Word to the Wise
Friday, June 2, 2023 - Friday in the 8th Week in Ordinary Time
[Sir 44:1, 9-13 and Mark 11:11-26]Now will I praise those godly men, our ancestors, each in his own time. But of others there is no memory, for when they ceased, they ceased. And they are as though they had not lived, they and their children after them. Yet these also were godly men whose virtues have not been forgotten; their wealth remains in their families, their heritage with their descendants; through God's covenant with them their family endures, their posterity, for their sake. [Sirach]
Nowadays, when I have the opportunity to visit my family and hometown of Natchitoches, LA, I often stay at a B&B owned by my nephew and his wife. The B&B, known as the Samuel Guy House, is located next to one of the oldest cemeteries in Louisiana. I can walk out the front door and up a brick walk into the cemetery and there I will find many of the graves of my ancestors in Natchitoches, going back well into the 1800's. I also find the graves of my older sister and younger brother and an infant older sister who died a day after her birth. The Book of Sirach touches on something deep in remembering our ancestors, known and unknown. Perhaps "ancestor worship" comes in for some sarcasm in western thought, but our Asian brothers and sisters may have something to teach us about life after death. After all, we do commemorate "All Saints" and "All Souls" in our own liturgy every year, and this does not mean just the "canonized" kind.
A brief look at the gospels according to Matthew and Luke will yield two genealogies of Jesus! One of them goes back to Abraham and the other to Adam!! These genealogies have a different theological purpose in each case, but they point to the same deep current in human understanding of our relationships and the depth of God's creation of the instinct of survival and the DNA we carry from our ancestors. They may or may not be as praise- or blameworthy as family legend would claim, but we owe our own existence to them. Remembering them all in prayer is the least we can do to say "thanks!" AMEN