“We are our grandmother’s prayers
We are our grandfather’s dreamings
(Singing) We are the breath of our ancestors…”
The breath of our ancestors…is that who we are?
Is our living just the continuation of their story? Just the next chapter? A story in which we will…all of us…at some point become ancestors ourselves, and pass on our story as prayers and dreams?
Ancestry is our spiritual theme this month and it is as complicated a theme as any I think we have engaged.
What does it mean to be people of ancestry? People of heritage? People with a history?
Those of us who were adopted or are adoptive parents or are close to families where adoption is part of the family story…and that is very many of us…know that ancestry is not just about genealogy…its not just about the DNA.
Author Ralph Ellison writes: “Some people are your relatives but others are your ancestors, and you choose the ones you want to have as ancestors.”
Adoption is so often a celebration of life and an expression of love. But adoption can make claiming ancestry complex. Who are the ancestors that adopted folks claim and that adoptive families draw on?
Some of us have had to move away from the heritage into which we were born. Some of us discovered that who we were was not welcome in the story of our family of origin.
Some of us have had children who moved away from us, rejected the stories and values we tried to share with them.
Ancestry is not a linear experience for many of us.
And then there are those terms “we” and “our.” Who do we mean when we say “our” ancestors?
We are in the midst of a very divisive national…”conversation” …I’m reluctant to dignify it with that description…because it feels more like a battle. And it does not feel like love is winning right now.
Refugees turned away at our border…Brown children in cages, torn from their parents, voting rights constricting, mass incarceration…law enforcement seen more often as occupiers not protectors of marginalized communities.
All of that violence supports a narrative, a story of who “we” are. It is the narrative of a white, native born, mostly Christian nation…America First.
So many of our stories have no place in that story. That story would erase so many of our ancestries.
And there are real costs to joining that story, even if your identity makes that a possibility.
American First is a melting pot…and in that pot, the particular stories…the specificity of our ancestries… like the story of the quilt that Cassandra shared…those particular stories are lost in a blended identity which is called “American” but which really means European and white… It is a story that is defined by power and superiority , a story that requires that some people be pressed down so that others can stay on top.
It is not a story of hope. It is a story of fear.
All of us, I hope…reject that story. It does great damage to our nation and to our spirits…all of our spirits.
But there is another narrative. Another story. This is a story of hope in which our differences need not divide us. A story of ancestors drawn from the real lived and varied experiences out of which we come. A story of perseverance. Of endurance. Of commitment. It is a story of richness of texture and depth of contour. A story of pluralism as a source of strength, not a cause for fear.
Those two stories are contending for the control of our nation.
The question of who we mean when we say “we” these days is a question that almost always requires some unpacking.
Our commitment to honor the original peoples of this land is part of “our” commitment to that second story, that story of hope.
Here is our statement honoring this land and its people:
“First Unitarian Church is located in the heart of downtown Portland. We honor the indigenous people on whose traditional and ancestral land we sit.
We recognize the Multnomah, Clackamas, Clowwewalla (or Willamette-Tumwater) and Cascades (or Watlala) bands of Chinookan peoples, and the Tualatin Band of Kalapuya.
These indigenous people signed the Willamette Valley Treaty of 1855 and were later forcibly removed from their homelands to the Grand Ronde Indian Reservation; their descendants live today as members of the Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde. Many other indigenous nations of the Columbia River have connections to this place as well, and their descendants also live on.
We acknowledge the ancestors and survivors of this place and recognize that we are here because of the sacrifices forced upon them. We honor their legacy, their lives, and their descendants who carry on Tribal traditions for present and future generations.”
Some of us have indigenous ancestry…more than a few. But we engaged leaders of the Confederated Tribes as we drafted those words. They told us that if “First Unitarian” was going to honor the people of this land, we needed to name all of the peoples…so that our honoring worked against the erasing of any of them.
And it was central to those native leaders that the on-going and living legacy of those people be named.
That makes for a long and somewhat complicated statement…but that is because the history of this land is a long and complicated history…filled with loss and pain and heart breaking violence…as well as love and hope and courage. The work of justice, equity and compassion is to recognize the truth of it all.
Who are our ancestors and what does it mean to be a people of ancestry?
I spent most of last week in Montgomery, AL attending meetings and visiting the Equal Justice Initiative’s Legacy Museum and Memorial to the victims of lynching. Some of our young people have visited on the civil rights pilgrimage we have sponsored. Some of you have visited the site as well.
The museum tells the story of the evolution of slavery into mass incarceration. It is in downtown Montgomery, on a site where enslaved people were warehoused, waiting to be sold.
The Memorial, however, sits on a hill overlooking the city. It is an open structure that displays tall rectangular blocks…monuments…earth colored…one for each county where a lynching occurred. These monuments…hundreds of them…hang…in rows and stretch along a wide path that descends down and around the hill…
Initially you walk among the monuments…they are at eye level. But the path descends more rapidly than the roof and soon you find that you are looking up at these memorials hanging above you…each one inscribed with the names of persons who were lynched in that county and the dates of their murders.
(Often the name is listed as “unknown.” Those persons did not even matter enough for their names to be recorded.)
Counties in Alabama, Mississippi, Georgia…you expect those. But this is not limited to the south… at all. Michigan. Minnesota, Indiana, Ohio, Missouri, New York…almost every state.
There is not a monument for Oregon…at least not one I could find…not yet…although the work of investigating lynchings continues. The NAACP does list one lynching of a black man in Cos Bay.
At the end of the path…there are duplicates of the hanging monuments lying…side by side…on a hillside…waiting for the communities to claim them and place them as memorials on the sites where the lynchings took place.
I found the monument for Haywood, County, NC…where I lived and where my mother’s family is from. There was one lynching there.
I also found the county in Virginia, where part of my father’s family comes from. There were many lynchings listed on that monument. My father’s family that I know, the African American part, lived across the river in West Virginia. It was my father’s white ancestors who lived in Virginia proper. My white ancestors who might have been part of or at least watched one the many lynchings in that community.
I left the memorial reflecting once again on the complexity of ancestry, my own and all of ours, and the layered story of who we are and what we need to learn and remember and tell about ourselves.
There is a truth about lineage at the molecular level. Bill Bryson writes: “To be here now, alive and smart enough to know it…you have to be miraculously fortunate in your ancestry. Every one of your forbears on both sides survived. …not one of your pertinent ancestors …[ over millennia]…was squashed, devoured, drowned, starved, untimely wounded…” I would add lynched…
The presence of each of us here is a statistical miracle…viewed in that way.
And we are all related, back to that mitochondrial Eve in the Great Rift Valley of Africa…
That story of our common DNA is true.
But that is perhaps not the most helpful part of the story in this era of divisiveness.
How many of you have taken the Ancestry DNA test or one of the others versions that are available? I’ve taken a couple, the first 15 years ago.
How many of you have?
Over 15 million people world-wide have taken the Ancestry version. The kit was one of the most popular Christmas gifts this year.
Ancestry keeps telling me that they are finding more and more people who are my genetic kin. Many of them Black, most of them white.
My genetic ancestry goes back to West Africa…Senegal, Nigeria, Benin…they are pinpointing these locations more and more specifically now.
But it also goes back to the Netherlands, Belgium and the British Isles.
My lineage includes both. Enslaved persons and those who owned them. Folks from the coast of West Africa and the west coast of Europe.
What story does my life bring forward. Whose breath am I expressing? Is my story determined or limited by the different stories out of which I was born?
What ancestry do you claim? What story will you pass on?
This month we will be looking at ancestry in a variety of ways. Our goal is to try to build our capacity to know the truth of where we come from and who we come from.
I hope most of you will take up Cassandra’s invitation to reflect on your own ancestry, what was passed on to you and what you hope to pass on.
This is not just for the young people. We want all of us to participate.
We’ve developed some questions to help you? Those questions are in your OOS, on the website and will be in e-news.
And I hope you will bring something…a photo, a piece of writing or a drawing… make these copies, not originals… if you can…to contribute to our own Ancestry Quilt…that we will create right here in two weeks on February 16. If you attend on line, you can send your item to quilt@firstunitarianportland.org.
We will make a memorial of meaning right here in this space.
We cannot choose our relatives…but we can choose our ancestors…
More important, we can choose the legacy we will leave…we choose it every day as we strive to answer the call of love.
We can choose to contribute to a story of hope in which there is room for us all…and beauty…and hope…and joy.
Will you pray with me now?
Prayer
Spirit of Life. Spirit of Love. Breath of our ancestors that still sings our grandparents’ prayers and honors their dreamings.
May we have the wisdom to choose ancestors from whom we can draw inspiration and courage…may we find the wisdom to choose them well.
May we take the time…here… to tell our stories and to listen to them, the particular stories that make us who we are.
Help us fashion those stories into a rich and diverse narrative that honors our real lived experience. A narrative told not to keep people out but to embrace us all.
Be with us as we remember those who came before. And be with us as we strive to shape a world in which those who follow can live with more justice, more equity and more compassion… because we…their ancestors…breathed life into a dream of Beloved Community and found the courage to begin construction.
May that be so. And Amen.
Topics: Ancestry