Where'd they come from?
On beliefs and genetic memory
I went home for Christmas last year for the first time in over three decades.
It’s just the three of us now— my mom, my oldest brother, and me. My dad died a decade ago and the younger of my older brothers died in late 2020.
The celebration, such as it was, was fairly quiet. I went to Quaker Meeting a couple of times with my mom on Christmas Eve. The second time, for the official “Christmas” service my brother joined us. The two of us snarked about the community we both grew up in until Mom shushed us while trying not to snort at our hijinks. Then I took us out to a pub for burgers and fries because there isn’t much open on Christmas Eve and no one wanted to cook.
Christmas day itself was also simple. My brother works in a residential care facility. Human infirmity doesn’t take holidays, so he couldn’t be with us until he finished work in the late afternoon. Mom and I went over to his apartment early to put the turkey in. When he got home he did the sides, we shared a meal, and then we exchanged a few gifts. The end.
I don’t know what their holiday would have been like if I hadn’t suggested we all gather together. I know, since my kids were with their dad, that I would have spent the day lonely and sad, alone in my house. If you had asked me even five years ago if I would have chosen to spend Christmas with my family instead of alone, even sad and lonely, I would have said absolutely not. But life is softening me (all three of us as near as I can tell), so there we were. And it was good.
My favorite part of the whole trip, though, was the morning of the day I had to drive home, when my mom and I had brunch with my parents’ oldest friends, who were in town visiting their daughter. These friends, Paul and Mary, who were my parents’ respective roommates and already dating, set my folks up on their first date. They went on to marry a year after my parents, which means they’ve been married for 61 years.
Like my parents, they subsequently spent many years living overseas. In their case, in Guatemala. Like my parents, they also adopted a child from the country they’d chosen as their home, who joined their biological children to create a family that was outside the confines of what White, middle class families were supposed to look like. Like my dad, they founded an organization, Ecumenical Project for International Cooperation (EPIC), to bring others into their care work for the world.
Their family has expanded over the years, with more adopted children, spouses of their children, and grandchildren. There have been struggles, divorces, and mental health challenges (like in many families) but unlike our family, they seem to have all maintained consistent affection for each other. Addiction and trauma didn’t plague any of them as far as I know, which might explain it, though I don’t know for sure.
What I do know is that sitting around the table with them, laughing together as they told stories on each other from their early days of friendship, I was reminded of the best of who my parents were (are, in my mother’s case). Of the young, faithful, vibrant couple who headed off to Africa in their early twenties determined to get their hands dirty in service of love, and spent their whole lives— imperfectly, true, but with great dedication— earnestly trying to live their faith.
I found myself thinking back on that meal this week because my brother randomly texted me a YouTube link. It’s one of the ways we’ve started to reconnect after all of these years, he and I. Out of the blue, he texts me memes, YouTube links, or gifs with no explanation. I respond briefly because we work different sorts of hours and I’m often in the office when they arrive. Then there’s nothing until the next offering. It’s a sweet, if odd, touching base. A line thrown out into unknown water and then a tug on that line, reminding us both we’re still out here in this stream together.
The YouTube link he sent led me to the above sermon by Texas pastor James Talarico, preaching against Christian nationalism. I’m not a Christian anymore (if I ever was, really) but still, it moved me. Not just because it’s a gorgeously crafted bit of oration, or because I think his message is so timely and important right now in America, but because he is articulating the Christianity I grew up with, which was ecumenical and inclusive and humble and all about getting your hands dirty in service of love.
It was the Christianity my mom was speaking out of when she surprised me in my twenties by telling me that The Last Temptation of Christ, which I happened to be reading for my book club, was her favorite book. She didn’t love it, like I did, for the idea of Jesus being tempted by the fantasy of a simple family life with Mary Magdalene. Her love for it was based on a scene where Jesus rejects the idea of Matthew writing the gospels. Jesus protests that Matthew’s describing miracles which never happened. He insists Matthew is making him otherworldly, which contradicts his message: “I want people to know they can follow me and live the way I live.” That was the heart of early Quakerism, she reminded me. George Fox’s central theological argument was if people wanted to call themselves Christians then they had to work to live the life of Christ every day, not just show up to church on Sunday, go to confession, and then do what they wanted the rest of the week.
It’s that same Christianity that causes modern Quakers to entitle their book of testimonies Faith & Practice, which I also thought of this week when reading a chapter of Prentis Hemphill’s book on social change and healing, What it Takes to Heal. What is one (belief) without the other (practice)? Would I have ever started this newsletter about the practice of integrity if not for that teaching? No, I wouldn’t have.
Sitting around that table with Paul, Mary, and my mom I felt so poignantly how they’ve all spent their lives trying to live the kind of Christian faith Pastor Talarico described in his sermon. And I could also see how they passed that dedication onto us— all the McKay children, my brother, and me. We are all, Christian or not, still earnestly trying to live our beliefs every day and make love manifest in the world.
It was realizing this inheritance I carry with me, feeling the constant, heavy weight of it on my heart as I drove home, that finally made it possible for me to start my memoir.
Also this week, poet Maggie Smith wrote in her newsletter about the development of her poem “Genetic Memory”:
Maggie isn’t talking about inherited beliefs, but her point remains, I think, if we turn our attention to them, which we should periodically. Why do you believe that thing you believe? Who first taught that belief to you? Does that belief reflect your current reality, help you make manifest the world you want now, or is it just inherited weight you drag from place to place, the ghost of traumas that aren’t your own haunting you?
Or, as in my case, is it a gift? An example of the best of what you were given, which doesn’t negate or remove all the “boxes of darkness”, as Mary Oliver named them, that you were also gifted. But isn’t it important to remember that precious thing’s provenance so you can cast your gratitude back upon your ancestors and teachers, give credit where credit is due, and feel the force of their wind at your back?
Where do your deepest beliefs come from?
Before we go, it’s important to me to say in the wake this week’s politics, I’m all in for Kamala and I hope you will be, too. I have no illusions about her or the Democratic Party generally. We don’t walk in lock step together on plenty of issues. But I trust we will all be able to practice our integrity, standing up for what we believe in, with a Harris administration in the White House.
We’d still have to do it with a Trump/Vance administration, but it would be very dangerous, and the danger would extend to democracy as a whole. Project 2025 has made that explicit.
Here’s some of the best writing I’ve come across this week about Kamala’s candidacy and the upcoming campaign on Substack, which covers misogynoir, resources to get involved, and some very satisfying ranting:
Freedom dictates folks can say what they want in public spaces, but not without consequences. Also, this isn’t a public space, it’s mine. So, if you are shitty to each other or me— today or at any point in the next 100 days or so— I will say goodbye. Permanently. Just so we’re clear.
We can absolutely disagree. We cannot be disrespectful or unkind. Thank you.
XO, Asha
Christmas in the July ~ I love the reminder of the ways we can come and be together, to walk in the world with intention and grace.
Just love this one ❤️ Beautifully lived, and shared - and thank you for all the good links. I was just telling a random Apple help desk employee (while we waited for the inevitable multiple updates and restarts) how as I get older, I find I am inclined to feel responsible (but in a peaceful way) to remember and remind others of the pre-computer world, what it was like without devices etc. … he was expressing some fear of being older and not as clued in to the latest technology. I was saying it’s not so fearful a place to be. We hold a precious time / memory within us, and also that softness that comes with age that you speak of, that understands the gifts we were given, and how to share them with more grace and intention. I hope I have expressed this well… :)