Status Updates From The Spiritual Practice of R...

…connects them in a cycle of fertility and growth. We are, after all, born of the dead, taking over their physical space, their language, and their ideas--and we are the ones who will hand these over to our unborn. We the living are a ligament between the generations, the only connection between what was long ago and what is yet to come.

WIthout our ancestors, we can't really know what it is to be human. …to be human is to bury our dead--and, even more important, to remember where they are. …being human means possessing a deep, rich soil, layers and layers of all that has gone on before we were born. This is the kind of soil that makes life out of dead things, that...

…and rail against them within the framework of our common tradition, that extended argument constantly unfolding across both space and time. Even though they do not literally talk back, it is still possible to learn to hear their voices clearly.

Our ancestors are on the one hand terribly alien to us, yet we are also profoundly connected to them. They confront us with the full span of human diversity, in beautiful, frustrating, and challenging ways. We do not need to excuse them for their various sins and omissions, treating them as if they came from some wildly exotic civilization. We have the right--and the responsibility--to disagree and complain...

For all our worries about divine providence and God's will, the really hard part about history is accepting the humanness of the past and its people. … All of us live somewhere between fear and hope, sharing the precariousness of life on planet earth. But we learn to understand our situation within different cultural ground rules and different physical limits.

…enlightenment than our ancestors. We are simply part of the same communion of saints, God's people spread across time and space, who need each other to "perfect" our faith. We are not isolated from the past or forever stranded in the present -- we are surrounded by a cloud of witnesses. … In a profound sense, memory is a process of "re-collecting" and "remembering" scattered people.