Enlarged heart: diagnosis or deliverance?

Image from The Do Collection

My Big Heart

Doctor listened with his stethoscope
To my inner machinery, and said,
"You've got a big heart; thumping out time
All around your chest."
I said, "Yes I know
Since every undeservedly aimed blow
Ever driven at anyone has hit it."

"It's swelling all the time with hope
For this one, that one, others popping out
From wombs firing like machine-guns;
Each new person jumped and mugged for profit,
Learning language by hearing himself cursed
For being here and ever having done
Anything except for a bully's gain:
Starting with the crime of birth."

"Doctor: It's for a bomb I need this big heart
To smash those liars into a great squashed stain
When the pressure jumps too much, and it blows apart."
-Milton Acorn

One of the options for scripture readings at the Vigil Mass of Pentecost is from Paul's letter to the Romans where he writes:

Brothers and sisters:
We know that all creation
is groaning in labor pains even until now;
and not only that, but we ourselves,
who have the firstfruits of the Spirit,
we also grown within ourselves
as we wait for adoption,
the redemption of our bodies...
-Romans 8:22-27

As we wait for adoption... The reference here is to how we, through our relationship to Christ, the Son of God, become God's adopted children, siblings of the Father's only begotten.

Here's an article from today's Boston Globe of groaning for the arrival of a child and adoption. It's a story of enlarged hearts - and redemption, too... (h/t to a good friend who passed this along to me)

From the first, Cate Nelson was drawn to the little boy with the thatch of dark hair and the Quiksilver T-shirt.

Disabled by a brain injury when he was 1, Edy didn't laugh like the other kids. He never talked. He couldn't even sit up. Surrounded by toddlers who played for hours on the tile floor, Edy mostly lay in his crib.

Cate, recently graduated from Belmont High, was volunteering in Guatemala City when she met Edy. She would pull him out of his crib and prop him up on the floor between her legs to play. She held him for hours at a time. On Cate's 19th birthday, Edy, who was 3, laughed with her for the first time. The nun who ran the orphanage said she had never seen him eat as well as he did with Cate. She adored him.

The weeks drained away. Cate had an acceptance letter from Harvard. Should she stay for Edy? Could she come back and adopt him in a few years?

Talking to her mother, Ellen, back in Belmont weeks before she was due to leave Guatemala, Cate burst into tears.

"Who will love him when I go?" Cate asked.

"Not me," Ellen thought.

Ellen and Steve Nelson had almost finished raising their three children. They were in their mid-40s, and their youngest, Josh, was already 15. In a few years, their nest would be empty.

"I started young," Ellen says. "And I thought, 'We'll finish young, and we'll have this whole second half to do things in.' "

She wanted to spend more time with her church. She wanted to work in an orphanage in Mozambique. She wanted to be something other than a mother.

Cate asked her to come to Guatemala. Ellen knew her daughter was hoping she would fall in love with Edy right away, too.

She didn't.

"Cate introduced me, and you know, he looked like a nice kid, but there was no ta-da moment," Ellen recalls. "I could tell Cate was disappointed."

Even so, back in her hotel room that night, Ellen prayed.

"It came out of my heart before I had a chance to reel it back in," she says now. "I said, 'God, if you want to give me your heart for Edy, you can.' "

The next day at the orphanage, Edy fell asleep in Ellen's arms, and suddenly, her heart flooded with love. God had taken her up on her offer, she says.

Though she already thought of Edy as her fourth child, Ellen didn't want to get Cate's hopes up. Leaving Guatemala, she made no promises.

When Cate got home the whole family sat around the dining table, crying as she talked about leaving Edy.

Lucy, daughter number two, was the first to say it out loud: "We have to adopt him."

If they were going to do this, the Nelsons would have to do it together. Edy may be legally blind, and though he can sit up now, nobody knows whether the 4-year-old will ever be able to walk and talk and function by himself. Ellen and Steve wouldn't be around forever. Even with the best medical care in the world, Edy might need as much help at 50 as he needs now, and the Nelson children eventually would have to be the ones to give it.

Together, the Nelsons went to Guatemala last summer. Together, they agreed to bring Edy home.

Because of new, tighter rules on adoptions from Guatemala, it may be several years before Edy can come to live with them in Belmont. But he is already Ellen's son, already Cate's brother.

So the new family waits: the college student who rerouted the life of a disabled child in an orphanage in Latin America, the middle-aged suburban parents recalibrating their long-held hopes for a second chapter, and the sweet, dark-haired boy so many others would have passed by.

-Yvonne Abraham, Globe Staff - May 7, 2008