Family-History Pilgrimage: Day 17

June 22, 2023, 5:20 p.m. (10:20 p.m. body time)

We’re at JFK in New York after an uneventful flight from London. Blessedly, Ann was discharged yesterday from the hospital in Exeter in time for us to drive to London and have a late dinner at the airport hotel. Also, thankfully, there was no drama in returning the car, other than some shaming about the scratches I’d put on the new car’s wheel covers (we’ll see how that plays out with the “zero deductible” insurance I’d purchased).

From the martyrdom in Salisbury in 1556 (a site we missed).

Our last two days in Britain didn’t go the way we’d have hoped to conclude this wonderful trip. I know international hospital tourism certainly wasn’t on Ann’s bucket list. I’m also sorry not to have visited the site of John Spicer’s burning at the stake in 1556, one of three Salisbury martyrs. And I would have enjoyed going to Romsey, south of Salisbury, to see a couple of churches related to the Holts, ancestors on my father’s side who left for Massachusetts in 1635, during the Puritan emigration. But over the past two weeks, we’ve seen so much, and experienced so much together, that the details of sites we missed don’t really matter. What matters is that Ann is well enough to come home.

So, what stands out from these past two weeks of family pilgrimage? Certain moments were especially meaningful: finding a McLagan tombstone at Old Scone Cemetery outside Perth; finding a Gibson tombstone at Govan Old Church in Glasgow; dining in the jail where Ann’s Owen ancestor was imprisoned for being a Quaker; visiting churches where other ancestors were baptized, married, and buried. As an exercise in family connectedness, standing in these places mattered. Thirty or 40 years ago, when my mother was spending so much of her time researching and recording our family’s history, I wasn’t mature enough to transcend my own story and appreciate my connections with the people from whom I’d come. There were names I knew, and some of those names came with stories my mother told – a great-great-grandmother, Nellie Josephine Crane Reading, who threw a washtub of water on a cougar in the Utah mountains; another great-great-grandmother, Mary Beaufort Lively Brundage, who threw her first suitor’s engagement ring down the privy when he went on a trip without telling her. But being in the places from which family members emigrated helped me ask better questions about my history and theirs: What made them uproot their lives, and leave behind the known and familiar, and take the huge risk to start new lives in places they could barely imagine? And along with that: What would I have done then, and what risks would I be willing to take now to provide a better life for those who follow me?

Then, of course, there’s the spiritual pilgrimage that’s been running alongside the path of family history. Where and how has God shown up over these past two weeks (and in the months of preparation beforehand)? Among the things I’d missed in my mother’s stories was the extent to which my ancestors’ journeys were journeys of faith. The converging and diverging streams of British religious history were raging rivers for the individuals who struggled to navigate them day to day. John Spicer and Thomas Spicer being burned at the stake during Bloody Mary’s Protestant purge – a mason and a laborer, respectively, willing to die rather than recant their faith – may be the most dramatic examples. But I think about Ann’s Quaker ancestor Robert Owen being imprisoned in Wales before he and his family helped settle Pennsylvania … or my Brundage and Hubbard ancestors leaving as part of the Puritan exodus during the Stuarts’ strident imposition of Anglicanism … or my Reading and Brown ancestors finding spiritual renewal with the Latter-Day Saints and heading to the Promised Land in the Utah desert. For each, the presence of God in their lives charted their course.

At the cathedral in Glasgow, we heard a sermon from the diocesan staff member for mission, whose job boils down to working with even very small congregations to identify the thing about which they’re most passionate, and then helping them discern how to live out that mission in their own contexts. It’s a great example of the truth in my family’s emigration stories, too – that trusting in the call and power of God is what it takes to accomplish astonishing things. We – or at least I – tend to intellectualize that truth too readily, reticent to let the Spirit act through us to change our lives and the lives of those around us. Remember, even while the Mormons were a small and mistrusted band, driven out of one American community after another, they were sending missionaries to England and filling thousands there with the reality of God’s Spirit empowering their lives. Too often, I think, we let ourselves play small as Jesus’ followers called to bring the Spirit to life in the world. But the stories of those who’ve gone before – and the stories of those who hear and heed the call in unlikely settings today – remind us that God has so much more in mind for us than simply heavenly rest.