“In my blood, in my bones, I hear your voice, I hear your call. Ancestors dance with me, ancestors chant with me; I hear your voice, I hear your call.” African Chant
At the Celtic festival of Samhain (31 October – 1 November) and the corresponding Christian festivals of All Hallows / All Saints and All Souls (1 – 2 November) we are invited to honour our dead and remember our ancestors. Samhain is said to be a time when the veil between the worlds of the living and the dead, matter and spirit, is said to be thin – the origin of our modern Halloween customs centred around ghosts and ghouls.
All cultures honour their ancestors in some way. We tell stories, build monuments to our dead, and keep their heirlooms. In some cultures ancestors may be seen as spirit guides. In the Shinto religion of Japan the ancient ancestors of clans are thought to have become kami, or spirits of place. In West African traditional religion ancestors remain alongside the living as long they have descendants to honour them. They can help, harm, or just cause mischief to a descendant. To insure the ancestor's kindness, they must be honoured with prayers and offerings.
Whether or not we believe in the continuing conscious existence of our ancestors’ spirits, they live on through their descendants. Our inheritance includes not only our DNA, physical characteristics and personality traits, but also stories, values, patterns, and all the things that make up our complex culture.
The science of epigenetics is uncovering how ancestral trauma is passed down through the generations via gene expression, resulting in persistent emotional and behavioural patterns in the descendants of those traumatized, such as post-traumatic-slave-syndrome.
Our inheritance is complicated. Like many people, my family history is complicated. At Samhain, I honour my ancestors of blood, place and spirit. I light a candle to my forebears, and spend some time remembering their stories with gratitude, and acknowledging the patterns and traits, both positive and negative, that they have bequeathed me.
To honour my ancestors of place, I spend some time connecting with the myths and stories of those peoples who came from over the sea many generations ago to make these islands their home, such as the Celts, Angles, Saxons, and Scandinavians, and those who arrived more recently, for example, from India, Africa, the Caribbean, and Eastern Europe. I give thanks for the blessings of living in a multi-cultural society.
I also spend some time connecting with the land around me and its history. I walk, through farmland and woodland and along the canal, to Chadkirk Chapel, which has been a sacred site for many centuries. St Chad was said to have founded a monastic cell there in around the year 670. There is a holy well near to the present chapel, which was likely a place where people had made sacred offerings for many generations before the arrival of Christianity. The local community still dress the well every summer.
The present chapel building dates back to the 16th century. By the 1640s the congregation had embraced Puritanism and the building was registered as the first non-conformist place of worship in Cheshire. In 1705 the non-conformists were evicted and the chapel was reclaimed by the Church of England. At this one site I can connect with the traditions of ancient paganism, Celtic Christianity, and non-conformism, which inspire me today.
“If we stand tall it is because we stand on the backs of those who came before us.” Yoruba proverb
The Unitarian Universalist minister Alice Blair Wesley once said that “joining a church is adopting a new set of ancestors.” At Samhain I honour the ancestors of my spiritual tradition – people whose life stories impacted on my own and helped to make me the person I am. In Unitarianism we are blessed by a 'cloud of witnesses' - many spiritual ancestors whose inspirational lives call us to work for social justice in our own time.
Just a few of those inspiration lives:
Joseph Priestley (1733 – 1804), whose chapel and house were burned down by an angry mob over his support for the French Revolution;
Mary Wollstonecraft (1759 – 1797), author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman; Elizabeth Gaskell (1810 – 1865) and William Gaskell (1805 – 1884), whose writings and Unitarian witness drew public attention to the poor conditions of the working class in Manchester;
Theodore Parker (1810 – 1860), who worked for the abolition of slavery;
Clara Barton (1821 – 1912), who established the American Red Cross;
Gwilym Marles (1834 – 1879), who was evicted with his congregation from the chapel at Llynrhydowen for refusing to vote the way their landlords told them;
Norbert Capek (1870 – 1942), Maja Capek (1888 – 1966), and Rosalind Lee (1884 – 1959), who risked their lives (and Norbert's case gave it) to rescue children from Nazi persecution.
“Faithfulness and truth meet; justice and well-being kiss. Truth springs up from the earth; justice looks down from heaven. The Lord also bestows His bounty; our land yields its produce. Justice goes before Him as He sets out on His way.” Psalm 85
The other aspect of Samhain is that it is the final harvest festival of the wheel of the year. One side of my family still make a living from the land as farmers. If you go back just a few generations, so did all our ancestors. At the end of October they would gather in the last of the harvest and kill all but the breeding livestock so that they had the minimum number of mouths to feed through the winter. They would then preserve the fruits and meat for their winter food stores, just as the crows and squirrel bury their winter stores of nuts. My family still sell their cattle at Martinmas, on 11 November or Old Halloween.
Our ancestors lived with a real risk that they might not survive to see the new year. In the autumn they would be accessing whether this year's harvest was good enough to ensure that they had enough food to last the winter. Sadly, as our energy and economic crisis deepens, many in our society today are facing a winter of hardship and deprivation, and our congregations all over the country are considering how best to support those most in need in our communities – perhaps by opening our doors for the Warm Room initiative, providing donations and volunteers for local foodbanks, or fundraising for other charities who help those who are struggling to survive.
“I am tomorrow’s ancestor, the future of yesterday, and what I am in the here and now goes rippling out all ways, goes rippling out always.” Brian Boothby
Honouring ancestors connects us not only with our family and cultural histories, but also with the future. It reminds us that we, too, will one day be ancestors, that our presence will be felt beyond our lifetime because our choices today are shaping the lives of those who will follow us and will affect all the generations to come.
While much of the legacy our ancestors have bequeathed us is positive – such as many advances in human rights, in medicine, in education – we have also inherited a legacy of conflict, injustice and oppression. War, racism, the economic crisis, the energy crisis, the climate crisis – these are all, ultimately, part of one and the same crisis. It is a spiritual crisis of disconnection – from the earth, from each other, from the sacred – a crisis that manifests in humankind treating the earth as a thing to be possessed and endlessly exploited, a crisis that now threatens the survival of every species on earth, not just our own.
Our current political systems encourage short-termism and an obsession with 'growth, growth, growth.' May we learn instead from the Haudenosaunee philosophy of looking ahead for seven generations when we consider what will be the legacy we pass on to future generations.
“We take care of our world by taking care of each other – it is as simple and as difficult as that.” Desmond Tutu
I believe that, just as it is possible to heal from ancestral trauma, though the road is long and hard, it is possible to heal from the legacy of separation and disconnection.
Some of the tools we can use to begin to heal are what my shamanic teachers, Nicola and Jason Smalley of The Way of the Buzzard, refer to as the five Cs: community, connection, celebration, creativity and ceremony. These are the things that give our lives meaning in the midst of chaos. These are the things that can help us along the road from division and disconnection to healing and wholeness.
This Samhain I invite you, if you can, to connect with the land by getting outdoors and listening to its stories; to connect with each other in community; to celebrate your ancestors of blood, place and spirit, in whatever ways are meaningful to you; to take time to be creative in some way; and to connect with whatever you consider sacred through ceremony.
“When life is done for me, let love be my legacy.” Shelley Jackson Denham (1950 – 2013)
There is another word for the connection that heals us. Love. Not sentimental love, but passion and compassion. What we love, what we are passionate about, we want to care for. May we fall passionately and compassionately in love with the earth. May we bequeath a legacy of love.
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