From The Vicar
The Revd Bruce Wakeling
Do you watch ‘Who Do You Think You Are’? (presently on BBC1 and BBC 1 HD on Wednesday evenings at 9.00pm)? In case you don’t, it’s a programme about the family trees of famous people. Over the last few years we have learnt about the ancestors of such people as Stephen Fry, Boris Johnson and J K Rowling. Did you know that Stephen Fry’s ancestor came to Britain to run the sugar beet factory at Bury St Edmunds, or that Boris Johnson’s ancestors include a Turkish politician and a King of England? Of course, in an hour-long programme it is only possible to trace one or two lines of ancestry.
Every time we go back a generation, however, we double the number of ancestors; I had two parents, four grandparents, eight great-grandparents. etc. If we all go back enough generations, we would seem to arrive at a figure that is more than the population of the world has ever been! This, of course, is because some of those individuals would appear again in different lists. Absurd as it may sound, it is reckoned that everyone of Western European ancestry is descended from the Emperor Charlemagne!
It all means that we actually are members one of another at a much deeper level than we realised, and it puts another layer of meaning on the idea of the Communion of Saints. Each of us is closely related to a crowd of people who stand behind us in the shadows of time, rather like Harry Potter looking in the Mirror of Erised. But we probably know nothing about them at all.
Each Autumn we are reminded that we are just the crest of a wave that has travelled far to be where we are and will travel on way past us. All Saints Day is the 1 November, and we now usually keep ‘All Saints Sunday’ on the nearest Sunday, this year on 30 October. We will have our All Souls Requiem on Wednesday 2 November at 7.30pm. And Remembrance Sunday is 13 November, when we remember the fallen in so many conflicts over the years. ‘Who do you think you are?’ often uncovers very poignant memories from the years of war.
It is important to remember that although we may know only a little about a few of the vast tide of humanity of which we are part, God knows them all. He remembers what everyone today has forgotten. He values those whom the world set at naught. And if we loved those who have gone before us, he loved and loves them so much more, and in him they are cherished for all eternity.
Bruce Oct 2011
