4/50: A blessing for the ancestors
One of my favorite prayers in song. May we rise up from all that weighs us down.
“Lord, through all the generations you have been our home.”
A few years ago, I spent a night in my childhood bedroom. My parents have taken down the wallpaper with small purple hearts and flowers that I loved in the 1980’s and the walls are now covered with portraits of my ancestor, along with bits of embroidery and dolls that my mom has collected from family.
I looked at those photos a long time that night — trying to find myself in the stern faces. I know it was the style to be somber in photos and there was so much life hidden behind those faces. But still, it wasn’t easy.
I am an Enneagram 4 who loves big artistic expressions. The best moments in my life have included dancing with Burundian tribes and singing myself hoarse to show tunes in a gay bar in NYC. My favorite foods are spicy and exotic. I drink whiskey neat. I have painted the walls of my houses yellow, green and deep blue. I like life big, colorful, honest and adventurous.
While I dearly loved my grandparents and great-grandparents, I am cautious about following in their footsteps. Their profound kindness and gracious hospitality were coupled with deep pain that was repressed in depression, and in some cases, expressed in abuse of those closest to them.
Every time my feet pick up to dance or I get on a plane to a distant country, I feel a little more healed from some of that trauma lodged in my DNA. Perhaps that’s what’s behind my wanderlust.
Deep wisdom invites me to return to these faces on the walls and become friends with them. If I can understand their pain and offer compassion, it heals something in them, in me and in our stories that run in the veins of my daughters.
So here’s a blessing for my ancestors and for all that is carried forward from them:
You have always done what needed to be done. All your days were spent tilling a livelihood. Scanning the horizon of wheat fields, you knew when it was time to go or stay. You trusted in closely held routines and customs to define and comfort you. Thank you for being the reliable ones and for the long years of work that fed two nations.
May you let go of the habits born of long winters that manifest in sadness and invisible violence.
May you learn to speak beyond the practiced silence of going along to get along.
May you laugh from your soul,
give longing permission to lead you deeper,
hold hands with those who come from faraway lands,
and find a belonging more ancient than the wheat fields of Germany
in the deep love of God.