\t\t\t\tThe past is memory. The memories of 2004 will be of Nature and its awesome power. As I write these words, the toll from the tsunami in Asia is now estimated to be 150,000 dead. Just reading the figures reminds us emphatically how blessed we are. We had a year of hurricanes in Florida from July through November. We evacuated in one case and watch the water slowly work its way across our lawn in another. But with the year ending calamity of the tsunamis it made our hurricanes look like little wind storms. The only comparison many could think of is a nuclear attack. More than 200,000 died in the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings in 1945. The death count could be even close to that if the diseases feared take hold and begin their killing. I was surprised to learn that there was a disaster with more deaths than this. It was in October of 1887 when the Yellow River overflowed in China killing some 900,000 people.<\/p>\n
We in America have in normal times so much to be grateful for that this added lesson comes home dramatically. On a personal level I am grateful for another year of good health both for myself and June. Even though 2004 brought a break in the routine with our travels to and from Philadelphia we still managed to stay well. At the New Year\u2019s eve service we read the 90th Psalm which reminded us the \u201cSeventy years is the sum of our years, or eighty if we are strong\u201d Having reached the Biblical age plus is a good reminder of our own mortality. The Psalm also has a great wish, \u201cFill us at daybreak with your love, that all our days we may sing for joy.\u201d It reminds me of what we all wish each other in our new year\u2019s greeting of \u201cHappy New Year\u201d We wish you happiness and days filled with love and joy. But what is \u201chappiness?\u201d The concept differs from person to person. We all want joy and contentment. But we seemed to keep looking for it without permanent success. It is the striving for it that may make life \u201cinteresting\u201d never the less the results are always momentary and fleeting. We remember well those happy times and try as we may to make it so, the memory never is as enjoyable as when it occurred. The secret is that we are made this way so as to continue to seek eternal happiness and the means to get there. Try as we may to deny it our mind and memory will never let us reach that goal, unless we shut them both down and accept the idea we will never be permanently happy here. When we ignore this we find ourselves continually seeking it in new things, or new hobbies, or new something else. We may even then take chemicals to relieve that feeling, but it only works temporarily. But we do wish you a \u2018real\u2019 happy new year, one filled with the joy of seeking the purpose of living. I agree with a thought I read in Augustine that our hearts will never rest until they rest in you Lord.<\/p>\n
Meanwhile, back at good old USA, we find seekers. There was a headline which read, \u201cResolved: To Do More, Or Less, Or Something.\u201d Beneath this headline is the phrase \u201cGuides to self improvement can\u2019t agree on whether to go faster or slower on the road to happiness\u201d The article by Warren St.John notes the separate camps or ideas for the \u2018right\u2019 road to happiness. One suggests, \u201cStop and Smell the Roses\u201d, and others suggest \u201cTime is Money (or Success = Happiness). The methods suggested are logical contradictions but demonstrate a market for how to do it books helping us to seek happiness. What both methods, the slow or the fast, miss is a definition of \u201cwhat is \u2018happiness\u2019?\u201d Is it dependent on success in worldly goods or is it a serenity of the mind feeling complete? Before you can get on the road to happiness you must find where you are going . . . what is your destination? Once you know that then you can lay down the road and then decide at what speed you want to get there. The titles of some of the books are: \u201cHow a Worldwide Movement Is Changing The Cult Of Speed\u201d, \u201cThe Lazy Way to Success\u201d,\u201dGetting Things DONE\u201d, \u201cTurbo Coach: a powerful system for achieving breakthrough career success\u201d. All of them clearly suggest that career success equals happiness. No doubt achievement gives one a feeling of happiness, but does it stay? Isn\u2019t there just another challenge ahead? The \u201csuccess\u201d is momentary not permanent. The articles emphasis was not on the subject matter of the books, except to show the contradiction in their methods of solving the problem. The main point of the article was that there is a great market for such books. He noted it was so great that there is \u201ca Library of Congress\u201d number of books being published to show us the road to happiness. The market indicates that people are still looking but are they looking in the right place?” Some thoughts I have read about happiness indicate how momentary it can be and how we should enjoy them. One from C.S.Lewis indicates their fleetingness, \u201cI again tasted Joy. But far more often I frightened it away by my greedy impatience to snare it, and even when it came, instantly destroyed it by introspection, and at all times vulgarized it by my false assumptions about its nature ” (CS Lewis, “Surprised by Joy”, p.69) Another is, \u201cI have discovered that all unhappiness of man arises from one single fact \u2013 They cannot stay quietly in their chambers\u201d(Pascal)<\/p>\n
Another memory was revived by a report of a new TV \u201creality\u201d show. It was entitled \u201cWhere\u2019s Daddy?\u201d The show has an adopted daughter attempting to pick out her birth father from a number of men. The author notes that the ending will certainly be the daughter and birth father reuniting. It is as the writer says turning an \u201cemotional issue\u201d into \u201cgame show schlock\u201d My past was blessed with work in adoptions. My practice of law involved representing petitioners in the adoption process and also placing children with couples searching for a child. So I could agree with the comment that \u201cthousands of others (searching parties) have learned that in real life adoption searches don\u2019t always end like TV shows with a tears of joy and a pots of gold.\u201d No they often end in the frustration of dead ends or learning that the natural parent, man or woman, don\u2019t wish to have their connection exposed.. In Pennsylvania when I practiced there was a modification in the law that permitted a natural parent to include in adoption file a request that a search for them not be permitted or that the don\u2019t wish their identity to be disclosed. It also eventually allowed medical records of the birth parents to be released but with the identity removed.<\/p>\n
Florida has a state run adoption registry which may have this prohibition as part of its system. All the article mentioned was it \u201cworries\u201d adopting parents. Some of the quotes in the article regarding success in the search brought back memories of the practice. My father, also a lawyer who handled adoptions, had comments to an adoptee seeking his birth parent that stay with me. In one case, the seeker was now over twenty, was out on his own and had left his adoptive home. My Dad questioned him about his love for his only known parents and in effect he said who really is your mother and father? Isn\u2019t it those who raised you , cared for you, etc.? Usually it satisfied the seeker in that when he thought about it he realized he had only one real mother and father. There was a quote in the article, from a seeker .It was one who had succeeded and which brought my father\u2019s comments back to mind. He, the successful seeker, explained, \u201cIt\u2019s a void in your life; it\u2019s a hole in their hearts. You know who your family is, right? See, they don\u2019t\u201d My thought on such an idea was \u2018genes don\u2019t make a family or a father or a mother\u2019. I know cases where the father left the mother pregnant, she gives birth, marries and the child or children are raised by a loving father. In one case, even though they know who their natural father is, they had no doubt who was really the\u201dfather\u201d. A \u2018father\u2019 or \u2018mother\u2019 is one who loves you as you grow and makes you the man or woman you are today \u2013 not the abandoning gene parent who may have even done so because he or she loved you so much they knew that the best way for you to be taken care of would be with adopting parents. Adoption searches are still with me today nearly ten years since I retried from practice. I have two files open now in searches for information from a 1961 and 1967 adoptions. The odds are that if they are successful the parties they are seeking will be deceased. In addition there is the problem that most of my adoptions arose from the Catholic Social Services\u2019 home called St.Vincent\u2019s for Single mothers. The home no longer exist and where the records are I have no idea. But we will continue to do all that we can, until next time \u2013Pax tecum!\t\t<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The past is memory. The memories of 2004 will be of Nature and its awesome power. As I write these words, the toll from the tsunami in Asia is now estimated to be 150,000 dead. Just reading the figures reminds us emphatically how blessed we are. We had a year of hurricanes in Florida from … <\/p>\n