A Family Reminder

[A version of this essay first appeared in the Washington Post on July 9, 2011]

 “Choose you this day whom ye will serve…but as for me and my house, we will serve the Lord.” –Joshua 24:15 (KJV)

A few of months ago, I received an e-mail from a parishioner who was in the midst of planning her family reunion in Wilmington, North Carolina. Among the various activities she was planning she had decided to include a family day of worship. The week that her family would convene would be filled with many meaningful family traditions, but one tradition was key: taking time to honor God, the God of their personal salvation and collective liberation and their bridge over both the scenic and troubled waters of their lives.

“Now – you say after me, in my mother’s house there is still God.” These are the words required to live in the House of Younger, the family at the center of Lorraine Hansberry’s masterful “A Raisin in the Sun.” As long as Mama Younger provides room and board, her children’s belief in God is non-negotiable and disrespect for God will not be tolerated. She may not be able to control her daughter’s thoughts and actions on the other side of her door and farther down the road of life, but she is determined to do what she can while she can. Her strong determination is a part of her even stronger faith. She is duty-bound to instill in her children a belief in God because the big book laying on the coffee table says that she must train up her children in the way that they “should go.”

How does one transfer to a successor generation, those whom the acclaimed novelist Colson Whitehead calls “our replacements,” a belief in God, an understanding of one’s story and a familiarity with the songs and hymns that provided the soundtrack along the journey?  You must tell them! Tell them not only about the joy and triumphs but the pains and tears as well. It is what Moses instructed the Children of Israel to do in his valedictory as he was preparing to graduate from the school of time to the university of eternity. Tell them! As an African proverb states, when an elderly person dies we lose a library.  The annual gathering of elders and children alike allows the transfer of the books in our living libraries, which necessarily includes How We Got Over.

The Fourth of July has proven to be a very problematic holiday for many African-Americans. How do a people celebrate a holiday that honors national independence and freedom while fully aware that one’s ancestors were everything but free?  The question famously addressed and raised by Frederick Douglass, “What to the slave is the fourth of July?” still demands attention. Yet and still, it serves as a very popular date for family reunions and gatherings. A time when people get together to reunite not only with each other, but to reunite with their history and traditions.

Just as my parishioner thought it important to show her family’s “replacements” that worship is important. This summer numerous families throughout our country will converge on cities and give churches advance notice to rope off pews so they can in great numbers proclaim that in their family  “there still is God.”