This month I want to invite you to consider your spiritual ancestors. These are figures who provide steadiness, comfort, and courage by gracing us with their wisdom and helping us grow spiritually mature. I encourage you to think big here: you can be, but don’t need to be, related to your spiritual ancestors. You get to choose your spiritual ancestral family. I also want you to think about how you are a spiritual ancestor. What would living into that role look like?
This feels like an appropriate invitation for this unsteady moment in the United States. I’m unsteady because I had taken for granted a shared general definition of and vision for progress. I’d taken for granted a shared reality. In 2016 some of these political currents felt like a last gasp, a zombie hand reaching from the grave. It is clearly more than that. The body has been exhumed, dusted off, and is among us à la Bernie Lomax. I never knew what the future held but now I know that I don’t know. That is growth, perhaps, because it’s living in the truth. Still, it is unnerving.
Spiritual ancestors help bring wisdom because people from all sorts of messy times in the past were having thoughts and feelings that feel relevant, appropriate, and resonant today. There is something reassuring about this spiral of human experience throughout time. I say spiral because I don’t want to think it’s a single path that’s trod in a linear, two steps forward, one (or more) steps back way. Instead, I prefer to think of progress as a journey in which we go over the same kind of territory multiple times but perhaps with a higher perspective each time. That sounds wildly optimistic to me as I type it and yet I have to let my stupid, beautiful optimism shine through the fog.
Spiritual ancestors also encourage maturity because few people want to be dealing with this bullshit, whatever this bullshit is. But my spiritual ancestors dealt with it, so I can too. For me there is also a sense that since I am here right now, maybe I was made for this time. Part of my theology is that I have an eternal soul that has come to Earth school to learn what I need to know. It follows that if something eternal in me picked now, I better get to it while I’m here. I want to go numb, I really do, but even more I want to learn what I’m supposed to learn while I’m here. And so I fight to stay present and to allow myself to change and grow. As Stevie says in my favorite song of his, “We all know sometimes life hates and troubles / Can make you wish you were born in another time and space / But you can bet your life times that and twice its double / That God knew exactly where he wanted you to be placed.”
I have a space on the wall dedicated to some of my spiritual ancestors. I wonder if that’s a possibility for you, though you don’t need wall space; you could write a letter to – or from – a spiritual ancestor. The “from” gets interesting – it could be words you are imagining your spiritual ancestor is saying to you, or it could be from you as a spiritual ancestor, providing steadiness, comfort, and courage to someone in your life.
A few of my spiritual ancestors are Julian of Norwich, Howard Thurman, and the collective divine feminine, represented through images like Stella Maris. Will you write me or otherwise tell me who is coming to mind as a spiritual ancestor? I would love to have a conversation about this with you! Oh – and here’s your spiritual homework. I know I already linked to Stevie’s “As” (and it’s long) but please also listen to this. I am kind of a hater about covers because they usually are not necessary but apparently Charles Yang knows what he’s doing, if from a different perspective than the late, great, Sam Cooke. Sam Cooke recorded his civil rights anthem “A Change is Gonna Come” 61 years ago and we need it today, too. Gratitude and blessings to to my spiritual ancestors, these magnificent artists, and to you, too.
