By Fr. Frederick Edlefsen

Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804–1864) remains one of America’s preeminent novelists, best known for his masterpiece, The Scarlet Letter. Yet, his literary legacy is mirrored by a profound family legacy of compassion. In 1891, his youngest daughter, Rose, converted to Catholicism and later founded the Dominican Sisters of Hawthorne, a community dedicated to serving incurable cancer patients. This "heart for the suffering" was a trait she inherited directly from her father.

Rose recalled her father’s encounter with a “wretched and rheumy” child at a workhouse in Liverpool, England:

“It was a wretched, pale, half-torpid little thing, with a humor in its eye which the Governor said was scurvy. I never saw, till a few moments afterward, a child that I should feel less inclined to fondle. But this little sickly, humor-eaten fright prowled around me, taking hold of my skirts, following at my heels, and at last held up its hands, smiled in my face, and standing directly before me, insisted on my taking it up! Not that it said a word, for I rather think it was underwritten, and could not talk; but its face expressed such perfect confidence that it was going to be taken up and made much of, that it was impossible not to do it. It was as if God had promised the child this favor on my behalf, and that I must needs fulfill that contract. I held my undesirable burden a little while, and after setting the child down, it still followed me, holding two of my fingers and playing with them, just as if it were a child of my own. It was a foundling, and out of all humankind it chose me to be its father! We went upstairs into another ward; and on coming down again there was this same child waiting for me, with a sickly smile around its defaced mouth, and it its dim-red eyes …. I should never have forgiven myself if I had repelled its advances” (Hawthorne 1850).

“Out of all humankind it chose me to be its father!” “I should never have forgiven myself if I had repelled its advances.” Rose said these were her father’s greatest words. People come and go in our lives. But we love them. As the Gospel of John notes, “The wind blows where it wills” (John 3:8). The Holy Spirit makes us spiritual mothers and fathers to others – if only for a moment.