Dear Friends,
Where do you come from? I don’t mean New Jersey, or New York? But where did your ancestors sail from to get to the USA? Did they come via a southern or northern border, or perhaps the Caribbean? Or like me, were you and your forebears more recent arrivals?
It doesn’t take long for the people I meet to hear my accent and ask where I’m from or whether I’m Scottish or Irish. I delight in sharing that we Celts share a common heritage with more than just our two nations, but also the Welsh, the Cornish and the those from Brittany in northwestern France. There’s language and culture which lingers on in the geographical remote fringes of these regions that remain untouched by the erosion of progress.
Thankfully, the advances in genetic science have enabled us all to trace our origins much farther than the last few hundred years. I’ve not yet delved into my ancestral origins, although my maternal Grandmother did trace my Grandfather’s ancestry to the Normans who came over during the Norman Conquest of Britain.
No matter who we are, we all hail from somewhere and are related to each other. In the UK, we used to say that we are never more than four handshakes from the queen and I’m sure there’s a similar phrase at large in this country too.
Various sociologists have wondered about our interconnectedness since the beginning of the 20th Century and possibly beyond that. When George MacLeod, the founder of the Iona Community, was a little boy, about eight years old, he was taken to meet a very old lady in her nineties to shake her hand. It turned out that when she was eight years old, she was taken to shake the hand of a very old lady called Flora MacDonald. Flora had been the one who helped to smuggle Bonnie Prince Charlie over the sea to the Isle of Skye as he fled the Red Coats and the British Army the failure of the Jacobite Rebellion at the Battle of Culloden.
An even more exciting interconnectedness all disciples of Jesus Christ share, is our common heritage of faith that has been passed on through all those generations since the twelve disciples of Jesus. All because they shared their experience of His presence in their lives, so that we could do the same that others too may believe. Despite the awesome length of that chain of succession, we still have the privilege of a personal relationship with Jesus Christ our Lord.
Pastor Cliff