It is interesting how awareness of family history can reshape a sense of oneself. I've thought of myself for a long time through the lens of my mothers family, the side from which I inherited the Lutheran tradition. My maternal grandfather was rooted in the Missouri Synod and my maternal grandmother came from the German Iowa Synod that eventually joined the American Lutheran Church and then, in 1991, the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America. Pastors on both sides influenced my own call to ministry. But there is a whole unexplored side of the family--my dad's side--which gives me other traditions, other influences, mostly that I've not known well. Partly this is because my dad became Lutheran when my folks married and they raised me and my sibs in the Lutheran tradition. However, I knew my Grandma May, my paternal Grandmother, attended the Baptist church, as did my dad as a child. I still don't know too much, but some interesting things are beginning to come out as I search further. One tradition is the Scharen clan, my paternal grandfather's line. They came from Bern, Switzerland, but I don't know if they had any family religious background. The Sheldon family, my maternal grandfather's lineage, goes back to the 1630s in Rhode Island and much further in England and Scotland (including an Archbishop of Canterbury). In the early United States, they were Baptists and a number of ministers were in the clan both in Rhode Island and Connecticut. And perhaps most interesting to me at the moment, since our friends gave us the DVD for season one of Little House on the Prairie, is my maternal grandmother, Charolotte Quiner. Her dad and mom were respectively brother to Caroline Ingalls and sister to Charles Ingalls, Laura's parents. So that makes me a sort of a cousin of hers, three generations removed. Their religious life is front and center in the stories and in the TV show. We were watching the show tonight, and when their baby boy died, Charles Ingalls Jr., Charles and Caroline embrace and begin to recite together the 23rd Psalm. They had contests during the winter in memorizing scripture passages. And Rev. Alden, their pastor in Walnut Creek, remained close to them even after their move out to De Smet, South Dakota. Just goes to show you how complex family history is, and how we in this modern age, convinced of our freedom, choice, and individualism, are faced with coming up with who we are. No longer can our identity be given and deeply rooted in family and community; we have to become ourselves through efforts to produce a version of ourself that we can live. As Bonhoeffer said in the concluding words of his his famous poem, "Who am I?
Who am I? They mock me, these lonely questions of mine.
Whoever I am, Thou knowest, 0 God, I am Thine!
It is within the grace of this being claimed by God that I continue to grow into a sense of my own background and the influences that have shaped me.
Anon, and +Peace,
Chris
How very interesting! Some of my forebears were Baptist pastors in Rhode Island, too. Seventh Day Baptists, to be exact. You know, like Seventh Day Adventists -- only Baptist.
And you've inspired in me a weirdly competitive urge to uncover an Archbishop of Canterbury somewhere in my own lineage.
I'm getting a daily dose of appreciation for my own goodly heritage since I moved in with my 90-year-old grandfather three weeks ago. His line of the family is the one I know the least, because of my four grandparents he was the only one who didn't have a parent still living when I was born.
So now, over dinner, he fills in the blanks about aunts and uncles and cousins I never knew and faithful parents and grandparents who were gone before I was born, but whose lives shaped the rich legacy I inherited. It is quite a gift.
Posted by: Rachel Maxson | February 02, 2008 at 10:14 PM