COMMENTARY: Honoring our elders by embracing our children

c. 1999 Religion News Service (Samuel K. Atchison is an ordained minister and has worked as a policy analyst and social worker to the homeless. He currently is a prison chaplain in Trenton, N.J.) UNDATED _ I recently attended a breakfast banquet where several women, including my 85-year-old grandmother, were honored as”Mothers of the Year.”Sponsored […]

c. 1999 Religion News Service

(Samuel K. Atchison is an ordained minister and has worked as a policy analyst and social worker to the homeless. He currently is a prison chaplain in Trenton, N.J.)

UNDATED _ I recently attended a breakfast banquet where several women, including my 85-year-old grandmother, were honored as”Mothers of the Year.”Sponsored by the local chapter of Links, a national civic organization of black women, the breakfast provided those in attendance with a much-needed opportunity to honor their elders.


Needed, I say, for at least two reasons.

First, it gave the honorees, most of whom were elderly, a chance to receive their flowers, as the saying goes,”while they can still smell them.” Certainly this was my impetus for attending the event. Though it meant rearranging my church’s calendar and getting someone to fill my pulpit for the Sunday morning service, this small inconvenience could not compare with the joy of honoring Mom-Ma, who had never before received such recognition.

Yet, equally important, the event enabled those attending to reflect on the importance of our elders and the history they represent.

For example, my grandmother, Falna McNeal, was born in a rural Mississippi town in 1913. Her father, Percy Gray, was the product of a legal marriage between a former slave and the Dutch son of a former slaveholder. This, together with his skill as a much-sought-after carpenter, enabled him to enjoy certain privileges, including the ability to vote, and a relatively comfortable living standard normally denied blacks of that era.

Falna, the youngest of Percy’s five children, was the only one to complete high school. Later, in 1939, when her first marriage failed, she traveled with their 5-year-old daughter, Anita, to Philadelphia as part of what sociologists would later call”The Great Migration.” Eventually, Anita, my mother, would meet and marry Samuel Atchison, the son of South Carolina sharecroppers, and give birth to four children, of whom I am the oldest.

Musings about my family tree and of its parallels with the nation’s history dominated my thoughts as three generations of Mom-Ma’s fruit _ her daughter, grandchildren and great-grandchildren _ celebrated her remarkable life.

Such reflections are important because we live in a time when many of us have lost our sense of history. This is critical, because to lose one’s history is to lose both pedigree and perspective.

Pedigree, because your roots are that which makes you and provides a key to personal awareness and understanding. The old saying is true: You don’t know who you are until you know where you came from.


Yet perspective is also important, for it provides a context within which your pedigree can be perceived. Thus, for example, as an African-American male, my appreciation for my family’s roots and the history that shaped them helps me to understand my reason for being. Such an understanding gives my life purpose, meaning and direction.

Strangely, however, it is this comprehension of the relationship between history and family, purpose and direction, that seems to be missing from many of our young people. As a result, many have no understanding of, or feel responsibility to, anything larger than themselves.

Mind you, it’s not that they don’t love their families or want to know more about their history. To the contrary, all the data indicate young people want to spend more time with their families, are curious about their roots and desperately seek some means of self-definition.

All too often, however, we simply are not there for them. We are too busy with the events of the present to pass on to our future the importance of the past.

In so doing, we dishonor the elders who made it all possible.

DEA END RNS

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