Looking back. Looking forward. Ancestry asks us to take that view from the mountain top that sees not only where we’ve come from but also where we are going… a vantage point that can hold both memory and hope.

Nelson Mandela wrote:

“…I have discovered the secret that after climbing a great hill, one only finds that there are many more hills to climb. I have taken a moment here to rest, to steal a view of the glorious vista that surrounds me, to look back on the distance I have come. But I can only rest for a moment, for with freedom come responsibilities, and I dare not linger, for my long walk is not ended.”

Both Moses and Mohammed went to the mountaintop to receive inspiration. Moses was always climbing the mountain…that is where he received the 10 Commandments and it was from a different mountain that he glimpsed the Promised Land…a land he could see across the Jordan River but a land that, as an ancestor, he would never enter.

Dr. King used that metaphor in his last speech in Memphis. “I’ve been to the mountaintop…and I’ve seen the Promised Land…”

Perhaps a mountain plays a part in your family story, in your ancestry.

There is one in mine.

Let me introduce you to my great grandmother, Delia Victoria Penland.

This branch of my family tree, of my ancestry, is from North Carolina and this picture is from sometime in the early 1880’s…about 140 years ago.

That’s Delia seated in the center. Her eldest daughter, Ida, my grandmother, is on her left. Ida was born in 1865, after the Emancipation Proclamation. She was born free.

But great grandmother Delia was born in 1841, a slave of Robert Penland, who contributed both his name and his DNA to my ancestry.

Delia’s husband, William, sits to her right. They married after Delia’s children had been born. They were mountain people who farmed land in the foothills of the Smokey Mountains.

Delia was a large and strong woman. She was taller than her husband…6’…and, according to the family stories, just as strong. They were hard working people…in slavery and in freedom.

Here is the story that has been passed down in my family about Delia.

Her husband had travelled across the mountain…probably to town to do some business…purchase supplies, sell a crop or pay a debt…we don’t know the exact reason for the trip.

But while he was there he “got into trouble.” This was the time when the first Jim Crow restrictions were being put in place and “getting in trouble” was both easy and dangerous for a Black man.

Apparently he wasn’t arrested but he had been hurt.

Delia got word that he was in danger and…so the story goes…crossed the mountain herself, found her husband and carried him…on her back…over the mountain to the relative safety on their farm.

There is courage and strength in my ancestry…more, I think, than I have had to live up to. Their lives seem so much more difficult than mine. That helps me put my own struggles into perspective.

“If they could live through all they did…if they could climb those mountains…well, I can manage to make it up the much smaller hills I have to climb.

Delia’s strength and courage inspire me.

But I have also been shaped by my ancestors’ commitment to education. Delia and her husband found a way to send my grandmother across the mountain to a school for Black children founded by the Freedman’s Bureau, called a “normal school.” Ida graduated and actually taught at that school before returning to North Carolina to marry, another mountain man, and teach in the two room Black school in Waynesville, NC for over 40 years.

It was at grandmother Ida’s side, on her front porch, when I was 8 and 9 years old that I began learning “where you come from, Billy.”

The commitment to education passed to Ida’s children, including her youngest daughter, my mother. And from my mother to me. And now from me to my children and to their children.

Our ancestry passes on values and culture that can be strengths, just as much as physical strength…

And it does not matter whether that ancestry is from relatives or from people in your circle or even in the circle of your knowledge…

It is a matter of embracing and valuing those strengths and…somehow…believing that you can use those gifts…that they are somehow present with you…and within you…available…waiting to find expression in this world and in these times.

That is why it is important to hold up those gifts of strength and endurance and to remember the stories, like the young girl in The Keeping Quilt…do you remember…the story that Cassandra told two weeks ago. That girl and her family sewed the family’s story into a quilt that got passed down from generation to generation. They sewed their story.

We are going to create our quilt with paper and with the pictures, drawings, pieces of writing that you have brought with you today.

In a moment, I am going to invite you to come down to the front…the children first…with your parents is just fine…and hand your piece for the quilt to Cassandra or Aaron, or one of the members of the Religious Education committee. They will put them on the wall…on our quilt…thanks to the magic of double sided tape.

After the children, the adults should bring their contributions down. If you are in the wings, and especially if you have mobility limitations, you can bring yours to the railing. One of us will be there to receive it.

And those of you in the balcony, can come on down as you like. Just give the children a moment or two to bring their ancestry images forward first.

Let’s begin. Here is the picture of my great grandmother and her family that I’ve brought.

Let’s have the young people come down first.

What a picture of strength and endurance, of beauty and commitment…what a picture of an ancestry that can hold us up, that can carry us through even hard days…what a picture of our ancestry we have created. We will be keeping images of this quilt to pass down. This becomes part of our story, part of our ancestry here at First Unitarian.

Topics: Ancestry