Last month, blogger David Russell Mosley over at Letters from the Edge of Elfland on Patheos Catholic channel posted an interesting piece on ‘spiritual ethnicity’, which was prompted by his pondering the results of his genetic genealogy test from Ancestry.com. I enjoyed that piece greatly and want to offer something of a response to it, but before I go any further, I do want to reflect a little on this. The recent craze here for genetic genealogy – a craze I’m by no means immune from, by the way – has already had some intriguing effects on our public discourse. For one thing, it’s unfortunately nabbed Elizabeth Warren by the heel as soon as she got her presidential run off the ground. It’s a very interesting phenomenon, and I want to be sure to do it justice.
By that I mean, I don’t want to make any overly-hasty generalisations on this, because my own family’s experience has been so mixed. My father’s family never cared that much about the patrimony and the family line, for (as I was given to understand it) two reasons. Firstly, because poverty makes that stuff seem unimportant. When you’re living hand-to-mouth, crop to crop, debt burden to debt burden, what your dead great-grandparents did can start to seem a bit irrelevant to your life. Secondly, because living in the South – and living as a poor white person in the South – seems attendant with a particular burden of shame. I have a very deep respect for Grandpa Cooper, and for the sacrifices he had to make in his life in order to place himself. He fought his ghosts of poverty and shame, and he did so in a way that actively made room around him for people like his first wife, his children, and later his second wife – my step-grandmother. But despite that process and its results being something I find unquestionably worth remembering, treasuring and honouring – there was some deliberate, hard forgetting he chose to do as a result. The deep irony in that is not lost on me.
On the other side – my mother’s side, the Doanes – they have always treasured the family tree, even the parts of it that are inconvenient or that cut against the grain of the national mythology. On the other hand, we do have some real people in our family of whom we can be justly proud. My maternal grandfather and grandmother, for instance, both lived full – and what’s more important, good – lives. I remember describing my grandfather, a bit oxymoronically perhaps, but aptly, as ‘actively generous and aggressively peaceable’. And I meant every word. Can it be any wonder that the Doanes find such joy and conviviality in remembering truly good people like Holden and Laura? But it is not merely for these people that the remembrance holds, that’s the beauty of it. The Doane family, and the allied Camp family, are incredibly tight-knit and have immense family gatherings that are always a joy to visit – people come from opposite coasts, greet each other like family, and have a party. When there is happiness, everyone shares it, and the same when there is pain or sorrow: everyone condoles. Remembrance, even of the ‘bad’ times, becomes transfigured into something joyful and life-affirming.
So, how to make sense of this? The ‘Cooper’ and the ‘Doane’ approaches to remembrance are very different, even though both of them have inescapably shaped my own ‘spiritual ethnicity’, for whatever valence you want to attach to either word in that formula. If I’m being honest with myself, I would have to say that the shame-complex aspect that I seem to have inherited from the Cooper side of the line has done more to shape my spiritual trajectory than the New England Methodist conviviality of the Doanes. There’s a Southern Gothic ‘haunting’ in my relationship to God – something reminiscent of Capote, O’Connor or Williams – that I haven’t been able to quite figure out or square away yet. It’s shown up several times in my life, and I don’t think that’s something that I can easily dismiss.
Beyond that, though, my spiritual ‘roots’ lie in a confluence of peace church activism – inherited from my Quaker forebears and impressed further upon me by my Mennonite upbringing; High Church Anglican Tory contrarianism – a gift from college and from the good folks at Saint Stephen’s in Providence, which strangely enough has encouraged and informed my Russophile tendencies; and a certain Eastern European Jewish radicalism – which, in the process of having come to light again, has been strangely amplified and transmuted by my involvement in the Antiochian Church. Each of these stems of my spiritual ‘genetics’ has directed me – the fact that each of these things lies in my background has given indication of the shape which my spiritual path must take. Indication – not dictation.
That’s an important distinction. Nikolai Fyodorov, Vladimir Solovyov and Nikolai Berdyaev were very quick to intuit the necessity of not only paying homage to one’s paternity, but actively loving them, to any kind of spiritual self-awareness. Fyodorov went as far as to say that it was our duty as a species to use our knowledge to resurrect our dead forefathers. This is why, in our prayer books, we are encouraged to pray for the health and salvation of our parents every morning. (This is also one of the reasons why I am writing such a lengthy series of hagiographical blog posts on the pre-Schismatic English saints.) But equally important, particularly when we use phrases like ‘spiritual genealogy’, is the necessary theological caution that genetics is not destiny. Even in the very Gospel of Matthew, in which the ancestry of Jesus is presented first and foremost, Saint John the Forerunner says not two chapters later unto the religious authorities: ‘Think not to say within yourselves, we have Abraham to our father: for I say unto you, that God is able of these stones to raise up children unto Abraham!’ In the annals of the histories received from the Doanes and pieced together from the Coopers, individual choice as a factor within history appears inescapable, even if the content of those choices was highly constrained by the conditions under which they were made.
In the end, of course, I think David Mosley is right, that ‘more reflection reveals deeper truths’, and that temet nosce is good advice for all and always. But the Church has always needed both the introductory chapters of the Gospel of Matthew and of the Gospel of Luke. The Church needs both the ‘spiritual genetics’ of Christ and His Church (we cannot, after all, do without the Law and the Prophets in our unregenerate state), and the sublimely personal act in history of total obedience to God that marked the Theotokos apart from all of her forebears and set us free, in the radical and philosophical sense understood by the authors of the Greek Scriptures. It does not do merely to say we are sons by blood; we must, like the prodigal son coming to himself, become sons by choice.
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