Matthew 2:16-18
When Herod saw that he had been tricked by the wise men, he was infuriated, and he sent and killed all the children in and around Bethlehem who were two years old or under, according to the time that he had learned from the wise men. Then was fulfilled what had been spoken through the prophet Jeremiah: “A voice was heard in Ramah, wailing and loud lamentation, Rachel weeping for her children; she refused to be consoled, because they are no more.”
I’m not sure how much my dad was paying attention to our midweek Lenten plan from one week to the next. I wonder, for example, if he cared what tonight’s theme was going to be, since he’s on a flight to Phoenix right now. But yesterday, he stopped by the office when I wasn’t in and left this picture in my tray, without much explanation. It’s just something he does.
Anyway, it’s a picture of my grandfather – my dad’s dad – on the steps of what used to be the library at Capital University, in Columbus, OH, back in June, 1942. Capital University, is where my grandparents, parents, a handful of my aunts and uncles on both sides of my family, my wife and I, and now Jackson, our son, have all attended. So, of course this picture struck a chord, as I was already wondering about this thing we’re calling “generational or ancestral grief” for the sake of our Lenten walk this week.
See, I never knew this man, my grandfather, Jerry Havel. He died about 7 years before I was born, in 1966, when he was just 46 years old. He had cancer that migrated from his throat and sinuses into his brain, thanks to a pretty serious smoking habit. My grandmother would talk about how he would “French inhale,” breathing the smoke into his nose as he exhaled with his mouth. She seemed to be equally impressed as she was disgusted by it.
Anyway, by grandfather’s legacy looms large in our family and in my life, even though I never met him. A super-sized, professional portrait of him hung above my dad’s home office desk for years in the first house I ever remember living in. My grandmother sang his praises whenever she got the chance – he was a Marine in World War II, on the island of Iwo Jima when that famous photo of the flag-raising was taken, even; he was a successful business man, an exceptional father, a loving husband, a faithful churchman, community leader, and so on.
More on Jerry Havel in a minute. Please shift gears with me for a moment.
I read some time ago about a scientific experiment using mice back in 2013 that some say shows how something like trauma – and I would contend, then, something like grief, too – might be passed along, genetically, to offspring, by birth., from parent to child.
I won’t get too into the weeds about this, because I’m not a scientist, but the nuts and bolts of the experiment are fascinating. Scientists took some male mice and wafted the scent of something like cherries into their environment while at the same time administering electric shocks, to the point that the mice began to respond with literal fear and trembling whenever they simply smelled the cherry scent, even absent the electric shock. Now, all of that’s nothing, really. It’s just the stuff of Pavlov’s Dogs that most of us learned about in high school, right?
In this experiment, with the mice, though, the scientists took all of it another step or two further by learning that the offspring of these male mice would also shudder with fear and trembling at the mere whiff of cherry scented air, even though they, themselves, had never smelled that scent before, let alone experienced an electric shock along with it. Even more surprising, the grandchildren – a second generation removed from the original mice – also experienced the same physical, fearful reaction to the smell of cherries, as did mice born by way of in vitro fertilization, using sperm from the original male subjects.
Again, none of these second and third generation mice had ever experienced the electric shock their ancestors had received in connection to that smell – yet they still showed physical signs of fear and trauma.
All of this is to say, it seems mice – and perhaps, then, humans – have the capacity to pass along, genetically, emotional responses and spiritual experiences like fear, trauma, and I have to wonder, then, maybe grief, too.
And we can quibble – and even disagree – about the “nature” and “nurture” of it all, but the spiritual and faithful proposition in all of this, for me, is to say that the grief we hold and the sorrow with which we wrestle, isn’t always ours alone. It’s not always isolated to our own experience. We are also impacted by those who’ve gone before us – sometimes, directly, by the ways our lives intersect, and sometimes by the ways our history as a family or as a people are tangled up on this side of heaven.
Where my grandfather is concerned, it’s clear that a measure of grief over his untimely death – it’s impact on my grandmother, my dad, our family – and the sorrow in the groundwater of my own life has always been a thing. It’s never been debilitating for me, but grief over never having met him has always been present in my life and in our family’s story, nonetheless. (And that experiment with the mice makes me wonder if his cigarette habit was the source of my own penchant for Camel Lights, back in the day, too!)
And, other than the smoking thing, Jerry Havel’s influence on our family was nothing but positive as far as I know. (It’s why I wear his ring on my right ring finger.) But I think it also must be true that there is real grief for ancestors who were hurtful or harmful or otherwise unhealthy branches on any given family tree, just the same. We grieve abuse, addictions, absence, infidelity, and more.
And this “ancestral, generational grief” is bigger than our personal lives and it grows beyond the boundaries of our respective families, too. Sociologists, psychologists and theologians suggest that we grieve the loss of our history, traditions, culture, and faith practices, too – all of which are supposed to be OURS, though we’ve lost a lot of that for a lot of reasons.
For most of us, from what I can tell – and what I’ve learned through the study and work of racial justice – our white culture, history, tradition, and even faith practices – have been whitewashed by a culture that has so desperately and so deliberately worked to lump anyone who is not “of color” into the same bucket or category of humanity. It’s one of the most ignorant, evil things about living in a white supremacist world.
What “whiteness” means is that Germans and Scotts and Irish and Norwegian people – and anyone who looks like me on the outside? – we’ve lost a lot of our ancestral heritage when it comes to the ways we eat, drink, sing, pray, worship, celebrate and hold space in the world. We don’t know or notice that all of the time, but it operates as “lack” in our lives. It’s something we’re missing, and missing out on, that impacts our psyche and our spirit.
The most telling way this was first shown to me was in a race workshop where a sizeable group of racially diverse people was asked to share, in small groups organized around our respective racial identities, what it was that we liked about being Black, Asian, Latino, or white, for example. For the most part, the white people were hard-pressed to answer the question. While Blacks were proud of things like hip-hop culture, music, and dance, for example; and the Asians and Latinos loved, among other things, their food; and while all those groups of color celebrated their resilience and strength – as a people – in the face of racism and oppression in the world; there wasn’t much that was uniquely “white,” for the rest of us. Because so many cultures have been poured into the “white” bucket, the good, beautiful things that once distinguished us, one from another, are hard to identify – let alone celebrate – any longer. And we are lesser for it. It is worth our grief and sorrow.
And there is yet a third form of this ancestral and generational grief for people who’ve had their ancestors and their history literally, deliberately damaged or destroyed by violence, oppression, and genocide. Most of us can’t know the personal sorrow of something like the holocaust for Jews, or of chattel slavery for Blacks in this country, or the genocide of indigenous peoples in north America and Australia. But for those whose people have suffered such grief, its sorrow lives on in their descendants.
And for the descendants of those who perpetrated such atrocities and evil, I wonder if it would behoove us to experience the Truth of that history as GRIEF, moreso than merely GUILT, so that we might be changed and make change in light of it, in a way we still haven’t figured out after all these years.
Which is where I think our life and our faith can come together around all of this grief tonight – the personal, communal, historical and cosmic nature of this generational/ancestral grief.
I wanted to hear those words from Genesis about Abraham, the first patriarch of our faith, and of God’s promise to build and bind the generations together through him – as the father of many nations, with “descendants as numerous as the stars in the sky and as plentiful as sand on the seashore,” we’re told. When we see ourselves in that light, as intimately and intricately connected with all of God’s people, their grief might become ours and our grief might become theirs, even though our experiences may be so vastly different and disconnected at times.
And it made me think of that bit we heard from Matthew’s Gospel, too, where he invokes Rachel … who lived generations before the days of Jesus arrived on the scene. Rachel was one of the matriarchs of Israel, whose grief and sorrow cried out from the ground of her grave, as her descendants and our ancestors in the faith were banished into exile and captivity. Rachel’s grief was alive and well then – long after she lived and moved and breathed in the world. And it is alive and well, still, in the world, and in our own hearts, minds, and lives, it seems to me.
So tonight, our invitation is to acknowledge yet another experience of grief in our heart of hearts – that which comes from those who’ve gone before us. Some of this grief is individual to our experience and grows from the lives we share in our families. (Sorrow, regret, and sadness for the those in our family tree.) Some of this grief is communal, in that we have lost touch with our ancestors’ deep, meaningful history, tradition, and culture in too many ways. And some of this grief is cosmic and comes from the damage done by one branch of the human family to another branch of God’s people – for those who received that violence and for those who perpetrated it, too.
Whatever the case, our ritual for this evening is a nod to the faith practices of our own spiritual ancestors. We will light sticks of incense and leave them burning at the wall. Their scent and smoke are meant to rise up like so many prayers of repentance… regret, maybe… some gratitude, I hope… and grief, of course.
And it’s also an invitation, to the ancestors who’ve gone before us, whose sorrow we share – and whose hope is ours, just the same – that they surround us like a great cloud of witnesses … like a communion of saints … on the other side of God’s eternity, where all of this grief – our mourning and crying, our pain and death are no more, thanks to the love that’s promised to all the world, from generation to generation, in Jesus Christ our Lord.
Amen
