These hills are jist dirt waves, washing through eternity. My brethern, they hain’t a valley so low but what hit’ll rise agin. They hain’t a hill standing so proud but hit’ll sink to the low ground o’ sorrow. Oh, my proud children, where air we going on this mighty river of earth, aborning, begetting, and a-dying, the living and the dead riding the waters? Where air it sweeping us? –James Still, River of Earth, 1940
While visiting historical sites, Diana Butler Bass and her husband come upon an ancient Quaker Church which feels eerily familiar to her. In addition to her affinity for the Quaker faith and its commitment to social justice and equality for all, she feels something deeper. Three years later, while doing genealogical research on her mother’s family, she discovers that in 1687, her many-great grandparents were married in that exact same meeting house. She has found her connection.
Today, ancestry research has become so popular that the New York Times dubbed this a “genealogy-crazed era.” In addition to DNA test kits that have become commonplace, even for our pets, sites like Ancestry.com attract over 41 million every year. Bloomberg Business writes that “genealogy ranks second only to porn as the most searched topic online.” The question ‘’Who am I?” has become not just a search for names but a search for connection, for soul, for spirituality. But how can we make those connections, and what if our family is not one we want to claim?
Growing up, Bass learned much about her father’s family, but she felt little connection. As she described it, “The family history was one of hierarchy, authoritarianism, bigotry, exclusion, sexism, and racism—everything I came to reject and work against my whole life.” It was only when she began to look into her mother’s family that she found a fit—including the Quaker ancestors—and a “genealogy of social justice and spirituality,” a much closer connection to the world as she experienced it.
Interestingly enough, Jesus’ lineage as recorded in Matthew and Luke includes all the big names of the Old Testament—David, Abraham, Soloman, and more—confirming his Jewish ancestry, and names people never heard from again in the Bible, confirming Jesus’ place among the ordinary. All of our family trees are similar in that we can connect with our bloodlines in some places while in other places, we wish we could cut branches out of the tree. All are a part of our larger story, and we learn from what we admire as well as what we don’t. She writes, “Discovering where we come from gives us a sense of where we belong.”
Once we begin to dig deeper, we realize that our family tree becomes impossibly large, its branches spreading to the point that they merge with branches on other family trees, ultimately connecting us all to one another. Archbishop Desmond Tutu calls this interconnectedness the African concept of ubuntu or “I am because you are.” In fact, our families are not isolated trees at all but they are what Catholic bishops dubbed, “the web of life.” Webs, of course, come with problems. They can be death traps, they can be tangled messes, and it can be difficult to find ourselves within them. Ultimately, though, we are all part of one big and interconnected web that includes the earth and everything of it. We look, then, to our ancestors and our human connections to also find God.
Bass concludes, “The more honest we are in telling the stories of our ancestors in the web, the more we will be able to understand ourselves and the possibilities carried in our emotional DNA for our future.” Our interconnectedness is a reminder that no one is alone for we are all part of one family.
Grace Episcopal Church 