In his concluding statement during the Democratic Candidates Debate last night, Senator Corey Booker pointed out Rep. John Lewis sitting in the audience and began with the famous words of gratitude from Deuteronomy: “We drink from wells we did not dig.”
He began with gratitude and the recognition that his life would not have been possible without the sacrifice and the suffering of those who have “brought us thus far on the way.”
As the Thanksgiving holiday approaches, my own spirit honors first those whose lives have made possible my own life, my genetic “family” of enslaved persons and slave owners, of the privileged and the striving, of those who achieved and those who succumbed.
I embrace all of my ancestors but getting to gratitude for some of them…the slave owners…remains a hill too far for me.
Many of you, most perhaps, have family histories as complicated as my own, though different in detail.
Claiming all of the branches of our liberal religious family tree is also a challenging task. William Ellery Channing, “father” of American Unitarianism, came from a slave owning family.
Even Thomas Lamb Eliot, first minister of First Unitarian, was far from perfect by our standards. He believed in Manifest Destiny, the superiority of European thought and culture, and that Christianity was the culmination of humankind’s religious quest.
The religious wells from which we drink hold water that is not crystal clear.
Our challenge, I think, is to know as much of our history as we can. I do not mean just the victors’ narrative that justifies the current order with its particular power relationships and oppressions. We do need to know the Pilgrim’s version of that first Thanksgiving but also search for the truth of the Native American version as well.
We need to amplify the voices that have been silenced and center the voices that have been kept on the margins.
And then we need to choose the ancestors and their actions that we will honor. It was a choice for Corey Booker to point out John Lewis in that crowded hall. A choice to name the hope that Rep. Lewis’ life represents and to claim, as ours, the work of his life as the place from which we begin.
It is also a choice to claim the positive achievements of the Eliot ministry, even as we hold the reality of what we now see as his shortcomings. Remember that our religious descendants will look back on our time with critical eyes as well.
The religious affirmation of our power to choose makes us heretics. The word heretic means simply “those who choose.”
We need to choose elements of our religious ancestors’ commitments to build on. We also need to remember that the right to choose was central to their religious witness.
A religious space in which we can critique them may be our religious ancestors’ most helpful legacy as we move into a new day.
We have much to be thankful for and we have much work yet to do.
Blessings,
Bill