 During
the course of our conversation I asked him about his grandpa, the
one who had been a state senator for 20 years in Lane County,
Oregon. His name had been Halver, he'd lived from the 1850s-1940s,
and besides being a state senator he'd been a sheep farmer, had
married a woman named Eliza Bond (everyone called her Kate), and had
had eight children, my great grandfather being the oldest.
After my conversation with Grandpa, I became obsessed with looking
up our family tree. I got online and traced Eliza's family back to
the 1700s. I'm sure there are some good stories from the lives of
many of my ancestors.
For example, Eliza's grandfather, Joseph Bond, died on December
31st, 1838, New Year's eve. Did he feel disappointment or relief as
he lay on the brink of a New Year, knowing--perhaps--that he
wouldn't see another one? Had he ended his own life, or did he have
memories of the Christmas celebrations that may have taken place
just days before? These are all questions that I may never know the
answers to.
A few generations up another branch takes us to William Bruce, the
father of "Major" William Bruce (who would be born two months and
two days after the US declared independence from Britain). All I
know so far of William Sr. is that he was born February 14th,
Valentine's Day, in either 1744 or 5. I wonder if he lived his life
with a lot of love, or if he was part of the revolution. I have no
record of his death. In the midst of these lives and dates and
personal histories is a larger, younger, country's history.
At first it was exciting tracing back through all these generations,
and then I felt like a mountain of people and years had piled up,
names and dates that I had never met were getting lost in a very
intricate and convoluted web of relations. It was pretty
anticlimactic. I realized how "nonspecial" we are, and as generation
after generation piled up, I began to get the image that we were one
massive, sprawled out, heaving brood. On my mom's and stepmom's side
the family tree is a mixture of broken branches and grafts, and on
my dad's side it's mostly an uninterrupted branch, as straight, and
sometimes as rigid, as an old oak.
What I came to realize though was that pedigree doesn't matter. It
doesn't matter whether the family line was broken or unbroken, and
with most of us it’s usually a mixture of both. The heroes and
villains, clerics and cattle thieves, political servants,
prostitutes and outlaws, slave liberators and slave holders and
indentured servants make up our checkered past. They spring from the
same branch. Yet we're all family, we have to live together, and we
have to get along.
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I also realized that my
place in the world doesn't depend on where I come from. Some of it
is shaped by my own actions and what I do with my own life and
years, but even more important than that, our value comes from being
part of a different family, being part of a bigger history and
bigger story: God's. Romans talks about being grafted into his
family where, regardless of our past, we can become princes and
princesses with an inheritance and belonging. None of the other
matters; most of that comes by chance and circumstance anyway. What
matters then is whether or not we are willing to become part of a
new family or still see ourselves as the outcast, disinherited
wanderers we’ve been.
Whether we're born into the home of beggars or kings, we have no say
in the matter. It wasn't dependent on anything we could do. The same
is true with being part of God's family. The "rights" we now have
don't come from anything we've done, but on our adoption, our
grafting in, as sons and daughters.
Sometimes when we're born into wealth we think somehow we're better
or morally superior to those who live in addiction or poverty, when
actually, at least in the beginning, it's all about the luck of the
draw and what those who have come before us have done or not done
with their own choices and circumstances. For some, they're given
rocks and weeds, and yet manage to turn it into something of value,
and the space they carve out feeds others and their future family
for generations. Others take a well tilled, well managed, well cared
for plot and through neglect and mismanagement it quickly
deteriorates into wasteland.
We have no way of seeing at one point in time where someone is at,
whether they are squandering what they have been given or pushing
out into uncharted territory. To the person coming out of inner city
ghettos and crack houses, staying sober and clean and getting a high
school education is a land unimagined or unheard of, while to a
Harvard educated son or daughter whose pedigree comes from kings and
politicians, this would seem cheap change. Yet to the wealthy and
educated, their challenge might be to give it all away, to make a
new beginning, not on the shoulders and backs of what they've been
given, but through the work and character (and grace) of their own
lives.
My grandpa has lived a good long life, and is still living it, which
is something I'd like to be able to say as well someday. The dash in
between two dates is what we've been given, but we've also been
given so much more.
[Cliff Wheeler - LCCS Faculty]
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