One of the privileges I have as a minister is officiating at memorial services. “That must be so hard,” people sometimes say to me. And yes, sometimes it is hard, especially when the circumstances of any given death are particularly difficult. But mostly there’s a tremendous sense of privilege, being able to sit with a person’s loved ones and hearing the stories—and sometimes the struggles of a person’s life. So often after a memorial people will note the things about a person’s life that they didn’t know about, that just didn’t come up. Accomplishments, sometimes. Tremendous difficulties, sometimes. It may only be after someone dies that we learn about their life in some deeper way.
I’ve also noticed through the years a certain tendency to put more emphasis on the positive side of a person’s life. At times it can almost feel like there’s a need to make saints out of those who have died. I’ve noticed that often we don’t necessarily want to emphasize—maybe not even to mention—the places where our loved ones—our ancestors—have fallen short in some way. Something from the past that hasn’t been forgiven. Something that still may be too tender to bring up.
And it makes sense when you think about it. When someone we love dies there’s a fundamental question that is floating around there somewhere—did this person’s life have meaning? Did it have value? What legacy have they left? What of that legacy is ours to take on? Did they have feet of clay?
Feet of clay felt like an apt title for this month when our spiritual theme is ancestry. Feet of clay is a reference from the Old Testament, from the book of Daniel. Daniel interprets a dream for Nebuchadnezzar, founder of the new Babylonian Empire. Nebuchadnezzar had dreamed of a giant idol with golden head, silver arms and chest, brass thighs and body and iron legs. Only the feet of this image, compounded of iron and potter’s clay, weren’t made wholly of metal. Daniel told Nebuchadnezzar that the clay feet of the figure made it vulnerable, that it prophesized the breaking apart of his empire. Over the years the phrase has come to describe an unexpected flaw or a vulnerable point in the character of a hero or any admired person.[1]
I expect that phrase has had resonance through the years because it speaks to what we know of the human condition. Truth is most of us—and most of our ancestors—have had our limitations. Truth is most of us fall short of our ideals at least sometimes.
And I think that recognition also makes it possible see the lives of those who have gone before us more fully. What I have also learned in memorial services is that sometimes there is power in being able to name the struggles someone has had. There is power in being able to name the ways someone may have fallen short for us. Being able to name those places may actually give them less power, less of a hold.
And in bearing witness to their lives—and the ways they fell short—maybe we are able to more fully embrace those things in ourselves as well. Truth is we don’t always rise to the occasion. Truth is we may not know how those in future generations might view our lives. History can, with time, be healing and redemptive. It can also be harsh. And we may not know which it will be.
When we chose ancestry as one of our spiritual themes for this year I don’t think I appreciated just how complicated a subject can be. Last Sunday Bill Sinkford talked some about all the questions we can find ourselves asking. Who is it we call—or choose to call—our ancestors? Are we related by blood? By culture? And what is it from their lives that we carry forward? What responsibility do we have to do that? What is our choice and what is not? What does it mean for them—or for us—to have those proverbial feet of clay?
The complexity of any given life is something we face when a person dies. And sometimes that happens on a larger scale when it is someone famous. Two weeks ago basketball legend Kobe Bryant died in a tragic helicopter crash in southern California. His 13-year-old daughter and seven others also died on the crash. His death touched many lives.
And his life was not without complexity. Bryant was considered one of the greatest athletes of all time in basketball. He was an inspiration to millions. And, in 2003 Bryant was charged with rape. The charges were eventually dropped and the case was settled out of court. So where does that charge fit into the legacy of Bryant’s life? Where should that be in his obituary? And there are lots of opinions about that. Those that say it shouldn’t even be brought up to those who would say that in this Me Too era it should be one of the first things brought up. There are threads of race, of gender, of fame—they are all in the mix.
We can’t know how time will treat Kobe Bryant and his legacy. There is a kind of sorting out, a kind of coming to terms with the death of someone we love and admire, whether that is within a family or in the larger culture.
I think our job is to do our best to learn and to grow and to try to see our ancestors in their fullness. That includes the ways they may not have lived up to expectations, particularly in the light of history. Part of what we do in that taking in and in that sorting out is to recognize their fallibility and in that moment to embrace of own fallibility as well. That is, after all, I think, the path to healing and to reconciliation. And it comes out of a willingness to see our lives and the lives of others in context.
History is a living thing. And history is a complex thing. It is often more circular than linear. We are constantly understanding our past—our personal past and our larger communal past—with the perspective of time and memory and story. What we choose to remember—what we choose to forget. The sins of the past that we carry with us and seek to forgive, the wrongs we try to right, the wrongs that lie buried somewhere. What about our own privilege? What about the things that have been taking from us? All of this is in the mix. All of this is what we carry forward with us.
As our lives change, that history, too, is changed, and the meaning of the lives of those who have gone before are changed. This is the hope of remembering—of giving new meaning to the lives of those who have gone before. Whether they are remembered or half remembered or forgotten, their lives are what we make them to be. We can’t change the past but we can bear witness to it.
A friend and colleague of mine, David Pettee, has, for many years, had a passion for genealogy. Tracing his heritage back through his mother’s side he has been able to go back and discover seven generations of Unitarians—and now Unitarian Universalists.
Well, several years ago he upgraded his subscription to an on-line genealogy source. When he typed in the name of an ancestor into a searchable version of the 1774 Rhode Island Census he was stunned to learn that four enslaved Africans lived in his ancestor’s home. This opened a door to research that eventually pointed to another ancestor being a slave trader.
That news came from court records. It was a case where the great, great grandfather of William Ellery Channing—as in the Channing Room in our building next door and as in the father of Unitarianism in this country—sued John Robinson, Dave’s ancestor, over a dispute involving nonpayment of wages to his crew on a voyage from Africa to Jamaica. And if it was a voyage from Africa to Jamaica in the 1800s, it was very likely that it was a slave ship. That did prove to be the case.
This put Dave on what he calls a pilgrimage to find out as much as he could about this part of his heritage. Dave eventually made the journey to Africa, to Ghana, where his ancestor had been in the 18th century. His faith, he said, had taught him that only an encounter with the truth might point the way forward. To one day make a fuller reckoning, he said, he would need to return to the scene of the crime. He writes of how sterile and bureaucratic the room where the bartering for human beings took place. He writes of how that changed going into the cramped dungeons where thousands of captured Africans held before they would be put on ships to cross the Atlantic.
This trip was a life changing experience. He still talks of the sights and sounds of that place and the images they conjure in the imagination. He says that going there has only prompted more questions.
He sought out advice and came to understand that the journey could not just end with the family he knew. Using that same expanded search engine subscription he next began investigating the descendants of the slaves held by his family. Through tracing a piece of land that was in the family for many years he managed to find the spouse of a descendant of one of the slaves. He wrote a letter and received no response. After a couple weeks we decided to call. He talked about the fear in picking up the phone and dialing the number. He did make contact with a daughter of that woman. Not long after he was able to meet this family and shared stories and shared histories. He writes of the great hospitality and warmth with which he received. Since that time they have kept in regular touch.
The stories of that family are now becoming part of a shared history that in the past was full or brokenness and separation.
The story continues.
More often the past can be a pretty abstract thing and the same can be said for our ancestors and their lives. For Dave it was that trip that made it all very concrete. It made his family’s past more concrete. And it connected him to the issues of racism and its legacy that he could not have imagined. We bear witness to the past through our lives. We bear witness in staying with the many dimensions of the past and what it asks of us in the future. What is it that we carry forward? And what will future generations carry forward from us? Where does responsibility lie? What is asked of us?
We live in times when navigating our way can feel particularly complicated. And we are asked to make sense of a world that so often challenges what seems to be some basic principles of honor and decency, of fairness and justice. We are asked to stay present. There are times when we’d want to know what the ancestors would do. Or what would future generations ask of us?
I was struck this week by a phrase Mitt Romney used in his speech on the Senate floor as he announced he would vote to impeach the president, making him the first in history to vote to impeach a president of his own party.
He said, “Were I to ignore the evidence that has been presented and disregard what I believe my oath and the Constitution demands of me for the sake of a partisan end, it would, I fear, expose my character to history’s rebuke and the censure of my own conscience.”[2]
The censure of my own conscience.
How we find our way, how we manage to figure out what our own consciences might ask of us, that is probably where we need to begin when we don’t know what to do. And where we need to begin with our ancestors, whoever they might be, asking if they listened to that conscience. If they imagined what future generations would say.
Words from T.S. Eliot, from Choruses From The Rock:
Of all that was done in the past,
You eat the fruit, rotten or ripe.
For every ill deed in the past we suffer the consequence….
And of all that was done that was good, you have the inheritance….
And all that is ill you may repair
if you walk together in humble repentance,
expiating the sins of your parents;
And all that was good you must fight to keep
with hearts as devoted as those of your parents
who fought to gain it.
The
world is full of terror and joy. It is full of mystery and wonder. And we are
left trying to make sense of it all sometimes. In our lives and in the lives of
those who have gone before us. This is tender ground. This is fertile ground.
It is important to remember that we are not alone in our struggles. We are all in this together. It is important to know that nobody has ever had all the answers. It is important to remember that even those people we have never known have given us all that they have given us—all of the brokenness, but also all of the blessings. It is our job to hold a space for what we can and move with all the integrity that we can. We hopefully find a way to take responsibility for what is ours and what is not ours as well.
In our lives we bear witness over and over again to that legacy. We bear witness by how we are with others, with the young and with the old, with those on the margins and those within the margins, by how we are with the earth, in all its fragility.
May we always remember that our ancestors carried us, just as we carry them. That they are with us as we become the people we are called to become.
Prayer
God of the generations, be with us this day. We give thanks for those who have gone before us. May their stories guide us and also challenge us. Give us courage to see their lives in their fullness, for all of their gifts and all of their limitations. Help us to find meaning and hope in their stories. May we see in their lives—their fears and struggles, their courage and wisdom—an image of what our lives might be. Amen.
Benediction
Words of Barbara Pescan:
Because
of those who came before, we are;
in spite of their failings, we believe;
because of, and in spite of, the horizons of their vision,
we, too, dream.
Let
us go remembering to praise,
to live in the moment,
to love mightily,
to bow to the mystery.
[1] From the “Encyclopedia of Word and Phrase Origins” by Robert Hendrickson (Facts on File, New York, 1997).
[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/05/us/politics/mitt-romney-impeachment-speech-transcript.html
Topics: Ancestry