Ancestries, Root Systems, and Mysteries
Whenever I recite the names of my familial dead, I always reach a moment when I can go back no further. It happens pretty quickly, actually, in three or four generations..My great-grandmother Lily’s mother Marie Leston from Brittany. I add in her parents, because she had them, and then I will add in prayers ten generations back for all of those unknown grandparents back and back, all of those Bretagne ancestors I do not have names for. But there are cousins too, and aunts and uncles, and friends, and animals. The dead lead us to more dead. More and more dead. We start with four grandparent and in a few generations we are at hundreds.
So many unknown names, so many unknown stories. There are beings I do not know who have gifted me blessngs, there are people who have bequeathed me curses. I follow lineages to Ireland, to England, to France, to Poland back and back.
Every now and then I’ll have a brief little enthusiasm for ancestry. com and find myself going mother and mother, once all the way back to the 14th century. It seemed impossibly amazing…but not when you think about how deep time is, how long we’ve been hominds, how vast our ancestry really is. It expands and narrows again….and expands again back and back to the primordial seas….
And that is just the lineage for this life. The lineage of a single life.
Because, in truth, within me, are the lineages of countless lives. Who knows through what countries I can trace those lineages? We have all been villains and saints and friends, we have colluded with crimes and risked our lives. Who knows what we have done in those lives? Who knows what our ancestors in those lives did?
What we know is that those vast ancestral root systems have brought us HERE to this moment. We are not the product of a line but a moment in a web so vast and tangled we can only surrender to its mystery.
It is that mystery that goes round and round to which we surrender in the rosary. I have been the mother of everyone I meet. I am responsible for eveyrone I meet. I am connected in ways I cannot imagine to each of you here Here we have found each other, old friends, old family, found each other in prayers we can often barely explain why we pray.
But here we are together on that carousel praying for each other and to each other round and round.
