The Blood of Our Ancestors:

A Global Family Reunion

A Sermon Offered at the Unitarian Universalist Church of Lafayette, Indiana

By Rev. Hilary Landau Krivchenia

October 14, 2001 

First Reading (pg. 288,  Seven Daughters of Eve by Bryan Sykes)

It is as if our present world of governments, corporations and committees has blinded us to the possibilities and importance of individual small-scale actions….

Though the whole existence (of the 7 daughters of eve) depended entirely on uncontrollable elements of their environment—the movement of herds, the advance and retreat of the ice caps—their day to day responses were a matter of individual choice within those constraints.  In this view of human evolution, chance events and contingency are the variables.  A boat sinks.  A Polynesian island is not discovered for another hundred years.

I like this kind of genetics because it puts the emphasis back where it belongs:  on individuals and their actions.

Also from the seven daughters of Eve:  I am on a stage.  Before me, in the dim lights, all the people who have ever lived are lined up, rank upon rank, stretching far into the distance. I have in my hand the end of the thread which connects me to my ancestral mother way at the back.  I pull on the thread and one woman’s face in every generation, feeling the tug looks up at me. These are my ancestors.  I recognize my grandmother in the front row, but in the generations behind her the faces are unfamiliar to me. The women do not all look the same. I speak, but they cannot hear.  Yet I feel a strong connection.  These are all my mothers who passed this precious messenger from one to another through a thousand births, a thousand screams, a thousand embraces of a thousand new-born babies.  The thread becomes an umbilical cord….

A thousand rows back stands Lara herself, the ancestral mother of my clan holding the beginning of the thread….

Finally from Norman Cousins Celebration of Life

I glory in the individuality of self, but my individuality does not separate me

from my universal self-the oneness of humanity.

My memory is personal and finite, but my substance is boundless and infinite.

The portion of that substance that is mine was not devised; it was renewed.

So long as the human bloodstream lives I have life.

Of this does my immortality consist. ...

I may not embrace or command this universal order,

but I can be one with it, for I am of it

Human unity is the fulfillment of diversity.

It is a many-stranded texture, with color and depth.

The sense of human unity makes possible a reverence for life.

Reverence for life is more than solicitude or sensitivity for life.

It is a sense of the whole, a capacity for inspired response, a respect for the intricate

universe of individual life. It is the supreme awareness of awareness itself.

We are single cells in a body of three billion cells. 

Sermon

It rained hard this weekend for the Feast of the Hunter’s Moon.  I went for the first time last year.  The Feast, which is held at Fort Ouiatenon, established in 1717, is meant to celebrate again the annual fall gathering at of the French and Native Americans which began in the mid-eighteenth century.  The Feast isn’t textbook history – it’s felt history.  Through amazing artifacts, period apparel, traditional recipes – I feel the longing in people to experience the world in which they lived, to touch their ancestors.  A longing in the blood.  I know this longing in myself.  On my father’s side, my grandparents landed in Philadelphia but choose to move down to Savannah Georgia -- where they settled in a growing Jewish community in the early twentieth century.  When my Aunt JoAnn gave me my grandfather Landy’s family tree, reaching back to the Black Forest town of Landau in the sixteenth century I felt so proud of that history – it turned out that many were Rabbis and teachers. My ancestors moved forward through history leaving their imprint into the twentieth century.  My Aunt also found a family picture on my grandmother’s side with her many brothers and sisters.  When the picture first came, I would gaze into their faces – hoping to know them, hoping to understand myself better through them. There was one sister in the picture who had grown up, married, had two small sons and died at Auschwitz.   And I felt such connection with these people – my people with their stories, strengths, accomplishments, and endurance.  I feel my connection deep in my blood – it is their blood moving and speaking in my veins. Your ancestors moving and speaking in yours.   What does it say to us? It transmits messages from generation to generation – being transformed over time.  This was once a deep mystery – but in the blood itself we have unfolded much of the mystery – at least in part.

            It really was Gregor Mendel, the monk, with his meticulous tracking of peas and of thirty thousand plants in eight years who solved the first great mystery – of how – how did people and plants turn out like their progenitors – or even their progenitors progenitors.  He bred, sorted, and mapped generations of plants to reveal the patterns of recessive and dominant messages encoded in them.  What Mendel offered was a view of life based on a sort of biological atomic structure – a building block of life.  Many names were entertained for this building block of life:  factor, gemmule, plastidule, biophor, id, idant, but we settled, finally, on gene. Still before World War I the mystery was thick – for example there were centuries of deadly blood transfusions.  In 1628 the first blood transfusion were recorded in Italy – but the reactions were nearly uniformly deadly and they were stopped.  In 1660 they were resumed again but with strikingly familiar and fatal failure and therefore were stopped again. Around WWI we began to study blood and blood type more intensively. It was Ludvik and Hanka Hershfeld at the testing lab of the Royal Serbian Army who labored hard and long to catalogue blood types for a blood bank and to learn how to store blood of future use.  With a systemic method they developed the arts of typing and storing  and saving rather than killing people with transfusions.  Gradually we were learning the language of the blood – the language of the body. And yet so much remained a mystery.  Then, as the outcome of half a century of research on the part of many scientists, people began to understand that there really was such a thing as a gene – they could see its impact and the regularity of the appearance and disappearance of traits – just as Mendel had mapped.  It was not until the revelation of the Structure, behavior, and character of DNA by James Watson and Francis Crick that we really began to study, map and understand the mystery of Deoxyribonucleic Acid – or DNA -- and the science of genetics became more precise.  Our blood could be used to determine paternity – and with the aid of DNA testing many another mystery has been uncovered, but greater mysteries yet have been revealed.  P.D.James is a great mystery writer – whose most recent book – Death in Holy Orders – includes an answer obtained through the study of DNA.  James wrote: What the detective story is about is not murder but the restoration of order.  Yes – it is less about the mayhem of the murder – at least in really good mysteries -- and more about the restoration of order and the discovery of answers and the disclosure of a secret. 

Over the last fifty years – since Crick announced in a bar in February of 1953 that they had “discovered the secret of life” the world of science has been hard at work bringing to light the fine details of that secret.  And suddenly in the last fifteen years the secret has rapidly risen into sharper clarity.  Now, you know that I’m not a scientist – however – there is a certain awe in simply reading about genetics.  The words on the page speak not of disinterested scientific research but really do describe the formation and ongoingness of life – of its changing nature and of its great stability, of life passing out of being and of life retaining some real immortality – of the shape and order of life.  Perhaps some of you have studied this stuff in detail – I never really have – but I have done more reading recently to try to understand – a funny thing was that in talking with my husband recently I realized that what I had studied in high school was information already quite outdated. That’s made me think that a lot has been learned in a very few years – well relatively few years – well in evolutionary terms it could be seen as a few years. Anyway, I have found it helpful to brush up on a little basic genome information.

First, the difference between the gene that I grew up hearing about and the genome that we hear about now is that the gene is the single piece – the portion of a particular strand of DNA that determines some characteristic – the genome is the broad group of all of those genes – the overall portrait of life that is encoded in our DNA. Our genetic information is found in every cell of our bodies.  It is, as Watson and Crick discovered, found on spiral ladders made up of markers made up of nucleic acids – the real building blocks of life.  There are four – Adenine, cytosine, guanine, and thymine – which are simply called ACGT – which makes everything a little easier.  ACGT do not simply determine the shape of life, the sequence in which they appear causes them to affect one another – to touch off protein interactions in the body, the production of certain hormones and in this way their various relationships do determine the shape of life.  DNA is more than a determinant of the shape of life – it is also a powerful record of history and of relationship.  We can discover many similarities between disparate people in the DNA.  There is a language to the varied sequences of ACG and T – repetitions of patterns of the four that allowed us to observe and compare them.  The image that I heard was like a spectrum in astronomy – with lines and patterns that tell you what you are looking at – or like a tall staff with colored rings on it in patterns – DNA itself is four feet tall if stretched out and untwisted – quite a considerable staff.  The patterns would have some very stable repetitions from generation to generation to generation but also could change with the introduction of, um, new progenitors – sometimes those changes might remain and stabilize or they might fade in a few generations.  So the DNA is like a sacred staff passed from person to person that, in reality, tells generations of history – and today it is the history that I am concerned with – in the future we can and will talk about the future as it is shaped by our growing understanding of the genome.  But, even more – by comparing staffs you can reveal the connections and distances – in any given moment, between the bearers of the staff.  And the ability to do this reveals history as never before.

There are two kinds of DNA – the DNA that lives in the cytoplasm – you can see one in the order of service – in that odd looking thing you might have been wondering about. And the DNA that lives in the nucleus of the cell – the stuff in the juice all around the cell and the stuff in the heart of the cell.  They’re really different from one another – for one thing the DNA in the nucleus – juice – carry the characteristics of the current generation – the mix of the father and the mother – or the male and female progenitors.  But they also carry the characteristics of the past generations – you just have to know the patterns to look for.  FIX You can find some of those patterns in the Mitochondrial DNA – the DNA outside the nucleus – because it’s really stable – it’s the original stuff that comes in the cytoplasm – the juice of the cells in the eggs of the female progenitor and it is untouched by commingling. It’s unperturbed by generations of meeting and breeding – it is hard to change and touch from generation to generation – although it can be affected by mutation – radiation and other environmental impacts. Still, it remains even more stable over time than the nuclear DNA -- it is like our internal Rock of Ages – and tells us of relationships deep in the past.

For me that’s where the story begins to get interesting – I got my staff, and my codes -- patterns, and my power to read the patterns and I want to go out and study history.  Well –a couple of months ago I saw an episode of NOVA on PBS about the Lemba tribe in South Africa.  An Englishman named Tudor Parfitt, encountered this tribe when he was lecturing on Ethiopian Jews.  They claimed to be descendants of one of the lost tribes of Israel – exiled by the Assyrians more than 2,700 years ago.  Now I am not arguing for the legitimacy of the Lemba’s claim and I don’t want to study all of the places in which uncanny things seem to connect modern people in Japan, Persia, Ireland, Kenya, the Crimea and other places, with those ancient tribes – but the exploration of the mystery of connection is fascinating to me.  When Parfitt met the dark skinned Lemba their yarmulkas intrigued him and then he was struck by how closely their religious practices resembled those of ancient Jews – as in genetics the richest information often comes from people who have been isolated for a very long time – kept their customs and their genotypes clear and unmixed. And the Lemba asked him to help them uncover evidence of their historical connection with the lost tribe – specifically the Cohanim – the Cohens – the Priesthood of ancient Judaism.  The Lemba tell a story about their origins: That they came from the North, possibly from Judea and went to a place called Sena. They say “We rebuilt Sena, the Great Stone City. At that point, we broke the law of God and ate mice" which would not have been kosher, “then we crossed Pusela and came to Africa." They speak of Sena like some people would refer to paradise or heaven. They say, "We'll meet again in Sena" like – “next year in Jerusalem”.  Parfitt traveled from village to village, picking up stories and going a little further along the path. Within the area of the eastern Hadramaut the valley in southern Yemen where Sena is located, so many of the tribes had just the same tribal names as did the Lemba.  Sena was a large town, protected by a mighty, stone-built dam that created plentiful irrigation. But, it is said that around about the tenth or eleventh century, the dam cracked and the area wasn't able to sustain a large population and people left, as the legends there have it. They say they crossed Pusela -- very similar to the Masilah, the Desert, which they would have to cross in order to get from their Sena – which he found in Southern Yemen -- down to the sea and there was a town on the southern coast of Arabia that was an excellent port par for the Arab exploration of Africa and an easy passage because of the tides and winds.  As Parfitt traveled and reconstructed the diaspora journey of the Lemba – ages ago -- he was more convinced that they really were a lost Jewish tribe.  The final discoveries came with DNA testing. Parfitt collected large samples of DNA from the Lemba and then he went to the Hadramaut and collected DNA samples over a number of days. The analysis seemed to show that there was an overlap, similarities, with the general area of the Hadramaut.  And then he found the Cohen element in the Y chromosome that seems to be a signature element for the Cohanim or Jewish priesthood. He found it in high concentrations – Even higher than in the general Jewish population.  And the Lemba, who have for thousands of years, maintained a belief in their kinship with the most exalted of ancient Hebrews, find themselves with new visitors, modern Jews carrying a new Rabbinic Judaism and the welcome of family.

Another, deeper mystery, was that of the Seven Daughters of Eve.  It is a story that stirs my own blood – it calls to me in the voices of the ancestors and speaks to us in the language of the blood.  It is the story of seven women – base mitochondrial DNA patterns who emerged in various stages of the Ice Age and whose daughters moved up, as the Ice thawed, to populate pretty much all of Europe – Xenia, Ursula, Helena, Velda, Tara, Katrina, and Jasmine.  But that sounds as though there might be simply several distinct braches of the tree of life but that would be misleading. I have heard instead referred to as more of a bush – it was what my brother in law Alex said to me last night.  The branches mingle and grow back together and then apart again and again. Even more, though, this is also the story of one woman – whom the scientists have named Lara – who was the clan mother of a small group of Kenyans or Ethiopians who at some point traveled up from Africa and founded forty percent of the European maternal clans, founded Asians, Russians, native Americans, Irish, Italians, Greek … the list is comprehensive. And Lara was clan mother – mitochondrial DNA Base pattern to a large number of present Day Africans. 

When we gathered our waters together in late August I spoke of as a world of wanders and this is profoundly true.  Not only in the French Voyageurs who came here to trade with the Native Americans -- they no doubt met and knew one another and bred, just like the lost tribles, the ancient and amazing Polynesians whose DNA claimed every Island in the Pacific over a 2000 year span, just like the seven daughters of Eve.  Voyaguers -- walking north from Africa, South from Judea, East from Britain, West from Italy.  We don’t stay put. We are a pilgrim family meeting and re-meeting at different location over thousands and thousands of years.  We are all related – truly a family tree – or bush – connected – back to another woman even before Lara – whom the scientists have named – mitochondrial Eve – for everyone of carries in us her mitochondrial DNA – a message sent to us – through us hundreds of thousands of years ago – out from Africa to every part of the world – one family. 

In light of this what is race? Clearly, race is no stable genetic factor – it changes over generations while other aspects of the genome remain stable over hundreds and even thousands of years.  We are not and have never been discreet branches on a tree --  we are a ball of life, a bush, a web with a single strand in the heart of it. Arthur Mourant, fifty years ago, said: The races of today are a temporary integrations in the constant process of mixing that marks the history of every living species.” P46

We are said Norman cousins further removed from one another than fifty people.  We are cousins.  We are no further removed from our common ancestor than one hundred mutations – and far more often – three.  We are so alike, when you sift through the few changes of the last one hundred and fifty thousand years that we are like sisters and brothers. Tom Chapin is right – the whole world is our kin. 

And Norman Cousins (22 years ago) said, “I am a single cell in a body of three million cells. The body is humankind.” He’d have to revise way up now but in spirit he was quite right – the history of the human genome has solved this mystery.  Or has it?

What do our genes tell us -- do they speak of suffering? Of family? How much can they tell me of change, warfare, peace, oppression, gentle or cruel power, creativity, anger, love, community, hope?  The voices of my ancestors do – not in my genes but in my blood – the listening of my heart.

            This is my family – this is my family, dying in Auschwitz, in Africa – suffering drought and warfare, in Afghanistan veiled or stoned to death, hearing the bombs overhead, this is my family – calling the church for laundry money, asking for cash, seeking my destruction, killing my family, this is my family dying of Anthrax – this is my family digging away the rubble in New York, -- worshipping Mohammad, Jesus, the path of Compassion, the path of vengeance, the Lord of Abraham, the Spirit of non-violence, the wisdom of Bahaullah, the mysticism of Rumi or Kabir. What are the messages of religious leaders to this world?  They cannot be messages to one state or one people – or even one religion – There is no text more precious than that written in our cells – the holy text of life.  This world aches for messages not of foolish hope but of challenging hope – and the religious message must be to the world’s family. There is no answer in the shedding of blood – but in the blood we may find our deep oneness – a oneness of compassion, of suffering, of courage, and of universal relatedness.  May we read in our blood -- beyond our tribal fears and concerns -- beyond our tribal fears and concerns.  May we read our connectedness – may we read and honor the precious lives and hopes of the blood of our universal ancestors.  We are all one.  In peace.