Everything Is Built On a Graveyard
I saw the movie “Poltergeist” at the tender age of 11 with my sister and cousin at the town theater. I went on to crawl into bed with my mother and father every night for three months, unable to sleep due to the intrusive thoughts the movie planted in my overactive imagination.
A lot about the movie skeeved me out, from the father character hallucinating that he’s peeling his face off, to the esophageal portal that breaks into a child’s room through a closet door. But the part that bothered me most was the plot’s underlying premise, the disturbance that put the story of Carol Anne’s kidnapping by demons in-motion: a real estate developer built the family’s house on a graveyard, and the family didn’t know until one of those grave’s occupants got a sinister idea.
I happened to know at the age of 11 that my home church was built on a graveyard. Continually serving the community for well over 300 years, First Church of Christ Congregational in Suffield, CT has occupied basically the same location, but it has had more than one facility. The current one’s construction necessitated moving some headstones from under the new facility’s footprint. The church’s history reads as though this were the most normal thing in the world! “Sure, just move some headstones. Who cares about the human remains under them? What could possibly go wrong?” It’s amazing I ever worshiped there again after the summer of 1982.
Back then, I thought the leaders who made decisions to build on top of a graveyard were hopelessly naïve and infuriatingly blasé about what they were doing. Today, I think that leaders who underestimate the importance of contending with harms of the past are similarly off-base and in for a drubbing. My reasoning is surprisingly unchanged today from that of the preteen superstitious insomniac I once was. Those who disrespect their ancestors are bound to find them rearing up out of the grave, grabbing them by the ankles, and insisting their presence be known.
I serve the oldest graduate theological school in the nation. For 215 years, Andover Newton Seminary at Yale Divinity School and its predecessor institutions have educated religious leaders for faith communities. Were an archaeologist to dig into our school’s history, they would find layer after layer of stories. Their spades would pierce the humus of human beings making tough choices that affected the course of communities’ and individuals’ lives. The strata underneath that layer of humus might be difficult to penetrate but rich with data on love and loss, failures and triumphs, the whole spectrum of lived experience.
We can’t reduce those hundreds of layers of history to “good” and “bad.” We also can’t ignore them. They cry out for engagement, and they yearn to be understood. I don’t want my successors to make the same mistakes I have made, and I have to believe my predecessors don’t want me to repeat theirs, either. We can’t live in the past, but we have no choice but to live on it. Therefore, leaders have to attend to their institutions’ histories as they reach toward the future if they have any chance of building upward, rather than in an ingrown pattern that reinforces and repeats our oldest mistakes.
I’ve written extensively in recent weeks about the travel seminar I co-led to Hawai‘i in early January. In that course, students learned about the history of missionaries traveling from New England to what European Americans then called the “Sandwich Islands.” They endeavored to share the Gospel and build institutions to transmit it over time. Several of those institutions live and thrive today, 200 years later, and of course they’ve evolved.
Our missionaries did some wonderful things. They formed friendships, helped to capture the Hawai‘ian language into written form, and provided a meaning-making framework to political leaders whose archipelago had only recently become unified for the first time in history. They built beautiful buildings that stand to this day. They created schools and churches that serve their communities now. They loved people.
Our missionaries did some awful things. They failed to recognize Hawai‘ian spirituality as a religion. They paved the way for both economic and military imperialism. They, along with their merchant counterparts, transmitted diseases that decimated the Hawai‘ian population. Within 100 years of their arrival, their grandchildren overthrew the monarchs descended from those the first missionaries befriended.
We worked with our students traveling in this seminar to get away from defining the history of missions from New England and Hawai‘i as “good,” or “bad,” but rather, “to be engaged.” We did this work because our graduates, future and present-day leaders, need to know how to do it, too. Leaders must respect the past without living in it, and without feeling constrained by it. They disavow and ignore the past to their peril. Leaders in all organizations, from families to countries, must know how to engage ancestors.
For religious leaders, holistic attention to past, present, and future matters even more. Religious leadership includes curation of rituals, facilitation of meaning-making, and tending to souls and the communities that gather those souls together. None of these functions are or can be approached ahistorically. A graduate of our program who doesn’t know how to engage with the past would be a graduate our school had let down.
All around us, we see examples of young, emerging leaders thinking themselves immune to the mistakes of their predecessors while simultaneously repeating those mistakes. I yearn to protect our students from poltergeists: angry ancestors who might channel themselves through leaders who failed to take their ancestors seriously. An essential skill for ministry today is the ability to parachute into a new place, and dig into the humus of the past while looking up to the hills, from where our help comes (Psalm 121). Engage we must, or the past will make itself known in ways that trip us up and remind us it’s always right under our feet.
