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Reflection for Date June 4 2006

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Ancestry

Last week I was having one of my frequent lunches with my son Adam at Cozzolino's restaurant in Bernal Heights. Aside from wanting to enjoy his company I also wanted to give him a copy of his great-grandfather John E. Wood's World War I draft registration form dated 1918 and a page from the 1880 U. S. Census for Philadelphia which records the names of his great-great grandparents and their children, including the above named John E. Wood at age two. Cousins keep sending these things to me and I pass them on to Adam for his own family archive. Of course whenever I do, I review the story of the Wood clan's arrival from Dublin, Ireland in 1848 and its manifold dispersal amid so many other surnames like Donnelly, MacIndoe, O'Neill, Adams, etc., until today we're probably related to every tenth person we meet in southeastern Pennsylvania to say nothing of south Jersey.

Well after all that there was a quiet moment and then Adam said, "You know, there was a Bellows on the Hopewell." I said, "What?" He repeated, "There really was a John Bellows on the Hopewell; I checked the passenger list on the Internet." With that remark Adam had shifted our attention to his mother's ancestry and to a John Bellows who arrived in New England in 1635 on the good ship Hopewell. Adam's maternal archives have always had firm evidence of his descent from this fellow, including a letter by a Revolutionary War soldier named Bellows written en route to the Battle of Saratoga. Adam then said, "That means my ancestry in this country on mom's side goes back 400 years."

Well, that spoiled my lunch - but not really. What it did was cause me suddenly to look at Adam as not just my son, but as someone who antedated me, who, as it were, transcended me. I looked at him in a new light and enjoyed the fact that there was a sudden "otherness" about him, yet an "otherness" that made him no less intimately flesh of my flesh, my own son yet not exclusively my own. I felt I was conversing with a much larger "presence" than myself and it felt good.

Later, driving home, I started thinking theologically. I imagined the Virgin Mary having tea at a village café and conversing with her son Jesus on one of his days off - and recalling for him items from her family history; like the name of his great-grandfather and the first of her clan to settle in Nazareth and the possibility of her descent from David's royal line. And then I imagined after a quiet pause Jesus saying something like, "Yes, and you know on my father's side I can think back to the days when the constellation Orion was first set in the heavens and galaxies that have yet to be discovered. And I'll never forget the whirlwind ride my father gave old Job, showing him the storehouse of the snow and the arsenal where the hail is stored, challenging him with questions like 'Has the rain a father and who sired the drops of dew and whose womb gave birth to the ice and can you bring out the signs of the zodiac in their season and have you ever attended the wild doe when she is in labor or taught the hawk to fly?' You know, the very thought of my paternal ancestry carries me so far and wide and high and deep." I then imagined that Mary must have felt as silenced, only more so, as I did when Adam mentioned the Hopewell.

But I also began to think: that's what Jesus came to remind us of - of our having an ancestry somehow identical with his. He came to detach us from too narrow a hold on our racial, ethnic and national origins. He came to clarify our ties whereby now we may all legitimately say "Abba, Father" to the same Maker and see ourselves (as St. Paul says in our second reading) as one grand family, children and fellow heirs of God, brothers and sisters to the trees and stars and the whole of creation. Which made me then think, "You know there is indeed an "otherness" about my son Adam and its origin goes way beyond the arrival of John Bellows on the Hopewell."

-- Geoff Wood