Heritage, the Unseen Blessing

[HKHaugan]

Heritage, the Unseen Blessing

 I just got a cup in the mail.  On it there are printed two flags.  Over the top one, the American, it says---My Nation.  Under the second one, the Norwegian---My Heritage.  Both of them carry a message with basic questions defining us; about where, what, when, why and how we came to be.  This is especially true if you are first-generation-born in a different land.  For children there are immediate questions like, ‘why am I different?’ why did my parents leave ‘the old country’ and ‘what drew them to this country?’

There is an inner conflict.  You are deeply influenced by the old and grow up deeply influenced by the new.  You may find your parents drop the language and customs of the old, retaining some, but your inner self realizes you are different, and growing up, the sense of identity becomes paramount.  You might not be able to articulate that in your developing mind, but you feel it.  Half the time you wonder.  The other half you just struggle to fit in.  If you are shuffled around to different towns there is another discovery.  These towns have long time family residency with long time traditions and distrustful feelings about outsiders who are given questionably descriptive names to communally isolate them. 

Being an outsider does something else.  It exposes a sense of aloneness, the need to belong, to find friends, to gain acceptance and a sense of being someone.  Your appearance and the sounds you make invite judging eyes.  While everyone may have that problem, you find that it is not so much where you come from, but the superiority felt due to the length of the local residency in the new country.  It’s a hidden message that tells you “It’s important you know your place and keep it.”  It’s not necessarily a conscious process.  It just is what people do.  For instance, there are genuine Americans, genuine Floridians, genuine whatever town.  They are authenticated by the nature of their names, their origin and forbear’s arrival.  The way you can tell this is true is by the ethnic communities formed to survive adjusting to their new place.  Identity is a constant processing experience.  This is not to mention the good and the bad involved, the judgments, the subtle innuendos, the unconscious cultural conditioning behind it all. When people use the word ‘systemic’ for any judgments they make, this is what it means. It’s all very complicated and compounded by the unique individuality in each person.  So, let’s ask some questions of ourselves:

Am I identity-conscious? Where was I born? What’s my heritage? When did I become conscious of myself as an individual? Why am I here? How do I make decisions based on all this?

I’d like to digress for a moment and describe what I think was the heritage I received from my parents.  What was it about their Norwegian background that influenced me along the way?  I could romanticize about the Vikings and the struggles of Scandinavians to have national identities, but that would abbreviate our search for something much more relevant.  Cultural history is one thing, but the life people lived in that land had qualities.  There is the quality of appreciating nature, the mountains, the incredible scenery, the physical environment and honoring it and preserving it.  The beauty of the fjords, the expansive glaciers, the innumerable waterfalls crashing into the rocks below sending mists that drift across the landscape.  The hardiness of the people that built grass-covered homes with eked out pastureland to raise cattle and crops to survive in the snow laden winters.  To see the love of the Summer, the vacationing in primitive little family huts called seters on streams and lakes in the mountains.  Then there is the ethic of working hard not only to survive but develop a culture of music, art, literature and drama and the need to have children educated and learn the value of their humanity.  You can’t overlook the effect of the extremes of short light Summers and long dark Winters.  Norwegians love their sports which were and are dominant with the ideal of personal discipline like ski jumping, cross-country and touring skiing, long sustained hiking adventures on the glaciers and in the mountains. These shape character. The harsh conditions of the country’s physical environment developed a generally stoic and determined people who saw everything as a challenge to overcome.  My parents always made sure that we went to the woods, fished, hiked and skied as well as going to the ocean when possible.  Travel and the need to see what is beyond where you live was part of the package.  I’m assuming that’s what motivated me to leave where I was born and start a hitch-hiking experience that led me to where I am today.  That’s my ethnic heritage. 

 Back to my cup.  My nation is America.  My heritage here is new and being learned.  It’s what I am living out in a land that received heritages from all over the world and allows their blending.  The really big value in this new heritage is the freedom of mobility both socially and economically to embrace the values of the past and live them out uniquely each day.  Wherever you go there is always the problem of rejection and acceptance in their many forms.  But here in America there is no excuse for the personal experiment of leaving stereotypical categories behind and becoming a unique someone.  Fear is the only barrier.  The heritage of the past is basic to the formation of the new person, but even that understanding changes which will be covered on down.  There’s not just the beauty of nature but here there is just more of it and the ideals of developing the inner person is more extensive.    

 Now, the foundational question, what has all this to do with being a believer in Jesus?

 First of all, this country is where God had me born.  It’s where He led my parents to come.  It’s a birth that took me outside to look inside and discover over a period of time who I really am and what I was created for.  It certainly wasn’t to be rich and famous.  Those doors never opened and for me that was a good thing.  I believe I was born here because God chose me to be free to make choices I could not have made in the other land.  That was not because it was an oppressive and limiting place but because He had something else in mind for me. 

Through the many circumstances of my searching mind and heart, His place for me was shaped by the inner struggle in a culture that invited it.  What you may know from any stratified religious past in another land, it played only a minor part in my growth.  Its religious denominational structure would not have allowed me the value of spiritual confrontation and choice.  Here the same kind of structure did allow me the opportunity to play the role with another goal, for God to save my soul and start the process of becoming whole.  Even the errors, the poor choices, the errant decisions along the way only taught me and continue to teach me, the radical nature of personal sin and God’s continuing forgiveness, moving me to pass that on.  

Second, we have to face the fact of our own complicity, our own conditioning, our own relaxation in the issues of human judgment.  The root cause is spiritual, the spiritual disease of sin.  Social, economic and ethnic distinction, whether they be class, race, appearance, or whatever lines we draw between us and anyone else, are rooted in this deepest of all problems, sin.  It’s spiritual, it’s personal and it’s relational.  It’s about me first and everything and everybody else second.  The good we want to do but don’t, the ideas we have but don’t carry them out, the desire to be better than we are but don’t’ try, the accepting defeat before we ever enter the battle,  apathy overcoming action,  these are rooted in sin.  Sin makes us lazy and self-rationalizing but also hostile and angry with a need to blame others and society for our inadequacies.  Sin makes us easily provoked and wanting the world to change before I change.  Excuse becomes a way of life.  That’s sin.

Sin is a spiritual problem that causes all the cultural calamities we see.  People need to recognize their real problem, the heart problem, the spiritual problem that cripples us all.  You don’t eradicate injustice, disparity, inequality by just emotionally reacting and believing in their eradication.  If you believe then you act.  The principle of justice is neither institutional nor making a public show.  It’s being just toward every person you meet.  It’s spiritual justice that leads the way to social justice and relational justice.  It starts with my personal faith to see everyone everywhere as an image of God and treat them as such whether they believe it or not.  That takes faith.  Faith is the action we take.  I’m not into moralizing here.  That right to act faithfully is evident in the Constitution.  America is not an experiment.  We are images of God, His children, freely growing up with each other and being a light and witness in the world of sporadic injustice.  

Third, there’s a new heritage, a spiritual heritage.  It helps us see that the world without God is not fair.  It never has been nor will be.  But we have a right that supersedes the world’s decadent spirituality.  It’s the spiritual right to be full of faith, repent, be forgiven, then to love, to think about how to extend that love and do it.  We have Holy Scripture to keep us on track and be held accountable as we yield to the lifestyle it defines.  Then we let the Spirit lead us through the valley of social isolation and death to bring a new light and a new way to a dark world where people in it can find their way out to internal peace and external satisfaction.  This is the new heritage in the new land in which I was born.  The land meant by God to develop a people free to be spiritual centered, its most important freedom.

Fourth, everything mentioned here is the result of my having asked the Lord Jesus in June of 1969 to begin taking charge of my life.  It is not about me being or becoming perfect but about a perfect human being who happens also to be a perfect God.  He is the One who makes sense to me and I hope I can convey that to others so that they too can face the world in which they live. I had one person tell me that I have no inkling about the real world because I as a clergyman am out of touch and only communicate with comfortable agreeable people.  But they have no inkling of my reality growing up in a city with gang conflicts, intense class and ethnic differentiation, hate for Jews, Latinos and condescending attitudes toward foreigners.  There was occasional violence, but the real violence was subtle and silently administered.  It hurt far more.  The difference between this new land and the old one? There you couldn’t escape it.  Here you are protected by its principles and justice system, limited though it may be, but our free social mobility is its covering principle.  You are free to make your own destiny.  But more importantly when that destiny is seen and accepted as spiritual and eternal, there are endless possibilities in every next moment. 

Again, the hard difference is the spiritual freedom that makes everything else changeable, redeemable and challenging.  The old is back-breaking tradition.  The new is forward looking, uplifting and achievable by faith in God through Jesus Christ.  You can be beaten, insulted and bruised but rise up and start again building what you were led to become.  That process is built-in to this land because of the Crucifixion and Resurrection of Jesus.  He is the One who brought the real meaning of freedom to this land we cherish.  All you have to do to understand this land of ours is to read the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.  Their inspiration was spiritual and their acceptance was spiritual.  Now it’s our turn to live them out.