Honoring the ancestors

Rev. Meg Barnhouse
October 30, 2016
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
www.austinuu.org

As we approach Halloween, All Saints and All Souls days, we might think about which ancestors we would choose to honor, and what actions we could take to honor them.

During the time of meditation we called out the names of those we have lost. The Celtic tradition says that the veil between the worlds of the dead and the living are thin at this time. In the Mexican/Aztec tradition, these are the days to celebrate the death of innocent babies and little children, then the next day, adults who have died. The Roman Catholic church delineates All Saints Day on Nov 1, and then All Souls Day on the 2nd.

This is a good time of year to honor those who have gone before us. Do we want to be just like them? No, we are each a unique self, and not to be the best of who we are dishonors the creative force. Do we search our ancestors to find something of ourselves? Of course.

Genealogy becomes a mania, an obsessive struggle to penetrate the past and snatch meaning from an infinity of names. At some point the search becomes futile – there is nothing left to find, no meaning to be dredged out of old receipts, newspaper articles, letters, accounts of events that seemed so important fifty or seventy years ago. All that remains is the insane urge to keep looking, insane because the searcher has no idea what he seeks. What will it be? A photograph? A will? A fragment of a letter? The only way to find out is to look at everything, because it is often when the searcher has gone far beyond the border of futility that he finds the object he never knew he was looking for.”
– Henry Wiencek, The Hairstons: An American Family in Black and White

Some people use Ancestry.com, others do the mitochondrial DNA testing where you swab your cheek and send it off in the mail. Everyone has ancestors, whether they were the ones who raised you or not. They are part of you.

I’ve told you some family stories, mostly about the Southerners on my mother’s side. I want to start by telling you about my dad’s aunt Neoskaleeta this morning. She was the oldest of three children, born in Huntingdon, PA to Rev. and Mrs. Tiffany. We don’t know why, but there in the 1890’s, they named their daughters, Mary Neolskaleeta and one Ruth Winureeta Tiffany. Local Native names. Ruth Tiffany was my grandmother, and Aunt Neosk found “Mary” to be dull and always went by Neoskaleeta, or Neosk. She had an illness as a child, maybe scarlet fever, and her hair fell out. When it grew back in, it was flaming red. She was argumentative, in contrast to her sweet sister, rebellious, and willful. In high school, when she declared she wanted to be a doctor, the principal told her that was out of range for a girl, but she could become a nurse. She went away to college, then medical school, got her diploma, rode back into Huntingdon on a motorcycle, went to the high school, and smacked the diploma down on the Principal’s desk.

She moved to Bahrain to be a doctor and married a man who worked for Standard Oil. A family story says that one day, men on horseback brandishing swords came and demanded she go with them. A sheik’s favorite wife was having trouble in childbirth. He wouldn’t have a male doctor look at her, and he’d heard there was a woman doctor in that town and went to fetch her. After hours long travel, she met with the sheik. If you save my wife, and if she has a daughter, I will pay you this much. If you save her and she has a son, it will be this much more. If she dies, you can find your way home across the desert alone. She saved the woman, who had a son, and the sheik gave her a back of gold and jewels. She gave those jewels to her children and grandchildren one at a time over the years. That’s what I hear. My grandmother, Ruth, married the preacher. He was a towering figure in the US during the twenties, thirties, and forties and fifties. They still sell his books in Christian book stores, I’m glad they are all part of me, but it’s Neoskaleeta I’m going to invite to sit down at the table with my inner committee. Do you have an inner committee? Who is on it? Any ancestors?.

This morning I want to tell you about some of our Unitarian and Universalist ancestors.

Who will we want to emulate? A Universalist preacher named Hosea Ballou? 1796-1852 The “family” stories about him: “Hosea Ballou, another Universalist once found himself sharing a carriage with a minister from another denomination, someone who believed very much in hell and damnation. Midway through their ride, the fellow asked him: “Could it be that you are Hosea Ballou, the infamous Universalist preacher?” Hosea admitted with pride to being who he was, and this other minister began to question him about his beliefs.

“So you do not believe in the existence of hell?”
“No.”
“Not even for the punishment of truly heinous crimes?”
“No.”
“Not even when you imagine that you yourself could be the victim of such a crime? Can you not conceive of a space in hell for someone who harmed you personally?”
“I cannot conceive of any place in hell, friend, for it does not exist.” Finally, exasperated and upset, the man asked Hosea, “Am I to understand then that if I were a Universalist, there would be nothing to stop me from killing you and the driver and making off into the night with this carriage?” And Hosea replied, “No, sir. If you were a Universalist, the thought of doing so would not have occurred to you.”

Another time a father came to him, concerned for the eternal soul of his son, who was always in the bars, partying and making bad choices. Please talk to him, pastor! He begged.
YES, let’s go build a fire outside the bar, and we’ll drag him out of the bar and throw him in it!
The father was horrified. “Why would I do that to my son?”
Ballou nodded. Why indeed, and are you a better parent than God?

There is Theodore Parker, a Transcendentalist Unitarian minister who founded a Vigilance Committee to get in the way of the slave catchers who came to Boston to kidnap men and women who had escaped slavery and drag them back South. He was a fiery abolitionist, and had an integrated congregation. He was constant about reminding people about the Black activists and soldiers who helped with the Revolutionary War. He wrote a letter to President Millard Filmore, another Unitarian forbear, which said There hangs in my study . . . the gun my grandfather fought with at the battle of Lexington… and also the musket he captured from a British soldier on that day,” Parker wrote in his letter to President Fillmore. “If I would not peril my property, my liberty, nay my life to keep my parishioners out of slavery, then I should throw away these trophies, and should think I was the son of some coward and not a brave man’s child.” Millard Filmore thought he was doing the best thing for the Union, signing the Fugitive Slave Act, which allowed slave-catchers to come north and snatch people. The new law also required all private free citizens to assist in the capture of those who had escaped. The members of the Vigilance Committee followed the slave catchers, harassed them, got in their way in many ways. They saved the lives of the men and women on the slave catchers’ list.

Margaret Fuller is one of the most dramatic female forbears. Her life is like an opera. She was born to a Unitarian family, educated in Latin, math, writing. She was a frequent visitor to the Emerson’s home, and a conversational adversary to him. Rumor has it that he had a great crush on her, but we don’t know if there was anything between them. She became a foreign correspondent for Horace Greely’s paper, the NY Tribune, He sent her to London to cover the literary world, but she became passionate about the Italian revolution, and went to Italy to cover the revolution there. Before this, war news was written by soldiers, and involved stories of battles and strategy. She wrote about the French bombardment of Italian citizens, and her stories held the human interest that war stories hadn’t included before that. She met an Italian Count, and they had a baby. Maybe tney weren’t married. She was advised not to come back to New England with a love child and an Italian Count, but they set sail. Caught in a storm, the ship was battered by waves and began to fall apart within plain sight of shore. A sailor said “I think I can make it, hand me the baby!” He strapped the baby to himself and dived in. They both drowned immediately. She stood on the deck as people on the shore watched in horror, her white night gown and her dark hair whipping in the wind, as the ship broke apart, its wooden hull battered from within by a giant marble bust of John C Calhoun being delivered to from Italy.

We are going to be ancestors ourselves. Whose story guides us? What family traditions do we carry on, consciously or unconsciously? What stories do we want told about us by our children’s children’s children? Do we sometimes do the wrong thing for reasons which seem sensible to us, as Millard Filmore did? Did we strain our relationships for the sake of justice or authenticity? Did we flout convention or do we live within the mores of a community to build trusting relationships or did they find a way to do both?

We can get guidance from the lives of those who have gone before us. No one is without flaws. No one is superhuman. Sometimes I color part of my hair red to honor Neoskaleeta, her intelligence and courage. I preach because that’s who I am, and I hope it honors all the preachers I come from. We are grateful to be here. We are grateful to be here together.

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