Inheritance

What We Want From the Future

There’s a book I want to write, someday when I get the time and space, about inheritance.

Lately I have been thinking about inheritance a lot. Not inheritance in the usual sense, exactly, but inheritance as a more general way to put a word to the way we show up in the world. None of us gets here on our own; all of us are here because someone put us here, willingly or not, intentionally or not. We all inherit everything, from the bodies we exist as, to the world our bodies move around in, from our ancestors.

Inheritance is complicated. We get things from the past, and we have choices about whether to embrace or reject those things, or to find a way to live with them. Some of us contend with our inheritances our whole lives: the kinds of families we are born into, the kinds of societies we inhabit, the well-used earth where we try to make a life. We rage against those, or claim them uncritically, or take one of an infinite number of positions in the middle. The book I want to write has to do with thinking about the bible as inheritance, as a way to talk about its importance—what some people call its “authority.” For me, the bible isn’t important because of any divine status—I simply bracket that off as something that’s frankly not that interesting to me. The bible is important to me because it’s the thing I received; it was (and is) a part of the meaning-making toolkit I got when I showed up here. I could choose to reject it, embrace it wholeheartedly, or spend my life figuring out how I feel about it. I have chosen that last way.

But that’s another book for another time. These days I am thinking about inheritance in a slightly different way.

Almost every time I go to my mother’s house, I come away with an heirloom. Chairs, rocks, tables, pots and pans. Old wooden spoons and old metal tools. Bird feeders and blankets, fishing rods and unfinished wood blocks that never got sculpted into anything. Three different desks. My mother’s parents both died in the last few years, and before that they were in a process of cleaning out their home to sell. So many of those things came my way, and some of them went to my mother, and they’re still making their way to me. Meanwhile she’s always finding something that I might need, texting me a picture of it, and saving it until I’m there. Every new trip I take possession of a new heirloom.

I’ve been thinking about those heirlooms and what’s important about them, and what’s behind the desire—desire on the part of my grandparents, on the part of my mother, and on my part—for those heirlooms to belong to someone. Why is it so important that we keep that chain of belonging? How and why does it matter so much to us—that continuity of things? We value the things that are passed on to us because they have been passed on to us; the mundane everyday things of one generation become the sacred relics of the next, because of the very fact that they have been passed on. We know that most things get lost or broken or thrown out eventually, but in the face of that, there’s this intergenerational hoarding that keeps us accumulating all the gifts of the past, across and among the life cycles of people and families and stories.

These days I also spend a lot of time thinking about the life cycles of churches. This is because my own church is thinking about some coming turns in its own direction, but it’s also because most everywhere I look in the religious world I inhabit, someone is contemplating the relationship between the past and the future. What do we do with these things we have received, and how do we pass them on, and to whom? Why isn’t anyone showing up to want them, and what happens if no one ever does? There’s such a deep anxiety about inheritance, and an urgent drive to recruit heirs. Many churches these days find themselves with no one to hand their heirlooms to; they have no one to claim any inheritance. Buildings, traditions, stories, hymnals—we have fought over them and come together over them, but the one thing we have never asked ourselves is what would happen if no one would come along after us to want them. We have never wondered whether we would be the last ones to feel that desire for continuity.

There’s a grief to throwing things out, even if those things’ usefulness has passed. The value we place on heirlooms has very little to do with usefulness; they are meaningful to us in spite of how useful they are (not), not because of it. We don’t want to throw things out, because more than wanting the things themselves, we want someone else to want them. We want to know that we have an inheritance to pass along.

In my office I have a wooden chest, not so different from the kind of chest you might see in the hands of pirates in a movie. It has a weathered finish and some graceful curves to it, and I use it to store my tea and my cups—several varieties of spiced chai, orange black tea, and a dozen or so cast-off cups that I cycle through. This chest is an inheritance, from my grandparents via my mother. My grandfather made it out of the pews of the church where his father used to be a sometime preacher. Once in the past the people of Shortoff Baptist Church replaced their pews, and my grandfather claimed some of the wood and crafted this chest.

That’s a different kind of inheritance. I don’t want or need a pew, but I can use this chest. No one wanted those pews, but my grandfather could use the wood. The status quo wasn’t useful anymore, but the raw materials could be the start of something new.

What would happen if we thought of inheritance that way—as a starter kit for the future, rather than as a reservoir of the past? What if a church, facing movement in its life cycle, turned its heirlooms into raw materials? I have known congregations that have done that—that have sold off their treasures for seed money for someone else’s projects. It strikes me as an extraordinarily generous thing to do, to offer one’s self to the future without the strings that are attached to relics. But it also feels like it might feel good to be able to do that. Perhaps we can give more to the future than our mundane stuff.

Still, there’s a power to inheritance. There’s belonging in the ways the past comes to us and shows up in things. And that belonging from the past can tell us something about what we want from the future.