“Kindly Remembrance”: of faith, ancestors, and debts to the past; a long post in response to Daisy B.

After a week away, I’m back — just in time for midterms here at Pasadena City College. Our official spring break is next week, which I believe gives us the last in all of America. Some colleges are only days from finals, and we’re only halfway through.

Much about which to be blogged, but let me start with a couple of pieces from Daisy, who now blogs at Dear Diaspora. Daisy blogs as a young Jewish lesbian feminist, and many of her best posts at her old blog (and her comments around the ‘sphere) have been in defense of communitarian values. (See our exchange, as it were, around this post.)

As we eased into Passover, Daisy put up a pair of posts about what questions we who call ourselves people of faith ought to be asking. I’m in particular struck by her second post, in which she asks three questions:

What are the effects of practicing my traditions?
What are my obligations to my ancestors?
What are my obligations to my descendants?

Daisy sounds a bit like Edmund Burke here, suggesting that society is composed of three groups: the living, the dead, and those who are to be born. These are the sorts of questions traditionally asked not only by the religiously inclined, but also by those whose temperament is fundamentally conservative. Yet they’re worth reflecting on, particularly perhaps from a feminist standpoint. (Daisy asks another question about what Christians see as their “central question”, and I’ll try and get to that in another post.)

To summarize, the relationship between Western feminism and this Burkean sense of obligation to ancestors and unborn descendants is a complicated one. At the risk of over-generalizing, the feminist tradition in this country, at least, tends to be suspicious of appeals to grand obligations. It is women, more often than not, who have had to do the grunt work of living up to those obligations. It is women who tend to be the primary providers of care to the “living ancestors” (one’s grandparents or older in-laws.) It is women who carry in their bodies the “yet to be born”; historically, the labor of delivery is not the first nor the last “labor” of which women will assume a disproportionate share. So it’s no accident that the feminist message has so often been “You are more than the expectations of your parents and ancestors” and “You are more than a husband and a wife.” To be flip, sometimes feminist advice dovetails almost perfectly with the title of Sandra Tsing Loh’s famous commencement address at CalTech: “Dare to Disappoint your Parents.”

But many feminists, particularly those outside the white middle-class American tradition, have suggested that this almost contemptuous attitude towards tradition risks throwing out the proverbial baby with the bathwater. With the understanding that yes, almost every cultural tradition has a less than flawless record on women’s rights, some feminists have long called for ways to reconcile the “ways of the ancestors” and the sense of obligation to community with a deep-seated belief in women’s radical equality with men. Feminism needs to be about more than individual choice and empowerment; it needs to find a way to center women’s voices and needs in ancient stories which still have value. And perhaps a way can be found to honor ancestors, to honor parents, and to still proclaim an uncompromising and uncompromised egalitarian vision.

I like the way Daisy poses the question: “What are my obligations to my ancestors?” It centers the person doing the asking, and it allows space for the answer to be “not much” or “damn all.” (Not that I think those are Daisy’s answers!) It implies a healthy tension between accepting the burden of the past and the freedom to pursue one’s own course, even if that course is fundamentally at odds with the one charted by those who came before.

The question also recognizes that for the people of the Abrahamic religious traditions (as well as others), we don’t practice ancestor worship. Whatever our particular beliefs about God (or, in the case of folks like Daisy, our lack of certainty about God’s existence), we know we can’t center our forebears in our consciousness to the exclusion of almost everything else. For those of us who believe in an ongoing and evolving relationship between God and human beings, it is clear that in some real sense our connection to God will be different from that of our ancestors. The relationship between a parent (God is often described as a parent) is dynamic, not static: a father treats his five year-old differently than he does his twenty-five year-old. The love has not lessened, the bond is not broken, but the rules are different and the understanding of what is owed is also different. This doesn’t mean that our ancestors were all spiritual children, while we are all spiritual adults! But it does mean that revelation and relationship is ongoing (a point I made here).

On May 14, I’m going to be giving a talk (accompanied by some family members) at the Oakland Museum. (The shortest of blurbs is here.) My family has been in the Bay Area since the Gold Rush, and over the years have donated various items to the Oakland Museum’s California history section, including a very large 19th century “mud wagon.” In any case, I’m going to be placing my family in historical context, talking about the way in which this particular generation of Americans took advantage of the state’s seizure of Spanish land-grant titles to accumulate large parcels for themselves, as well as the way in which men of my great-great-grandfather’s generation lived fundamentally urban lives in San Francisco and Oakland while trying to create pastoral idylls in the hills to remind themselves of their agrarian roots.

To prepare for this, I’ve been re-reading my great-great-grandfather’s book: Geneaology and Recollections. (Privately printed in 1915, you can now download a free PDF.) A.A. Moore wrote of his ancestors:

Those dead of whom I write abhorred with all mankind the notion of oblivion — being forgotten and as if they never lived. No doubt it would have pleased much any of those dead ancestors of whom I am to speak to have known in life (if possible) that in 1915 a descendant should write the name — as Enoch, or James, or John, Polly, or Betsy — in kindly remembrance. One would rather be abused than forgotten. The longing for immortality on the earth, among kin and people — to be remembered and spoken of and written of — is universal. There is a kind of immortality in “the recollection one leaves in the memory of man.” Myself, I gloom a bit, in the thought that with brief lapse I will be as a “watch in the night” — forgotten, and as if never born.

I owe Albert Alfonso Moore what he owed those O’Melvenys and Whitesides and Blands who came before him: I owe the obligation to write the name, to teach my daughter the names, to give her a sense of where she came from. Children do not magically appear, after all; DNA is transmitted from generation to generation with unmistakable markers; we ought to do what we can to honor those who gave us ours. But the obligation we owe is the “kindly remembrance”, not the slavish obedience to their particular values or customs. A.A. Moore was a splendid man in many respects, but our family fortune, such as it was, was made by serving as counsel to the likes of Southern Pacific Railroad, and in my grandfather’s chagrined phrase, “by foreclosing on widows and orphans.” He was a man of his time, I a man of mine, my daughter a woman of hers. A.A. was raised by Methodists and Presbyterians; I’m an adult convert to Catholicism (raised by atheists) who went on to the Episcopalians, the Anabaptists, the Pentecostals, and now Kabbalah. My daughter will find her own path; she will be raised with the certainty that the ocean refuses no river. But she will know the name A.A. Moore, and Ana Rengifo, and many others besides. It is an obligation that will rest lightly on her shoulders.

It’s worth asking, this question about ancestors. And it’s worth asking whether a legacy of suffering has a bearing on the obligations of the subsequent generations. My father’s father’s family was wiped out in the Holocaust; do I owe that side more because they were persecuted than I do to other branches of the clan, who in recent centuries lived in far greater security and comfort (and if anything, were on the side of the persecutors?) It’s worth asking, indeed.

I wrote a few years ago about my love for Los Angeles (a part of California to which my ancestors were not connected) and my sense of “liberation from history.” Still childless, I wrote:

What makes me a Los Angeleno in my mindset is my fascination with self-reinvention. I love that I am surrounded by hundreds of thousands, even millions of people, who call somewhere else their truest home — but have nonetheless come here, to this basin with its beaches and valleys and hills — in order to start something new. They’ve come here to escape the burdens and obligations of the past, the sort that linger in the old places even after the old people have gone. They’ve come here to escape the “things are the way they are” mindset. They’ve come here to replace the fatalism and superstition of the old places with a relentless optimism about their own potential and the possibility of global transformation. They’ve come here to get away from the ghosts of Holocausts and World Wars and rigid class distinctions. They’ve come here to run on mountain trails upon which their ancestors never set foot.

Where will my daughter go for that same self-reinvention? Perhaps back to the old places. I owe her the stories I was bequeathed; I owe my ancestors the bequeathing of those stories. But beyond that, I owe very, very little, just as Heloise Cerys Raquel (whose names all come from no known forebears) will owe us little, even as she owes the world and its creatures so much.