"The Ancestors: Who We Are & Whose We Are" Sunday, May 25, 2008

A Sermon for Memorial Day Weeekend
Given at First Unitarian Universalist Church in New Orleans

In the years immediately after the Civil War, in towns and cities and villages around the country, spontaneous commemorations of the dead were held in local cemeteries. Often called “Decoration Day,” the rituals included bringing flowers to the graves of those so recently killed, and sometimes holding religious services. In the South, these remembrances happened at various times in the spring; in the North, they generally occurred in May and eventually settled around the end of the month. The first official proclamation of Memorial Day, as it was called, was in 1868 and set the date as May 30th. In 1882, the purpose was shifted to honor all those who have died in the nation’s military service, and became a public holiday in the northern states. (Southern states, at first deeming it a “Yankee” thing, were slow to follow.) In the 20th century, the day began to be seen around the country as the unofficial start of summer, and in 1971, it was declared a federal holiday, set on the last Monday of the month to create a 3-day weekend.

By now, Memorial Day has evolved, so that it is a time to remember and honor all those we love who have died. While here in New Orleans, that purpose of honoring all the beloved dead is more usually thought of as All Saints Day on November 1st, this weekend is still a good time to remember those who have gone before us, whose work and lives contributed to ours, who left us legacies of freedom and hope. So it is this morning that we consider what we owe our ancestors, those we are born with and those we choose for ourselves, those of our families and those of our religious heritage.

This can be a particular challenge for Unitarian Universalists, for, as one of our most beloved hymns puts it, we are a people who revere the past, but trust the dawning future more. We UUs tend to think we have somehow “freed” ourselves from the ideas and notions that constrained the past, and now stand in the present unconfined. Many UUs resist the study of Unitarian and Universalist history, saying that none of it matters any more, that we’re unconnected to what happened in years past. Some UUs even assert that their own personal ancestry does not concern them, seeing no use in knowing more about their family’s ethnic and cultural background.

Let us recall the 7th principle of our liberal faith tradition: “the interdependent web of existence of which we are a part.” Like it or not, everything is connected. Whether we wish it to be so or not, we humans in the 21st century crave sweets and salt and fat in our food because our ancestors needed them for survival. We are subject to the adrenaline rush of the fight-or-flight syndrome, even over trifles, because that reaction helped save the lives of some of our ancestors in very dangerous situations. I have a predisposition to heart disease because it has been passed down in my father’s family.

But it is not just what is passed in our DNA that affects us; what has occurred in history and experience continue to have resonance in the present. African-Americans today are subject to bias and bigotry as a direct result of their ancestors’ forced enslavement. European-Americans have unacknowledged privilege in the present because of the legacy of the power and assumptions built into society’s institutions in the past by our ancestors. For some three generations on my mother’s side of the family, oldest daughters have had conflicted relationships with their mothers. As has been said many times, the past is not past, it’s not even the past.

We Unitarian Universalists enjoy the blessings of liberal religion today because of the sacrifices and strivings of our spiritual ancestors. What they thought and believed, what they held dear, how they structured their worship and their churches, continues to affect us today. Our very name refers to theological controversies going back to the 3rd and 6th centuries of the Common Era. Our Sunday morning services are what one of my seminary professors jocularly called “a typical Protestant hymn sandwich” because that is the tradition we grew out of in the 1500s. We govern ourselves by congregational polity because that is what was decided in an agreement aboard the Mayflower in 1620. The past is with us still.

Very recently, a UU minister has been researching his family history of slave-owning, trying to discern how the legacy of wealth and privilege that was passed to him affects his responsibility in the present for atonement and justice-making. On UU blogs, the debate rages back and forth. What do we owe our ancestors? Anything? Nothing? What is our connection to and our responsibility for, their words and deeds? A little? A lot?

The issue boils down to identity and belonging – who we are and whose we are. Those whose orientation might be called extreme individualism might reply that they are themselves alone, belonging only to themselves. Those at the opposite pole, who might be styled extreme communitarians, would assert that they are who they are because of the community or tribe or group they belong to. But I believe that for most of the rest of us, the answer lies somewhere in the middle – we are indeed our own selves, and we got the way we are because of our ancestors and families and up-bringing and life experiences. And we do belong to ourselves – but we also belong to and help serve the needs of the various communities to which we give our allegiance and love, our intimate relationships, our extended families, our ethnic groups, our religious communities, our neighborhoods, our city, our country, including in those communities the ancestors, those that have gone before us and were part of those groups before we came along.

What does it mean to know who you are and whose you are? Like so many of life's complicated questions, this is something that each person must work out for themselves. But one things is basic and foundational. You cannot be whole and healthy by denying or cutting off your ancestry. No matter who they were or what they did, those ancestors of ours in the past, it is not so easy to disavow them. You can’t stop being Italian or Irish, or being white or black, or being in a religious denomination that has a Christian heritage, just because you want to run from those things. We are who we are, and that includes where we and our forebears come from and how we got to here.

As Bob Dylan reminds us, “Everybody gotta serve somebody.” Since that is true, we need to recognize and be aware of who it is we serve. Knowing who we are and whose we are is not to say that we are bound, tied, limited to what has been in the past and was known and accepted by our ancestors. Having knowledge about what has been helps make decisions for the future clearer and easier. In family systems theory, we learn that family patterns cannot be changed until they are known and understood. (Before I knew that mothers and eldest daughters with troubled relationships were a pattern in my mother’s family, I thought it was just me with a problem.) When we strive to understand our ancestors better, we understand ourselves better, and are better able to make healthy choices in our lives about what we wish to retain from the past, and what we wish to discard.

This Memorial Day weekend, as we remember and honor the men and women who have served in our country’s armed forces, and as we recognize the contributions made to our lives by our direct and chosen ancestors, let us resolve to make our own peace with those who came before us. We are who we are, both because of our own efforts, and because of the legacies we have inherited. Who our ancestors are does matter – but it is not the be-all and end-all. We are still able to make our own decisions, but we can only do so when we know our history and can integrate that history into our lives.
May we have the courage to do just that. AMEN – ASHE – SHALOM – SALAAM – NAMASTE – BLESSED BE!