But Zion said, “The Lord has forsaken me,
my Lord has forgotten me.”
Can a woman forget her nursing child,
or show no compassion for the child of her
womb?
Even these may forget,
yet I will not forget you.
See, I have inscribed you on the palms of my hands;
your walls are continually before me.
--Isaiah 49: 14-16 NRSV
On
Sunday, I preached about the biblical basis for addressing God in feminine,
especially motherly, terms. The scripture read on Sunday came from Isaiah 49,
one of my favorite Bible passages, because of the way God compares God’s self
to a mother being unable to forget the child she gave birth to. What especially
speaks to me is the first line of verse 16: “See, I have inscribed you on
the palms of my hands.” It speaks to me because while my wife and I don’t
have our sons’ names inscribed on our hands, we do have their names tattooed on
our bodies.
When the
adoptions were finalized for each of our sons making them legally our children,
my wife Jennifer and I found a tattoo parlor and had their monograms tattooed on
our bodies. My wife chose to have one son’s monogram tattooed on the top of
each foot. Ouch! I chose to put their monograms on either side of my left
wrist.
I wanted
the tattoos of my sons’ monograms where I could easily see them wherever I
chose. Back before my cell phone became my timepiece, I wore a watch which
would cover the tattoos. These were the days before everyone had tattoos, and I
felt like a little camouflage was in order, lest the sight of the minister
having tattoos cause heart palpitations for the church’s more uptight members.
Sometimes the watch wasn’t enough cover, and I did get to watch some prim and proper
women (and men!) clutch their pearls in horror. Eventually I stopped wearing a
watch, and everybody, even church-going grandmothers, got tattoos, so it’s not
nearly the big deal it was once upon a time.
My sons
don’t take much notice of the tattoos sported by their parents. After all, they’ve
been around as long as my teenage sons can remember. Sometimes, however, I do
make a big deal of pointing the tattoos out in order to tell each of them how
much I love them and that I carry them around with me all the time. It’s true.
I glance down at my tattoos on my wrist and think about all we’ve gone through
together, from the struggles of adoption to the struggles of being a teenager.
A
psychologist friend of mine says that Jen and I were responding to a need for “embodiment.”
We didn’t literally go through the physical process of giving birth to our
sons, she says, so we needed a physical tie to them. That makes sense to me,
although at the time, we needed a way to ritualize our celebrations of the end
of the rigorous adoption processes we faced with each boy. Either way, the
tattoos were a way of claiming both beautiful children as our own.
In Isaiah 49:16, it is God who has the name of God’s
people tattooed on God’s hands. God cannot forget you or me, but it is as if
God goes to the extra trouble to inscribe our names on God’s hands just in
case. God claims you and me, and I like to think God checks out the tattoos of
each of our names to remember all God has been through with us so far on our
journeys. God cherishes even the difficult times simply because God had the joy
of being together with each one of us.
Whenever you feel alone, remember God has your name
tattooed on God’s hands, and God is looking at it and lovingly thinking about
you.
Grace and Peace,
Chase
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