I met my brother and sister on Epiphany ’23. And when I say I “met” my siblings, I mean that, weeks earlier, at the beginning of Advent, I didn’t know that they existed. I lit the third candle on the Advent wreath with my church– “Joy”– only hours after discovering the fact of their existence.
Earlier in the year, I had started to feel a restlessness that many can relate to. Years of pandemic quarantining and isolating had given me a fierce desire to travel, to see the world, and to feel connected to far-off lands; distant places and people I had never seen before. Did I have any Irish blood in me? That’s all I wanted to know.
I knew everything there was to discover about Dad’s lineage (or so I thought) in Switzerland, thanks to his excellent genealogy that charted our family tree almost all the way back to the Radical Reformation. But Mom’s side remained a mystery to me. My mom was not even entirely sure who her aunts and uncles were, so great was an unnamed family rift. No stories, traditions, or remembrances were passed down to her for reasons that were never made clear. So, half of my family tree was unknown. Half of the story is missing, I thought.
Know thyself, right? Just as curiosity made me a life-longer learner and explorer of the wider world, I’ve never flinched from self-discovery. But the night before a milestone-birthday this summer, I had a troubling dream. In the dream, my older sister– my only sibling– sat me down to tell me that I didn’t know the half of it –the basic facts about my life– that she and I weren’t biologically related, but only step-sisters.
This was a nocturnal fiction, thankfully. Yet, I awoke with a start. My heart pounded with fear, as if everything I thought I saw so clearly and knew so fundamentally about my life was a falsehood. When I was jolted awake, I texted my best friend about my dream.
I thought about how, in the New Testament Greek, the word for “I know” and “I see” is the same: “oida.” The Greek Playright Sophocles seemed to play off this pun in his most famous work: “Oedi”pus the King. 1 The tragedy of Oedipus seems to hinge on seeing vs knowing… a play on words occasionally employed by the Evangelist John in the New Testament… Oedipus itself is a play on how we can drive ourselves headlong into the undoing our lives, in an effort to save our lives, if we don’t heed the words above the doorway at the Oracle at Delphi: “know thyself.” (If you remember, only Tiresius, a blind man, prophetically knew the world as it was, and once Oedipus finally came to know himself as the man he really was, he could no longer bear his own sight and blinds himself.)
My best friend is a playful interpreter of dreams. “Does it mean anything?” we asked each other.
That day was my birthday, and another friend texted me to tell me that 23andme was 50% off that day. I hadn’t told her about my dream about my sister. Had she known I was curious if I was Irish? Had we even talked about that? Kind of amused and bemused at the coincidence, I decided that genomic self-discovery was going to be my birthday gift to myself that year.
In my supposed pursuit of self-discovery and exploration, why then did I leave the genetic kit out on my kitchen counter for 4 months, after it came in the mail? “Big brother” fears of giving a coorporation too much genetic information about oneself? That definitely warrants some hesitation. But I wasn’t conscious of any motivation to delay. I looked at the unopened kit on my kitchen counter for months, but the day I finally gave my genetic sample, I felt such an urgency to know more that I almost ran to the post office to send it off. (I remember it was Grandma’s birthday. How I miss her!)
My results were returned to me in less than 3 weeks. Upon learning that I was a mere 2% Irish, but mostly just confirming what I knew about my Swiss connections, I found my results underwhelming. I questioned why I had bothered, until I went to see if I could at least locate any cousins on my Mom’s side through the DNA-relative finder. But in looking for cousins, I was sidetracked by a deceptively mundane notification of extraordinary news: “You have a Half-Brother.”
I stopped breathing. A spirit of ruthless self-discovery took over me. “There are no dread secrets,” a voice seemed to whisper somewhere inside my soul. I wrote to him…my brother…with all the tentative gentleness of holding a premature baby: What life disruption could my discovery cause him, this stanger/my brother, as he receives an equally mundane notification of a message from me with the power to overturn life as he knows it? I prayed he would forgive me as I pressed “send.”
He wrote back immediately. He shared my shock and the same spirit of ruthless self-discovery. He was similar in age to me and still lived in my hometown (science is real, y’all). We discovered, somehow both gently and ruthlessly, that the man he knew as his father wasn’t biologically related to him, but mine was. The man who had loved my brother so completely had just died, maybe even during the time I left my kit unopened on the kitchen counter. Was it a mercy, that his dad wouldn’t live to witness our discovery? He told me how hard all this was to believe, since his younger sister looks just like him. He shared her picture with me. It looked like me in her wedding dress. They grew up next to me, and I wondered to myself: how many times in my youth had I met exclamations that I had a doppelganger with the dismissal “I must have one of those faces”?
They are my family. I see my grandparents in their faces; I see myself in their smiles. I unquestioningly knew my sister was related to me upon our first conversation because I intuitively recognized the way she thought. And she had Grandma’s teeny tiny hands, which I had loved so dearly, and missed so much.
I can’t describe the tremendous tenderness I feel for my discovered siblings, while I have a deepened sympathy for the complexities of all our parents’ lives; half their histories hidden from everyone’s eyes. After so many years of secrets, there is no place for condemnation. Just compassion.
What I’ve learned since January among my pastor-friends and clergy colleagues is that these “23-and-me situations” are increasingly common. Most of us will have parishioners who stumble upon life-altering information when all they wanted to know was if they were a little bit Irish. We have to help our parishioners and their families accommodate new realities; real-life complications… with emotional, relational, and financial implications. God, help us to walk with people– with grace, compassion, and wisdom in how to move forward, together. Wherever possible, God, help us go forward in Joy.
1, My thanks to Dr. Bella Vivante, for being a great Classics professor. 🙂