Context

My great-great grandfather, George H. Lewis,
who died in 1863 in Washington, D.C.

Context. That’s what I’m always looking for. Growing up in Connecticut, where parts of my family have been since 1634, I had a profound sense of context. It was all around me. In downtown Meriden was the high school (in my time a middle school, now demolished) where my father graduated from high school in 1940. Across the street is the big brownstone Meriden High School building, a late Victorian pile, where my grandparents went to school. My great-great grandfather’s name is on the Civil War memorial in front of City Hall, again, across the street.

Every Memorial Day we went to the East Main Street Cemetery to decorate graves. There, my great-great grandfather is buried. He died of dysentery during the Civil War. My great-great grandmother is there next to him, along with her second husband and their infant children. In the same plot is a memorial to my great-great-great grandfather who lost his shirt in 1830’s by speculating in real estate. He went out to Iowa to start over, hoping to bring his family out. He died out there. One of my life’s ambitions is to find his grave and find out what happened to him.

I grew up with a deep sense of context, that I was part of a continuity. I always had a sense of my ancestors surrounding me. I have a glimmer of what many peoples around the world have, of seeing their ancestors with them, not just dead and buried. Now that my mother has died (6 years ago) and my father is in memory care, I have many family treasures--a photograph of my great-great grandfather, presumably taken before he left for the war, never to come back alive; a print of Abraham Lincoln reading the Bible to his wife and son (which turns out was based on a photograph of Lincoln leafing through a photo album with his son, and Mrs. Lincoln pasted in); several keepsakes of my mother’s which she saved from her childhood, such as a  metal German candy canister given to her by a German boarder who stayed with her family for awhile; a little incense burner in the shape of a birdhouse on top of a tree stump, and other reminders of her.

For me at least, it seemed natural to study history. As a pastor I’m not a professional historian, but history is very much a part of what I do. I preach from a text that is thousands of years old, and help my congregation understand what the text meant to the people who wrote it and first heard it, and what it can mean to them.

Reproduction of a Novgorod chess set, ca. 1300

On my own, I seek out the past. Anyone who has read previous posts knows that I enjoy making reproductions of chess sets from the past. Once in awhile I enjoy buying an antique set online, but the sets I reproduce exist only in fragmentary form and must be reconstructed. That’s the fun part. As I play a game with a medieval Russian set I have a sense of the people who would have used such a set in Novgorod 700 years ago. I also enjoy painting copies of medieval and Renaissance devotional art. Same thing as the chess sets. I enjoy seeing such art in museums, and I often pause and pray silently before them, as their original owners would have. It’s easier to spend a long time with a piece of art at home, however.

All of this helps me to understand myself in context. I’m not just an isolated individual. Each of us is a part of that great cloud of witnesses.