Adoption and mercy on the road to our forever home
My essay for Mockingbird; more thoughts on Taylor Swift.
My essay for Mockingbird Magazine was recently posted to their website. You can read the whole thing here. And here is an excerpt. Enjoy.
“I will not leave you as orphans; I will come to you.” — Jesus (John 14:18)
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PAW Patrol: The Movie got it all wrong.
In the 2021 animated film based on the really-popular-with-young-kids TV series, the human chief of paw-lice Rider explains to Chase, the German Shepherd, why he adopted him. Chase has begun questioning whether he has what it takes to be a member of the elite canine rescue team, PAW Patrol. He’s wounded by doubts — doubts that trace back to his past as an orphaned pup. Rider tries to calm him by telling him his adoption story. In a flashback sequence, we see Chase crossing a busy intersection. He’s about to be run over by a truck. Then Rider appears. He steps in between Chase and the truck with an outstretched arm and open palm, commanding the truck to halt. Chase looks up at his rescuer with big, brown, puppy dog eyes.
“You saw me and took pity on me,” Chase says, hanging his head in shame.
“Not at all,” replies Rider. “What I saw was a brave, heroic pup. Even though you were too small to look after yourself and you were up against all those scary things, you got back up and kept going. I didn’t adopt you because I felt sorry for you. I chose you because you were the bravest pup I had ever seen… I know that you were born to be a hero.”
I’m a dad of three kids under the age of 11. I’ve watched my fair share of PAW Patrol, and our kids have consumed their fair share of toys and swag. I tolerate it. It’s fine. There are other, more banal or problematic pieces of intellectual property that my kids could be into. But the first time I saw the scene described above, I looked at my kids and said, “That’s not what adoption is about.”
They needed to hear this. Because they, too, are adopted. From 2016 to 2020, God built our family through adoption via the foster care system in our county in Colorado. By the time our kids were placed with us, they had experienced trauma and disrupted attachment. They had come from hard places.
I understand what the PAW Patrol writers were trying to do. In pushing a message of self-sufficiency, they were trying to establish some intrinsic quality in Chase that made him worth adopting. That he was always made of The Right Stuff — he just needed a change in scenery. But by attaching Chase’s adoption to a set of conditions that merited his adoption, Rider isn’t really showing love.
This is antithetical to the deepest mystery in the universe — that all who are in Christ have been adopted by the Father. Christians have received the Spirit of adoption, as St. Paul tells us in Romans 8:15 and Galatians 4:5–6. And there was nothing in ourselves that qualified us for such an honor. The Father, our adoptive Father, qualified us to share in his inheritance (Colossians 1:12). He chose us in him before the creation of the world just because.
Chase’s use of the word “pity” is a loaded one. The writers of the show no doubt used it intentionally. Pity as patronizing sympathy, as “feeling sorry” for. But this is a poor use of such a rich word.
In the Anglican Book of Common Prayer, it is used in several prayers, perhaps most famously in this collect for use during Evening Prayer, or Compline:
Keep watch, dear Lord, with those who work, or watch, or weep this night, and give your angels charge over those who sleep. Tend the sick, Lord Christ; give rest to the weary, bless the dying, soothe the suffering, pity the afflicted, shield the joyous; and all for your love’s sake. Amen.
Proper 11 begins with this supplication: “O God, you declare your almighty power chiefly in showing mercy and pity…”
The term is used throughout the Psalms, oftentimes translated as “compassion,” which means to suffer with. In Psalm 69 of the Coverdale Psalter, the psalmist is actually looking “for some to have pity on [him]” and to “comfort [him]” as his enemies crash down on him. In Psalm 103, we’re told that “the Lord [is] merciful unto them that fear him” in the same way that “a father pitieth his own children.” In Psalm 106, God “pitied” his people “according unto the multitude of his mercies.”
In Matthew 20, we’re given an account of Jesus healing two blind men. The text tells us that Jesus “in pity touched their eyes, and immediately they recovered their sight and followed him.” In the Greek, “in pity” is a figure of speech that’s translated as “to have the bowels yearn.” Rather than patronizing, Jesus’s pity was deeply felt and bodily, and it moved him to action. Jesus opened the eyes of the blind, making them at home in the world. Restored, they followed the Lord, in whose light are we able to see light (Ps 36:9).
Pity. Mercy. Compassion. Three terms all pulling on the same thread. Or, rather, weaving together a fabric of grace, in which God clothes us as his own adopted children.
Good reads: Patricia Snow on “Taylor Swift’s Sexual Revolution”
Back in the spring, I fumbled around trying to “review” Taylor Swift’s latest album and What It All Means in our current cultural moment. Don’t read that. Read this, by Patricia Snow over at First Things. If I could ever write something half as insightful and incisive about such a topic (feminism + Taylor Swift), then that’s what I want to do when I grow up. I mean, have you ever read a more apt description of a Taylor Swift concert than this?
This, in a nutshell, is the dynamic driving Swift’s Eras Tour: consensus-seeking young womanhood coalescing around another young woman’s truth-telling. The concerts are vast exercises in collective remembering and purging, tumultuous occasions of female catharsis, as all those pent-up, proscribed emotions—petulance and rage, disabling anguish and persistent desire—sweep the amphitheaters where Swift performs, in a spectacle of passionate solidarity ratified by the ubiquitous talisman of the friendship bracelet.
The piece is long (it’s First Things) but very well worth your time and attention.
Speaking of attention: when you’re done with Snow’s piece on Swift, go read her 2016 article about smartphones, distraction, and real presence. I still remember how this article hit me when I first came across it eight years ago. It was a formative, eye-opening experience. I still go back to it from time to time. It has (sadly) aged all too well.
(See what I did there?)
Thanks for reading.