The Roots We Choose (Excerpt)
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We don’t get a say in the roots we inherit, even as they stretch beneath the surface of our daily lives and contain within them countless stories—of danger and survival and elation and heartbreak—that inform our living in ways we understand and ways we do not. No matter if we spend a lifetime tracing what we can learn about our family’s branches of these roots, or if we do all we can to ignore or even abandon these roots, they will remain there all the same, connecting us to the past, and in a sense, to each other.
They are the roots that instill in us our first notions of what family is, what safety is, what possibility is, even what the future might be. They are the roots that reveal to us our first and perhaps most enduring understandings of “home”—understandings that influence, in ways both obvious and subtle, the kind of home we may create for ourselves and for generations that will follow us.
Some of these roots are helpful to us, in that they simplify our options and allow us to make sense of what can be an unwieldy and overwhelming life. These roots are the places we can return to when our branching out has left us feeling adrift. But these roots can hold us down, effectively eliminating from our lives the possibility of growth, keeping us from becoming the people we are yearning to be.
These are not the roots we have chosen. These are the roots that, we could say, have chosen us.
So what about the roots that we can choose? What about the commitments that we can make to our lives and to the people around us, the commitments that are within our reach?
Raised in the Protestant tradition of my mother and her mother and her mother’s mother, I was expected to go to church on Sunday mornings, to sit in the pews, and restrain myself from making a scene with my adolescent impatience. To pass the time, I drew on the orders of service and the offering envelopes and daydreamed about the people around me.
Still, I loved the people I knew in the church. I saw them as kind and gentle. They always had a smile and a soft word for me. But over time, I began to pay more attention to what I was hearing, and saying, in the services. The spoken creeds were no longer just words we recited together. They were words that meant something. Words that I was starting to question—not with animosity, more with wonder and confusion. Hell, the Holy Ghost, the Virgin Mary, judging the quick and the dead. Lots for a developing mind to ponder in those words.
“What does it mean when I say these things?” I asked my mother as we stood side by side, doing the dishes one night after supper, a time when we often discussed big questions. “I don’t think I believe that stuff,” I told her.
Maybe she had wrestled with some of the same doubts. I’ll bet she had, as she did not choose to shame me or to suggest that I had better get my understanding straight if I hoped for eternal life. She was religious, but, thankfully, not that kind of religious. No, all I remember her saying is that religion is not about always understanding. It is about trying to understand.
I liked that. I still do. Religion is about trying to understand.
What I was beginning to understand at the time, however, was that I shouldn’t be participating in the portions of the service that troubled me because I didn’t think they were true. At any rate, I couldn’t convince myself they were true, and no amount of trying to understand would change that. My concerns were serious, heartfelt, and, even with the non-judgmental love of my mom as I wrestled with it all, a little scary. And so, I resolved to live with more integrity at church. I would still go, as my parents expected, but I would withhold from saying and doing things I didn’t believe.
Then came a week when the congregation shared a communion. The tradition was to pass trays with little squares of bread, everyone taking a piece and waiting to put it in their mouth at the same time. The bread came and went and I declined to participate. So far, so good. Next, trays with tiny glasses of grape juice were passed, and I again refused. Then the words were said and the people in the pews, in unison, drank the juice, their heads going back as if the room had been picked up and tipped to an angle for moment and then back. My head stayed still.
And this is where the revelation of my own understanding became terrible.
My choice to abandon the rituals and the understandings of my clan in that moment felt like a leap into nothingness. It felt as though I had ripped myself from the roots that had previously offered me a sense of identity, even in my confusion and lack of belief. My commitment to authenticity required that I refuse the communion, but the disorientation I experienced as I let go of my culture was painful and real. I instantly wept. My mom held my hand, sensing the leap that I had taken, perhaps wanting to hold on to her son as I went bounding into an adulthood of my own choosing.
- The Covenants We Keep - March 1, 2017
- The Roots We Choose (Excerpt) - May 1, 2014
