By Tony Rossi,
Director of Communications
Adoption has been a major theme in Catholic singer-songwriter Sarah Hart’s life this year. Not only did she release an Advent and Christmas album, which celebrates the season in which God adopted us as His sons and daughters through Jesus’ birth, the adult mother of two finally went through the process of being adopted by her stepfather decades after he became part of her family.
Sarah’s biological father was never a big part of her life. So, when she was a child, she prayed that God would send her mom someone who loved her. It took 12 years for that prayer to be answered, but when it was, God got it perfectly right. During a “Christopher Closeup” interview, Sarah noted, “He’s not my stepdad, he’s my dad. To my dad’s credit, he jumped into a household with two teenage daughters. My sister is a year older than I am. That was a lot of bravery and love.”
When Sarah and her sister eventually had children of their own, their dad took to being a grandpa “like a fish to water”—and the kids adored him right back. Though the topic of adopting Sarah and her sister had come up through the years, the timing never worked out. “About a year ago,” Sarah recalled, “we had a family member who was not well. I said to my dad, ‘If something happens, we will not be listed as your next of kin. We have to do this. I don’t want you being sick in the hospital and having nobody who can legally take care of you.’…So, we finally did it…The judge was crying, our lawyer was crying, we were all crying. It was an amazing testimony to love.”
The Christmas story, of course, is another amazing testimony to love. That is what Sarah celebrates on her new album “All the Earth Alive Rejoicing.” She noted that she would happily record a Christmas album every year if she could because, ”I am an incarnation girl…I love the incarnation from a theological standpoint, that concept that God condescends and comes to us and says, ‘I got you. I love you.’”
In light of that, one of her songs is titled “Lowly the Cradle,” which reminds listeners that the God of the universe humbled Himself to be born in a manger. Sarah observed, ”We live in a world where many of the strong want to lord it over the weak, and want to keep the poor and powerless in their place, and want to keep people enslaved in different ways...God understood that about our human preconditions to be sinful people who want power—and some want to lord it over others.
“For Him to come as a king in a completely powerless state is such an incredible, beautiful image—to literally say, ‘I come as the poor, I come as the weak, I come as the innocent, I come as the stranger and the immigrant.’…In writing ‘Lowly the Cradle,’ it was important for me to address the humility of God. I worry about a culture where we focus too much on God as power and contorting God in our image, if that makes sense. The way that Christ came to us is the antithesis of a lot of what’s happening in the world right now: to come humbly and quietly, to fall among us to lowly birth parents with no money and no stature, but people who had love and kindness to give.”
For free copies of the Christopher News Note THE GIFTS WE GIVE, write: The Christophers, 264 West 40th Street, Room 603, New York, NY 10018; or e-mail: mail@christophers.org
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