Living On
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We exist because of those who have come before us. Their strength and love encourage us in our living. There is a deep humility in understanding that we are just one note in the symphony that began long before our birth and will continue long after we’re gone. And the sound of our note is shaped by all who have shaped us, as we shape the notes to come.
Our bodies and minds are formed by the DNA of our direct ancestors, but we also carry the culture and stories and songs that have been passed down to us by people far beyond our immediate family. There are spiritual ancestors as well as physical ancestors.
Two years ago, my 88-year-old UU mother and I went on a self-guided pilgrimage to New England to visit the UU “holy places” there. We spent several days in the small town of Concord, Massachusetts, the home of many people I consider my spiritual ancestors, that circle of Transcendentalist men and women of the mid-19th century whose writings, speaking, poetry, activism and tremendous insight shaped America in many ways.
It was powerfully moving to stand in Ralph Waldo Emerson’s study, surrounded by the books that had so enthralled young Louisa May Alcott and Henry David Thoreau, or to see the house where the Alcott sisters created their private world that became Little Women. We went to Walden Pond and I picked up an acorn for my home altar, thinking in gratitude of Thoreau and how his book Walden changed my life as a teen.
Before leaving, we went to Sleepy Hollow cemetery, on a wooded hill at the edge of town. They are all there, just a few hundred feet from one another: Emerson and Nathaniel Hawthorne and Elizabeth Peabody and the Alcotts and Thoreau, their graves clustered along a high rocky ridge. I could just imagine them walking together one fall afternoon, as the new town cemetery was being planned, and laughingly arguing about who would get the best view from their grave.
Emerson’s marker was a massive uncut chunk of native stone, suitably magnificent and iconoclastic. At Louisa Alcott’s little gravestone there were hundreds of pens and pencils: offerings, I assume, from aspiring writers. At the base of Hawthorne’s gravestone there was a folded-up piece of paper with a scribbled poem. Thoreau’s gravestone was just a few inches tall, like the stone for a young child, and all it said was “Henry.” I sat down on a tree root, grown from his bones, and thanked him in my heart for what he brought to the world 120 years before my time, about how to live on this earth, as best one can, with grace and appreciation.
The next summer, my dearest spiritual friend died. We had known each other since I was six years old and she was nineteen. She was a steadfast force of goodness, love, and light in my life for more than forty-five years. When we spoke on the phone for the last time before she died, she told me, for the first time, that she saw me as her spiritual daughter. “Yes,” I said, “Yes. I am who I am because of you.” Now she is gone, at least in the form I knew, and I go on, carrying, as best I can, her qualities of fierce honesty and unconditional love, in her memory and honor.
In Japan, many people place their loved ones’ names on their home altars, and light candles and incense for them, in gratitude, just as they do for the Buddha. Similarly, in my congregation we have an All Soul’s Day ritual each year in early November in which we honor our ancestors by lighting candles, remembering and acknowledging: “I am who I am because of you.”
