Sermon given by intern minister Tori Rosati, October 23, 2022.
I knew since I was a kid that I was going to inherit my grandmother’s china. It was a common refrain around her house that one day, she would pass it down to me. My grandmother, Rose, was the daughter of poor Italian immigrant farmers. Later in her life, she would marry a successful business man who for some time was able to give her a comfortable life. However, several years into their marriage, and after my father was born, he would sadly lose his entire livelihood and she would struggle once again.
The china, to my grandmother, represented the period in her life when she felt taken care of – it represented the possibility of success in a life of hardship, of safety and security. And in her gifting it me, she was passing that security and possibility down to me.
As a child, her china rarely came out. It was meticulously placed in the corner china cabinet in her dining room and when she died it was packed up in boxes and stored at my parents’ house where it sat in the basement for over a decade. I had growing kids with clumsy hands and – I dared not bring it into our home. So it remained, tucked away and all but forgotten in the busyness of life.
Then COVID….
As we approached the holidays that first pandemic year, we were lonely and grieving a world that was scary and uncertain. Our own Christmas tradition is to go to Western Mass to be with our families but that year, we were tying to make things festive amidst the lockdowns and danger of COVID.
And here my grandmother would reach out across time and space to offer her presence and love. She loved the holidays. She used to decorate her Thanksgiving and Christmas tables with her china at least a week ahead of time and show it off to visitors and guests. As we were thinking about how we were going to make that year special, her china came to mind. I asked my parents to bring it. Out it came from the basement, musty and packed in tight with crumpled, old, faded newspapers. It was like Christmas just taking all the pieces out, carefully washing and drying them and then decorating the table ahead of the holiday.
I felt her draw near. With each peace I laid on the white table cloth I imagined her hand guiding me – turn it this way, no the salad plate is over here, yes, that’s right. These pieces of painted glass held so much in them. They held more than the food that we would serve – they held my childhood, they held hope and promise, they held the larger fullness of time that set me – one small part – on the table of my lineage.
It was a comfort….
And it continues to remind me of the power of the what is passed down to us – the ways that we are connected and challenged by the greater meaning and blessings we imbue in what is carried through the generations. As we have explored this month, we are the inheritors of so much and we are the ones who others will inherit from.
And, I have been reflecting on what it means to pass something on. How are the things we inherit changed in our holding? There is an invitation here to reflect on our practices of passing on – to pause and ask ourselves – what is my contribution to this? Whether family heirlooms, personal qualities, one’s life’s work – every generation has an opening to shift, expand, and radically alter altogether what has been given to us and in so doing – participate in the transformation of the world.
Author Bina Venkataraman, in her TED talk and book, The Optimists Telescope reflects on how we go about the work of being good ancestors. One of her strategies is to leave behind what she call, “heirlooms, rather than just legacies (the heirloom she refers to in her piece is an Indian instrument known as a dilruba). I love that…leave behind heirlooms not legacies. Venkataraman shares, “The recipient of an heirloom (as opposed to the recipient of a bequest or gift) carries the obligation to steward the resource for the generations that are yet to come…”
By looking at our contributions to this life, whether tangible or intangible, as heirlooms, our stewardship allows us to use and adapt what’s been passed down to us and with an eye, Venkataraman says, for how it will endure. How it will endure.
This orientation is not just about protection, but stewardship – allowing each generation to add their own gifts to keep our projects, our stories, our treasures alive into the future as each generation draws their own sense of comfort and joy from what has been passed down it. This is certainly true of how I now hold and honor my grandmother’s china. The new stories it holds of pandemic living, loss and connection – knowing that those stories will be passed down along with it to those who will set their tables in the future.
So, I invite us this morning to reflect on what are our heirlooms…as individuals, a community, and a people…
And, as I have been reflecting on this notion of heirlooms this week, I’ve been seeing them everywhere!
This building for one – a tangible thing that we as a community have inherited. And we are treating it as an heirloom, aren’t we? Stewarding it for the generations to come. As it has been entrusted into our waiting arms, we have held it with reverence, foresight, and vision. The capital campaign is increasing access, opening walls to invite in new ideas, innovations, and ways of being in relationship to a changing world. We are responding to the needs of our current moment alongside where the world may be some day - how it continues after us. We are doing the sacred work of heirlooming this inheritance.
And this heirlooming isn’t just about the tangible things – the family treasures and building entrusted to our care. Lessons we’ve been taught, ways of thinking about the world, our life’s work – these are all things that we steward. All potential heirlooms.
I can’t help but think here about the teacher’s strike in Haverhill and Malden this week. The way the community came together to advocate and ensure the sustainability and promise of our young people’s education – creating an heirloom in action and deed that stewards a future of equity and care.
The way so much of our justice work in the world is about creating heirlooms – projects and initiatives that ask us to steward our obligation to work toward a future free of oppression – to pass on a world that is more equitable and just – to take our place at the table of this time and see it as a gift to be taken up by future generations – carried out of sight but still connected.
And, in this way, anything can be an heirloom, right? Even the more uncomfortable and painful parts of our histories, can be transformed in that pause, in that unwrapping, that bringing up from the basement – they are transformed by the intentionality, the love and commitment for this journey we share with those generations who will follow us someday.
And we do have a choice here – do we pass them on without thought or care – or do we unwrap them from their boxes, hold them up for a moment – look at the hand painted patterns that catch the light for a moment – and set them, in our own healing ways, at the table of the future.
And this makes our very living a great gift – we are the heirlooms…
Wendell Berry, in our reading, says:
We are what we are given
and what is taken away;
blessed be the name
of the giver and taker.
For everything that comes
is a gift, the meaning always
carried out of sight
to renew our whereabouts,
always a starting placeAnd every gift is perfect
in its beginning, for it
is “from above, and cometh down
from the Father of lights.”
Gravity is grace.
When we see something as an heirloom, we don’t just pass it on as it was, this is the beauty of them – as an heirloom, we ask ourselves, what do I have to offer as a steward of this thing, this idea, this history, this work? How might this piece of painted porcelain, this renovated and expanded space, this way of being in the world – how it might become an heirloom? Where do I start?
Because heirlooms aren’t just the things that were passed down to us. We have the ability to bless what’s in our midst – to create and bestow new heirlooms for the future – transform the ordinary, the mundane, taken for granted, unpacked parts of our lives - every single thing - into something sacred and holy that is waiting to begin – that starting place that cometh down from the Creator of lights…”
Gravity is grace, Berry says. When things, even the most challenging things, move down – down through the generations, there is opportunity to imagine them anew – to mark the moment a starting place. To give it our blessing.
Because at the end of the movement, the day, the lifetime - heirlooms are our blessing. The blessing we inherit and the one we bestow.
As I set that 1st pandemic Christmas table, I blessed my grandmother – her life, what she taught and how she shaped me. Blessed our meal – the sheer wonder that despite the isolation, grief, and loss of that time we gathered still. And, I blessed the story I told my girls…of how these simple and beautiful pieces of porcelain and paint found a place in the china cabinet of our home. I blessed their passing through this life of mine – what they picked up along the way and what they would one day become as they make their way into the unseen.
These heirlooms we inherit and the ones we create to pass on -they are sacred – they are our blessing for the future of this world. As we have been exploring this month in our other sermons, when set ourselves within the larger fullness and lineage of time, we are invited into clouds of witness, radical and reparative remembering, and hope. Hope that the blessings we leave ahead will give our children and their children’s children a world that is more just, more liberated, and more connected to us and in this way we set our own place in time.
So, let us look for the heirlooms in our midst, imagine what we they might become in our waiting arms, and what new one’s might we bestow with the blessing of our lives. Let us set our table wide, play with the position of our plates and saucers, paint our stories on the porcelain that someone, someday will bring up from the basement, unwrap, and set at the table of their place in time and space.
I would love to hear about your heirlooms, the gifts that blessed you and the ones you are passing on to bless the future. I hope we get to share these stories in the time ahead. Let them help us to nurture, create, and pass down these sacred gifts as our spiritual practice and offering as a community.
Because we do this together. This is not solitary work – we need each other to tell our stories to, to witness our memories and histories – to bless the movement of times unfolding in our midst. An heirloom is not a solitary thing that is passed on from one hand to hand – but a collective, a community of passing down, something held together by the giver and the taker and giver and the taker and on and on.
As we move along the path of our lives, may heirlooms abound in our wake. And though we cannot see what will ultimately come of the things we pass down, we can take comfort in the knowing that a part of us is carried with them on the journey -that we get to be a starting place and a return. We can’t know to where our gifts will ultimately go, only that they do, that they are carried on out of sight, that they continue still…through the generations like a river, a rain, a light that cometh down from the sky, and because of this… gravity is certainly our grace…gravity is our grace.