The Spirit of Adoption: At Home in God's Family.

The Spirit of Adoption: At Home in God's Family. By Jeanne Stevenson-Moessner. Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2003. xvi and 134 pages. Paper. $14.95.

This moving book is not only a powerful story about personal experiences and the significance of adopting children. It also provides the biblical and theological foundations for a theology of adoption. Adoption is an underdeveloped metaphor for communicating the way of God with humanity. God's mercy and compassion for humanity, based on the Hebrew word-root transliterated rhm, is "womb-love." This womb-love certainly comes to expression in the healthy relationships between biological parents and children. But with equal force it also comes alive in the relationships between birth parents and the children they relinquish for adoption and between adoptive parents and adopted children. When we begin to comprehend that God has this kind of womb-love for us as divinely adopted children, we begin to reconceive both our understanding of God and our way of interpreting the meaning of adoption.

As an adoptive parent herself, Stevenson-Moessner authentically articulates the many faces of the adoption process, not only the joy but also the grief and the guilt. Her work is enhanced as she draws creatively on the experience of many others whose lives have been deeply affected by the adoption experience: adopted children, birth parents, and other adoptive parents. Adoptive families come in many configurations and the author, Associate Professor of Pastoral Care at Perkins School of Theology, brings great sensitivity in sharing their stories. The personal vignettes about adoption are juxtaposed against the background of a rich variety of biblical passages and images that highlight the way of God with God's adopted family, the church.

This book is not only of value to those who have been personally touched by the experience of adoption. One out of five couples deals with the challenges of infertility and childlessness. This book can serve as a primer for pastoral care with these struggling people. Even more, The Spirit of Adoption provides a fresh and multifaceted metaphor for understanding whose we are as God's people. The Scriptures express very poignantly the agony of barrenness and the thrill of childbirth. The expectant waiting, joys of homecoming, and the struggles of growing pains are experiences of adopted families that connect profoundly with our collective experience as the people of God. Adoption provides nothing less than a comprehensive metaphor for our ecclesial experience of being given a new name in baptism as we are received as adopted children into God's family, the church. We have a God who embraces each child with a womb-love that will not let go. And we are called to live together as a church that is bound together with one another in the spirit of this same womb-love.