On Sharing the Family Story...
The Revd Deacon Polly Bowen
I received a letter from my Cousin Jeanne a short while ago. I haven’t seen her for years, but she enclosed a recent photo of herself (taken for her parish directory) and I was delighted to see that she looks marvelous. (She’s ten years older than I am, so . . . well, you get the picture!)
It started me reminiscing about family. I remember the last family reunion I took my mother to – she was the matriarch, the oldest woman in the family. But she wasn’t the oldest person. She was very excited because her Cousin John, eight or nine years older than she was, came from
“Wouldn’t you think they’d have come just because John was there,” she asked. And I callously answered, “But Mother, they don’t know John.”
The minute I said it I knew I’d hurt her. And I also knew that it wasn’t true. If the young people in my family didn’t know my mother’s Cousin John, it was because they hadn’t been listening to the family story as it was passed down from generation to generation.
You know what I mean – you do it in your family, too. We heard it from our parents and we tell our children, and they tell their children, and so on, and along the way the story acquires new richness and greater depth, and maybe some things aren’t told exactly the way they happened, but the essentials are there. And every so often the family produces someone with a burning interest in history and genealogy, and that someone gathers up these essentials and puts them into some sort of cohesive story. And that gets passed along and added to, and new generations grow up knowing who they are and where they came from, because they have the family story and the family traditions that bind them together.
Among my early recollections is the memory of being in church with my mother week after week. I was little and it was generally pretty unexciting, and I suppose I was fidgety. And I wondered what was so important about this that we had to do it every single week – and sometimes in between.
But even in my boredom I noticed some things. The priest would read to us, and everybody would stand up, because this reading was special! My mother told me it was our story! And then would come the curious ritual of the bread and the wine.
t was years before I began to have an inkling of why this ritual was so important. But I knew that it was important to the people I cared about, and who cared about me. And when I did stray, my rebellion was doomed to failure – because my mother had done her job so well that the story was imbedded in my heart, and I just had to come back.
We are, by the grace of God, called to gather together in this place. We know that our Baptismal Covenant sets us apart from the world. But we also know that the world’s attractions pull us in a different direction.
That pull is very strong. We reach out to the sick and the hungry, but our hands are shaky and our offerings feeble. Our timid voices quaver as we proclaim justice and peace and salvation. Sometimes we fail to welcome the stranger in our midst, or we’re reluctant to accept the one who is a little different. And when we gather together we are vulnerable before the burning Word of God, because that Word bespeaks a faith journey that illuminates our weakness.
And then we dare to break holy bread and pour out a cup of holy wine, and our voices grow stronger and our hands grow steadier and our prejudices grow weaker. And we celebrate the Light in our darkness and our unity with those who have gone before, and the story that binds us together.
This is the legacy my mother gave me. It’s the precious gift upheld by my Cousin Jeanne, who was there for me in the years after my father died when my mother was working. Jeanne (a teenager at the time, with more than the usual teenage problems) managed nevertheless to be a comfort to me in my loneliness, helping Mother teach me to set the priorities that would someday help me to find my way in the world and in the Church.
You who join me week after week as we break the bread and pour the wine know that we are participants in the greatest of family stories. Whatever circumstance brought each of us to this place to worship as a family, we share both the gift and the responsibility of passing the story on to those who come after us. For a few short years, we are the keepers of the story, and we must make sure that our children are ready to take their place in the chain of remembrance.
I pray that we teach our children well.
