As I've continued to talk to folks about their sweet, small, churches, I've had a whole bunch of interesting conversations with folks whose experiences of church are local, intimate, and sustained. I recently chatted with Pastor Mary Harris Todd, who's been with Morton Presbyterian in rural North Carolina for thirty six years. She and I discussed what it's like being embedded in a little community for a big chunk of your life, but also what it means when you've lived a biblical generation with a single group of folks.
One of the most peculiar things about sticking around a church for a while is that you get to watch kids grow up. As they grow up, and that brief season of childhood fades like dawn before a rising sun, it becomes more and more obvious how they resemble their parents. Meaning, I’ll be looking at a teen, and watching them talk with their parental unit, and all of a sudden I’ll see all of the features they share. A forehead. The set of a chin. A vocal inflection. And then I’ll see the other parent, in the eyes, in the smile, as our innate capacity to recognize faces susses out the roots of that young adult’s uniqueness.
Like those moments where we look at ourselves in the mirror, and we see our mother or our father. Dear Lord, I’ll say. I remember Dad looking like that.
Heritability is a blessing, but in other ways, it can be something a little less desirable. We can inherit Scots Irish alcohol tolerances, or anxieties, or a volatile temper, or a genetic predisposition to cancers or heart disease.
There’s been some discussion over the past few years about the possibility that we might also inherit trauma, that the complex system of hormones that activate and engage our genetic code might mean our genes are changed by moments of extreme stress. That concept is called epigenetics, and there’s a whole lot of discussion about the possible ways that 1) we can intentionally shape the genes we pass down through certain positive actions…genemaxxing! and 2) we might be ensnared in cycles of inherited trauma, as generation after generation are warped by the horrific experiences of blood ancestors.
The idea that we’re forever trapped in the dysfunction of our ancestors can be a powerful one.
It can feel like we are sometimes, like things can never improve, like we’re eternally trapped in cycles of war and hatred, of greed and collapse. Among the Hebrew people, there was once a saying.
“The parents have eaten sour grapes, and the children’s teeth are set on edge.” The people of Judah believed their parents had done wrong, and that they were doomed to forever suffer because of it. They were convinced that the loss of their land and their enslavement in Babylon was God’s punishment.
It meant there was nothing they could do. What was the point? There could be no escape for them. They were trapped by what had gone before. The taste of inherited sin lingered in their mouths.
Wild, bizarre, crazy Ezekiel challenged this hopelessness. He proclaimed God’s word that sin is not something that lingers, not something that God holds against a people in perpetuity. God does not condemn a people for things they hadn’t done.
The same challenge rises from the Prophet Jeremiah. Jeremiah lived through the same period of history as Ezekiel, and had exactly the same divinely inspired response to that lingering despair. “Stop saying that,” says the Lord.
God does judge us, sure. God judges us right now. What are we doing, right now? Are we still making the mistakes of the past? Then we’ll be called on that. Have we turned away from them, embracing grace and justice and righteousness? Then God will see the turning of our hearts and the changing of our minds, and will embrace us in return.
That sense of hopelessness that those two prophets battled wasn’t just restricted to ancient Judah. Many of us bear within us that same despair...either consciously or subconsciously. We feel trapped by our past, trapped and condemned by things that have come before. We look at those we love, and imagine that they, too are trapped by the past that we have lived.
This happens in so many ways. How can I ever make it work? We can feel trapped by the expectations of our culture, channeled into broken ways of living that we know are wrong but feel we cannot escape. You look at your life, and say “This isn’t the life I wanted...but there’s nothing I can do.”
We are, or so we tell ourselves, the offspring of our pasts.
Old angers, old biases, old jealousies and conflicts and bitterness, those things become our sinful parent, and it is too easy for us to imagine our future as that doomed child of our own former sourness, trapped forever by the way things were, our future preordained and utterly without hope.
That flavor of bitterness, that sense of being pinned under the weight of your past, that is not what God desires for any of us. We are each called instead to cast aside that saying, to refuse to let the past turn us from the future that we are each called to discover.
That, I think, is the challenge with concepts like epigenetics. That is, beyond the fact that the research is interesting but scant, and most of it doesn’t make anything like the broad sweeping assertions about its effect that come from online wellness influencers and those whose ideology drives them find a physical mechanism for generational trauma.
Thing is, there doesn’t need to be a physical mechanism.
There are plenty of ways that our culture passes along brokenness, trauma, and dysfunction, without having to promote the idea that it gets burned into our genes. The burned-in biases in our economic and cultural systems, if we are not wary, can become power serving power, trapping people in the condition of their parents and grandparents, setting firm bounds around who we can be and what we can do.
In the face of that, Ezekiel declares that we all remain free, free to set our own course away from the challenges of our own past.
We can acknowledge who we were, celebrating those moments of joy but at the same time letting the truth of our failings be a place of learning.
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