2018.11.11 Ancestral Healing

2018.11.11      “Ancestral Healing”   Rev. Laura Bogle

Reading:  excerpt from The Woman Warrior by Maxine Hong Kingston

"When we are born, we have curses and gifts from our parents and ancestors [that] come from way back, and generation after generation, we work on them, with them.

They are curses because there are terrible problems and hardships…the most difficult questions of humanity, such as ‘why war?’ and ‘what is love?’….

They are also gifts, because we have the opportunity to come up with the most beautiful answers."

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If you go out Sevierville Road about 12 miles from Maryville, on your left hand side you’ll see a small old Presbyterian Church, surrounded by a cemetery.  Eusebia Presbyterian Church, founded in 1786.

And if you roam that cemetery, you’ll find more recent gravestones, as well as ones that look simply like worn rocks.  Covered in lichen, it’s hard to tell anymore if there are any markings of name or date on them. 

One of these very old and worn gravestones has a more recent and legible one placed right next to it, as well as a marker from the Daughters of the American Revolution, indicating that the person buried there had served in the revolutionary war.  It is the gravestone of one my ancestors, Joseph Bogle, who died here in Blount Co., in 1790.  I believe it is the oldest marked grave of a white person in the county.  He was my great-great-great-great-great-great-grandfather.

Now, if my father were still here, I’d probably have more to tell you about our family history, he was a collector of stories and genealogical information.   But some of my father’s ashes are buried right in that same cemetery, close to the ancestors that linked him and me to this East Tennessee land.  My father’s name was Joseph Bogle, too.

But I’ve got some written documentation of research done by other family members.  How did the Bogles come to settle in East TN?  We don’t even know for sure what year or when that original Joseph Bogle was born.  Speculation is that he, or at least his forebears, were born in Scotland around Glasgow.  They then were part of colonizing Northern Ireland with Protestants through the Ulster Plantation.  And then they left Ulster for Pennsylvania.

Like many other Scots-Irish folks, we see record of Joseph, his wife Jean and their children having moved down through Virginia and eventually to this part of the country in the 1780s.  This land would not be part of the state of Tennessee until 1796, six years after that Joseph Bogle died.

My father Joseph Bogle was born and raised in middle Tennessee.  And how did my father’s branch of the Bogles end up in middle Tennessee?  Well, the family lore is that following the end of the Civil War, two Bogle brothers, including my great-great Grandfather Joseph Black Bogle, were basically run out of town, because they had sided with the Confederacy, and as you historians know East Tennessee was strong Union territory.  They eventually settled in Middle Tennessee, south of Nashville.

I am descended, at least in this line of my ancestry, from a people on the move.  A people searching, a pioneer people. A people who were part of a Revolution to create this democracy.  What fortitude it took to strike out for new lands, not just once but several times over.  What hardships and challenges they must have lived through.

And yet, as I read through the genealogy that I have access to, I have so many other questions about what is left out.

For instance, my Bogle ancestors were here living on this land when the removal of the Cherokee took place.  I have found no mention of my ancestor’s relations with the people who were already living in this land.

And in reading the history that I have, I’ve also found no mention of whether or not my ancestors owned slaves—just that at least part of the family sided with the Confederacy. 

I have some research work to do.  And if any of you are curious about the same kinds of questions about your own family, I invite you to join me and share with me what you know.

I am telling you this bit of Bogle family history not because it is particularly unusual or special, but because it is actually very usual and representative of the complex legacies many of us in this country—especially, but not only, those who are white-- have inherited.

In fact, to become “white” in this country has very often mean disconnection from all  of the stories and family lore, the good and the bad. Disconnection from any sense of ancestry at all.   To become “white” meant assimilation to the dominant culture, very often leaving behind cultural practices and ways from the “old country.”

Even if we know the good stories of pioneering and perseverance, we often are disconnected from the shadow side of the story – at whose cost? 

My colleague Rev. Molly Housh Gordon tells her family’s story of settlement in Oklahoma, and says:

“My maternal family remained in Oklahoma, our story and the state’s intertwined, our ancestors’ beloved bones buried in that contested, stolen land.

I once heard “On Being” host Krista Tippett, a fellow Oklahoman, call Oklahoma a land without history, a place where people left their past behind, some by forced march from ancestral lands, and some by chosen sojourn in pioneer wagons.

But the truth is that our entire nation suffers from a studied amnesia, a cultivated forgetting regarding the twin genocidal conditions of its founding – slavery & native cleansing. We either distance ourselves from memory entirely, or we tell stories about ourselves with important details missing from the telling.

Every family does this….

Every town does this….

Every nation does this as well – this careful forgetting. Ours does it more studiously, more insistently, and with more feigned innocence than most.”

Disconnection from the fullness of our history is dangerous.  In fact, this amnesia might lead some of us today to be surprised by the rise of white nationalism around us.  But that white nationalism would continue to make an appearance, generation after generation, makes sense in light of our ancestral stories that have never been fully examined, nor healed. 

Anyone out there watch the TV show “This is Us”?  It is masterful storytelling about how the past impacts the present and future, in the lineage of one particular family—flashing back and forth from different time periods.  Without giving too much away, one of the recent story lines is about a present day son, who has struggled with alcoholism, exploring a more full picture and story about his father who died when he was still a teenager.  In the process he learns more about his father’s service in Vietnam, he uncovers family secrets – or at least stories that were never told. The more he understands the past, the more he is able to understand himself.  It is part of his own path towards personal healing and writing a different story for the future.

The same thing that happens on the family level happens on our collective national level.  The United States has family secrets, or at least stories we don’t tell out loud.  The more we understand those stories, the better we will understand ourselves.

I don’t think it is possible to heal our country’s collective legacy without squarely looking at it and telling the truth about ourselves. 

This is not a recommendation that white folks go around feeling guilty for the sins of our forebears, that doesn’t help anyone.  But you know, there has never been a truth and reconciliation process for our country, for the devastations of the genocide of native peoples and the enslavement of Africans.

It is a challenge to all of us to do some examination, to ask some hard questions even about our own family histories, about our nation’s history, and to tell the truth about them. To tell the whole story.  It is a challenge to do the spiritual work of holding the contradictions in one place – the gifts of strength, ingenuity, and resiliency some ancestors passed to us—and the legacies of harm that were left.  It is a challenge to then be responsible for what we do with those legacies.  Only then will be able to live fully into our call today to be agents of healing and transformation. 

This is one reason why our area UU congregations are planning a trip to Montgomery, AL, in February.  We will visit the new Legacy Museum which traces the history of racial oppression from enslavement all the way up to present-day mass incarceration.  And the National Memorial for Peace and Justice, acknowledging the victims of racial lynching in this country.

Our congregation will also be reading the book “An African American and Latinx History of the United States” with a book discussion in January.

Our Unitarian Universalist 7^th Principle is the affirmation of the interconnectedness of all of creation.  Taking interconnection seriously means remembering our interconnection with the past and the future.

Buddhist teacher Thich Naht Hahn:

“All our ancestors and all future generations are present in us. Liberation is not an individual matter. As long as the ancestors in us are still suffering, we cannot be happy, and we will transmit their suffering to our children and their children. Now is the time to liberate our ancestors and future generations. It means to free ourselves.”

All of us, no matter our immigration stories, no matter our family lineage, hold complex legacies, ones with gifts and burdens.  Let us continue to ask questions about those legacies.  It is my theological perspective that the more we are able to honestly incorporate from the past, the more Love will be able to break through to help us write a new story for the future. 

This is the work of redemption, not just for ourselves and for our future generations, but it is how we actually participate in the healing and the salvation of our ancestors—the ones we knew and the ones whose lives we can only imagine.

May it be so.  Amen.