Respect for the past and restoring family ties

Remembering one's ancestors, the sense of shared roots, ties of blood, a sense of belonging to a larger community - are these worth thinking about at all? Aren't they a waste of time, that time which we are always so short of, anyway? Do we have any use for them in our contemporary reality?

The meaning of life, a decent life, humanity: in their deep expressiveness, these terms, to a greater or lesser degree, accompany us throughout our lives. What conclusions should we draw? Does the pace of our daily lives give us a chance to reflect a moment - to ponder on life itself? Must we be uncritically subject to the current fashionable trends of the world? Or can we tailor our own individual approach to life, our own hierarchy of values?

Our distant forebears - who were they? Should we reach back to them? Should we care what their names were, how long they lived, how many children they had, or even what sort of lives they led? Now that the modern era has given us the means to answer these questions, we face a choice, surely a moral one: should we make efforts in this direction, or not? There are those who label such efforts mere fashion, or snobbery - they can't grasp the notion that it could simply be a moral imperative.

When we consider the sense in recreating our family roots, in the contemporary world, we may discover many positive aspects. We need lasting, higher values to bring some necessary order into our lives. Perhaps family, in the widest sense - remembrance of those who went before us, is one of those values? It may even be that this is our inner need, though we may not always realise it. Could it be that, in our constant striving to better our lot, we've lost something along the way? Perhaps we should teach these values to the younger generation, so that they can grow up in a secure, orderly environment: one of respect for tradition, family and forebears. But we teach best by setting a good example. Belonging to a large, close-knit family or clan, attending get-togethers of those close to us, who are glad to see and welcome us - surely this can be positive and give us new strength to bear the burdens of life.

Recreating our genealogical tree together, discovering our place in this entity, may help us feel less like a lost, unimportant and very temporary form of life in the universe. We might not only assimilate new values, but also become stronger and more mature. After all, the clan is the proof of the continuity of our lives, since we are the continuation of the lives of our ancestors. Maybe that is the real meaning of our lives.

Not everyone can be reached by these ideas straight away. It depends on how much each one of us, with our individual sensitivities, will feel drawn by ties of blood to a sense of belonging to the family, of being a part of it. Such an awakening of awareness, once begun, will become an ongoing process, gathering in ever-wider ranks of community members. The realisation - and acceptance - of membership in such a vast community will add something to our lives which perhaps, deep down, we crave, and which we find to be missing in the modern world. Jacek Szparaga

10.05.2009
Translation: Jacek Rokitnicki, England