In many ways, I and many of my clients belong to a culture that has had its ancestors stolen from us. If you belong to a culture where you don’t feel this, I envy you.
The bonds we have with those who have died are natural and intense. Although these bonds are, in a sense, injured by losing the physical presence of the beloved, they aren’t actually broken in any meaningful way. The bond continues, expressed precisely in the grief and loss we feel.
Grief does soften over time, as we make new bonds and adjust to the new reality, but if we check in, the bond is still there.
This organic persistence of bonds is what led earlier cultures naturally to celebrate the ongoing presence of ancestors in their lives. They could “feel” these people as an ongoing reality, even though they were dead and clearly no longer physically present.
We can remain utterly agnostic about the mechanism of those feelings – we really don’t need a transpersonal theory to explain them and respect their impact on day to day human life.
Hence we have cultures eating with ancestors on holy days, or creating altars to their ancestors, or engaging in complex group rituals to connect with their ancestors. These are all in alignment with the human experience of the ongoing and precious bond.
But as immigrants well before skype, or as slaves forced from their homelands, or as refugees fleeing impossible conditions in their countries, a bond is broken – between us and them. To survive, it seems, our more recent ancestors had to let go of any conscious awareness of their predecessors in order to figure out how to get along here without completely falling apart from grief and loss.
This forgetting serves another, less benign, function as well: the purpose of dominant culture to define who and what we are so that it, and not our lineages, can be in control of defining us.
Eventually, the connection to the ancestors became suspect, irrational, something good Westerners don’t acknowledge.
Our ancestors were stolen from us. Or, perhaps we let them go, to survive. In either case the cultural loss is substantial. I believe that, actually, it’s part of what is making our culture crazy.
Reality TV is filled with programs about ghosts and the occult, and as I watch I feel the deep yearning for a sane, meaningful, culturally acknowledged way of connecting with our beloved ancestors, so that we might have roots, connections, lineages, and history.
I ask my clients on a form to fill out their ethnicity, and what I usually see is “white” or “black” or “hispanic.” When I see those words, I feel a loss. A loss of “Irish” and “Nigerian” and “Peruvian” (or Irish/Nigerian/Peruvian). Losses of whole peoples and lands in our hearts. I don’t intend to separate us, but to honor our specificity (and, by extension, to honor and enjoy the specificity of others).
My upcoming Constellations for Individuals Course is going include developing skillfulness at seeing this specificity in others and helping them claim it, for the sake of true homecoming and connection to who we are.
What have your roots meant to you? When have you felt a cultural obstacle to recognizing your ancestry and various cultural lineages? How have you overcome the “forgetting”? Please share on my blog.
I am really supported when people who connect with my writing share it so that others can see it. I would be hugely grateful, if you have a response, to please share it here. Thank you!
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