I am the youngest in that photo, my great-grandmother is the oldest. Her grandfather was living with her when he died in 1922, but had been in Pickett's charge on Round Top at
Gettysburg, where he was wounded. He had become a pastor after the war,
but had enlisted from Stokes county, N.C. under Stonewall Jackson. My
mother became a Methodist minister and pastor herself after her divorce,
and always spoke very highly of the godly example her grandmother had
lived in front of her.
I
also knew my maternal great-grandmother on my father's side, and it is
my great-grandfather who bought the farm that we still own and love. My
father's paternal grandmother is the one who supplied our (my father's
and my) sense of humor and and ability to find the funny in just about
anything, a trait often mentioned with fondness and relief by my
great-aunts, and it is to her family's reunion that I go in two weeks.
My ADD comes from my mother's father, and it is his creativity and
talent for drawing that got passed to my nephew, who now works as a
computer graphics illustrator.
If
you are a geneticist or some sort of materialist, you might find all
that information is some sort of confirmation that genes will out or we
are all acting out of some sort of determined path carved out for us by
Nature's influence on our physical composition. If you are the member of
a family, you will recognise the cascade of taps on the shoulder, words
spoken in season and out, and family legends passed on not in story or
myth, but in lingering examples that shaped one person and then the next.
As
I woke up this morning, I was thinking about the image of a gloved hand
reaching thru time and the generations. If you were a scientist, you
might think of that hand as ideas carried in people, and how powerful an
idea can be as it stirs up change and influences every generation that
finds it and acts on it. If you wanted to clothe that same idea in
religious garb, you might think about how powerful habits, weaknesses
and proclivities get passed from one generation to the next and how
spiritual forces shape and move human beings.
If
you grew up in a family, then you'll know that hand as Una Mae patting
you on the shoulder and pointing out how ridiculous Portly was in all
his affectations and seriousness. You will watch Hallie sketch in the
evening to relieve his stress and draw dry cleaner advertisements in the
day to earn a living. If you are descended from a family, then you will
pull out a doily and wonder how "Mom" made fabric out of thread and
still cooked and cleaned and kept the grandchildren long past
"retirement age." In every case, you will see that it is not ideas that
are being passed thru time, but people who are giving of their lives to
those that follow, and I am not a copy of their DNA, but I've been
touched, tangibly altered, by the works of their hands imprinted onto
living people.
The
god conundrum works the same way. Some people think of god as an
elemental force, the set of existence whereby things, including people,
came into being and we describe his nature in physics and biology and
sociology as great waves of events as effects ebb and flow. The more
philosophical or religious elevate god to a plane where he has made laws
and principles or declarations of intent and we all are measured
against his standards and plans, creating our successes or failures
along the way as we work with those concepts and ideas. Then there is
the third way, where God is a person who is creating a family.
The
way I met him was to watch him in red letters while he lived in front
of his family. He loved little kids, like me, and he seemed to be always
looking for the next guy to feed. I always liked how he could talk to
the wind or the sea, and how the fishes would do what he asked, and how
at the end of a big city disaster that got averted, he said how glad he
was the animals wouldn't have to suffer any more, too. When I got older I
really appreciated how he didn't talk down to women, and he would never
embarrass someone if he didn't have to, even if they got themselves into
a bind. I liked how he loved being with people so much that it didn't
matter who was having the party, he was going to be there - so much so
he got a rep as a drunk! (Man, talk about not worrying about what folks
think about you!)
My
favorite story of all time is when he was coming into town and and
everyone came out to see him, but there was a blind beggar sitting in
the dirt asking him for help, too. My God? He stopped, he turned around,
and he saw blind Bartimus on the ground, and he touched his eyes with
the palm of his hands. Blind Bartimus saw like a natural man.
That I can type out a lyric that says God stopped, turned, saw and
touched just blows my mind and is completely out of line with nature,
but a living person can see and move and touch with love and kindness.
To be family with him is incomprehensible, but true.
