Note: This post is the second in a series. To read it in context, start here.

I return for the second time to the monastery in the wilderness perched over the Pacific Ocean, peddling through sheets of rain. Utterly saturated even through my raingear, I push my loaded touring bicycle up the steep entry road. An old blue pickup truck filled with large plastic garbage bags approaches from the other direction. It slows down when it reaches me but does not stop. I briefly make eye contact with two men through the water-streaked window, their faces inscrutable. And then they drive on. Not the warmest welcome, but then again, I do not know what to expect. And, it must be admitted, neither did they, in this place that likely sees many eccentric wanderers wash up from the road below.

When I reach the monastery, I am shown to a room in a rustic single-story building for workers behind the monks’ residences. I hang up as much of my wet gear as I can and try to settle in. But after weeks of travel, mostly alone and almost always outdoors, I’ve grown partly feral. I cannot bring myself to sleep indoors just yet. So, after the rain passes and I’ve had some time to explore, I set up my tent another mile up a fire road near a small lake.

I quickly develop a routine: Each morning, I hike down the hill to the monastery, attend to my work responsibilities, participate in liturgical prayer and eat lunch with the monks, and peruse the extraordinary monastic library like a kid in a candy store. Each evening, I walk back up to my tent to sleep.

By day, I wander awestruck through the redwood canyon below, and along the forbidding rocky shoreline that abruptly plunges into some of the deepest coastal waters in the world. By night, I savor the stark silence beneath a stunning canopy of stars undimmed by light pollution.

I absorb the works of contemporary spiritual writers like Thomas Keating and Laurence Freeman, surprised by the parallels they draw between Christian contemplative prayer and Buddhist meditation, with which I am more familiar. The homilies I hear at Mass imbue scripture stories I remember from childhood with new meaning. This is not the moralistic Catholicism I was taught growing up. Even less so the repressive faith that compelled my mother’s family to send her away to a maternity home when she was pregnant with me. Still, the symbols, stories, and rituals that permeate life here shimmer with a familiarity that echoes down through my Italian ancestral roots.

Why am I here?

Because I followed a mysterious signal, a tug of joy that pulled against the grain of my own ideas and superficial desires. Now I am in a place where such seemingly anomalous events are welcomed—not as aberrations in an otherwise predictable fabric of linear cause-and-effect, but as disclosures of a deeper reality. Something addressed me through the medium of my own intuition. What had been a monologue of desolation has become a conversation that I did not initiate. The question of why I am here is not mine alone to answer.

I ask to speak to a monk and am introduced to Father Michael, a tall, dark, energetic South African man with a deep resonant voice and penetrating gaze. He asks me when I had last been to confession. “Not since I was a child.” “Okay, then let’s start there,” he replies, and we set a time to meet.

Thinking about seeing Michael again, I feel a mixture of nervousness, excitement, curiosity, and confusion. I want to come prepared. Confession implies having something to confess, after all. But when I reflect on my life, the focus of my mind’s eye seems to fragment. The pieces of my life don’t fit together. I feel untethered, floating in an ocean of incoherence. I fear that I could fall into nonexistence at any moment, with nothing or no one to catch me—a kind of existential vertigo that I’ve lived with for as long as I can remember. Surely this is a burden that weighs more heavily on me than any harm I may have done to others?

When the day comes, I still feel woefully unprepared. I meet Michael in a simple room with two comfortable chairs facing one another in front of a large window. A candle flickers before an icon on a low table. The atmosphere feels warm and welcoming. I take a seat and am immediately put at ease. After a brief introduction and prayer, Michael invites me to speak.

At first I am at a loss for words, so Michael asks me to tell him more about myself. When the words do come, they seem to tumble out of me before I have time to think, as if pressed out of my mouth by the sheer need to be heard. I don’t know if I am making sense. I hardly know what I am saying. Is this even confession?

When the words finally stop, I feel drained and dispersed. I wait for Michael to pick up the pieces.

“Can I make a suggestion?” he asks. I nod for him to continue. “In listening to you, I wonder if we can say that your core sin, before anything else, what keeps you bound up in pain, what causes you to act harmfully toward yourself and others, is this: that you believe that you are the person you see in the mirror of your adoptions.” He pauses, giving me space to take this in.

Slowly, something gathers in me, like the vibrations of a tuning fork harmonizing the cells of my body. Michael’s words reflect a truth so simple that it cuts through my confusion, yet at the same time so deep and wide that I can barely comprehend it. A gentle warmth rises in my heart. I lift my eyes to meet his. “Does that sound right?” he asks. “Yes.”

When I was a baby, adoption demanded the impossible of me—that I cease to be who I am and become something else. Before I had words, I learned that survival meant adaptation to people who couldn’t know me in my depths, who didn’t share my history or lineage. I learned to mirror my adopters who could not adequately mirror me back. I learned to become a fiction unto myself and leave the rest of me behind.

All of this was compounded exponentially when I was relinquished and adopted again at age nine, only now the ruse was obvious: How could I possibly forget who I was and to whom I belonged for the first nine years of my life? But I wasn’t given a choice. I had to become something else entirely all over again, at yet another unbridgeable distance from myself.

Do I have a choice now? And who am I without these familiar mirrors? Even if they only reflect distorted, fragmented images of myself, they are all that I know.

As Michael closes our time together with prayer, I am filled with wonder.

“May God give you pardon and peace in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.”

I am not sure what forgiveness means, but I do know that it restores freedom and agency and invites me to leave the past in the past.

So much remains a mystery. Surely this is only a beginning. But let my ‘yes’ be enough for now. Let my ‘yes’ be enough.

Amen.