These last days of Lent might be a good time to remember those who have come before us in our families, those who begot us and those who begot them, and so on backward into that past where every one of our ancestors used the pronoun “I” just as we do in this living moment.
Anyone who grew up with the Bible remembers the emphasis on genealogy in the Old Testament. My stepfather used to call these passages the “begats” from the language of the old King James Version. For example, “And unto Enoch was born Irad: and Irad begat Mehujael: and Mehujael begat Methusael: and Methusael begat Lamech” (Genesis 4:18). Some of our relatives might be amateur genealogists, but it takes a certain dedication—the client base of ancestry.com, let’s say—to trace our ancestry for even five or six generations, much less the 42 generations between Abraham and Jesus in Matthew.
The general ignorance of our forebears, it turns out, is worse than we might think. In a recent survey of more than 2000 adults across the country, only 47% could correctly name all four of their grandparents. That national average was better than in Dallas and Chicago, where only 36% of those surveyed knew their parents’ parents’ names. Our contemporaries, it seems, are losing the bonds of continuity with the past. Perhaps that should not be surprising, given the steady cultural pressure to believe that the past does not matter. In the first place, the people who lived back then were technologically inferior (they had flip phones), and in the second place, they had deplorable opinions, such as a belief that there are men and women, that would never pass muster among the woke.
When I read about these findings the other day, it struck me as another compelling reason that an education like ours at Wyoming Catholic College provides a bridge of escape from our shrinking island of judgmental “presentism” and an antidote to forgetfulness. There is a real world we share with our ancestors, and our students learn about it both through experience of its demanding beauty and through the great texts of the Western tradition written to interpret it. The central questions of justice in the past are not whether people have been assigned the wrong bodies in some agentless cosmic download. Real history is full of missteps and harshly corrected illusions, and the drama of salvation differs considerably from the choice of avatars in the metaverse.
My wife and I have four grandchildren in Dallas (apparently an epicenter of genealogical forgetfulness) and thinking about them suggests to me that the survey results might have another explanation that complicates the findings. Our grandchildren know me as “Grandpa,” my wife as “Grandma”; similarly, our own grown children and older grandchildren warmly remember my mother as “Nana.” I wonder if all our Dallas grandchildren could correctly write my full legal name on a survey form, or if our own children remember my father’s full name, since he died before they were born. In other words, the survey results might accurately reflect a detachment from the past, but perhaps they also demonstrate that surveys aren’t very good at capturing the circumstances that characterize families, much less the particulars of love that hide in the most generic words.
As we approach Palm Sunday and Holy Week, the daily readings in the Gospel of John over the past few days point directly to the problems of our relation to the inherited past. Incensed that Jesus would claim that he can set them free, the Jews object, “We are descendants of Abraham and have never been enslaved to anyone.” They do not consider that they are enslaved to sin since they think they have the correct genealogy. When Christ says that those who believe in Him will never die, they ask, “Are you greater than our father Abraham, who died?” When He says that Abraham rejoices in seeing His day, they scoff that he is not even fifty, and He claims to have known Abraham? It’s as though he were unaware of how many centuries had passed.
His answer is one of the most electrifying passages in the whole of Scripture: “Amen, amen, I say to you, before Abraham came to be, I AM.” It sends chills down your back. He is not saying that Abraham has no importance, or that genealogy means nothing. Far from it. But it will not save you, and neither will it condemn the Gentiles born outside the blood lines of Israel. The “children of Abraham” are all those who believe in Christ and whose faith is credited as righteousness, as St. Paul explains in Romans. Yet if family genealogy meant nothing, His own revelation as the true “son of David” would evaporate.
These last days of Lent might be a good time to remember those who have come before us in our families, those who begot us and those who begot them, and so on backward into that past where every one of our ancestors used the pronoun “I” just as we do in this living moment. All family stories are full of sin and suffering, flaws and sorrows, but we can draw closer in prayer with gratitude, and reject the “presentist” superiority that makes the past responsible for everything wrong with us. What does Christ say? “Before Abraham came to be, I AM.” Life after life, generation after generation, adds ever greater meaning and power to the central event in time, the sacrifice of the Son. As Fr. Thomas Dubay puts it, “At this moment, in one’s deepest center, the Father is begetting His Son Whom He never began to beget and shall never cease begetting.”
Republished with gracious permission from Wyoming Catholic College.
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