Saints and sinners

How connecting with our ancestors helps us put together the pieces of who we are.

Before my father’s death, I knew almost nothing about my own family history except that my ancestors were French-Canadian, Catholic and poor. 

We weren’t the kind of family that passed down stories or kept good records, or so I thought. But after he died, I learned from his cousin that apparently, there was a lot we know about our Quebecois lineage, which could be traced back hundreds of years to France in the 1600s. Among the notable members of the Grégoire family tree included a well-known nun, Marie-Léonie Paradis, who founded an order of nuns, The Little Sisters of the Holy Family, and was said to have performed several healing miracles. Her remains were housed in a Cathedral in Sherbrooke, and there were statues of her all over Quebec. 

The other notable thing I learned: much of the family had been French-Canadian mafia living outside of Montreal, engaged in petty organized crime (!). 

When I made a pilgrimage to visit Paradis in Quebec this Summer, I was surprised to learn from the nuns that she was going to be canonized at the Vatican in October! I returned to Sherbrooke last weekend to attend her canonization celebration and honor her officially becoming a saint. 

This is a longer story for another time, but suffice it to say that it’s been an interesting reflection for me to learn that I am descended from both saints and sinners. Could this explain the nagging sense of guilt I’ve had since I was a little girl and the perpetual, inexplicable feeling that I’ve done something wrong, despite almost never being disciplined by my parents? Is there such a thing as inherited Catholic guilt? I can’t say for sure, but it kinda makes sense. 

This new awareness of my body as a meeting ground of saints and sinners also struck me as an apt metaphor for what we all come from: generations of people who have loved, suffered, triumphed, struggled. Those who performed miracles, and those who committed crimes. And in between, a lot of hard-working people who did their best to keep calm and carry on, and to live meaningful lives. 

Honoring Our Ancestors 

This time of year has traditionally marked a special moment in to connect with our ancestors. 

This past week has brought Samhain (the Celtic predecessor of Halloween), Dia de los Muertos, the Mexican festival of the dead, and All Souls Day, an Italian Catholic holiday focused on praying for the souls of the departed. Families celebrating All Souls Day, like those celebrating Dia de los Muertos, often prepare altars and visit cemeteries to leave food and flowers for the dead as a way to help them find their way from the beyond back to their loved ones who are still alive.

The idea behind these holidays is so powerful: To celebrate the dead while their souls return to the land of the living to be with us again, offering their wisdom, guidance and loving support. And to consider that maybe they want to reunite with us as much as we want to connect with them. It’s a reminder of what many of us instinctively feel—that our ancestors are with us, a part of our lives. And as research in epigenetics increasingly shows, they may also be the source of not only our genetic predispositions but also our deepest strengths and struggles, our gifts and our traumas.

Is my sense of faith and spiritual orientation connected in some way to my more pious ancestors? And is my sense of guilt connected to my, let’s just say, less virtuous ones? Based on what we know about epigenetics and inherited patterns, it’s not so unlikely.

Our ancestors live on in our DNA, our blood and bones, and even our patterns of thought and emotion, and our stress responses. They live on in our memory. In ways both conscious and deeply unconscious, they shape our very sense of who we are. On some level, we carry the dead with us wherever we go. 

But honoring our ancestors is something we generally don’t practice and haven’t learned to do. So how can we do it in a way that doesn’t feel artificial or performative? It might just be learning more about them, remembering the things we loved about those we’ve lost, or just taking a moment to honor their ongoing presence in our lives—what they’ve left with us. Knowing that our greatest gifts and traumas often go back way before we were even born, can we root more deeply into our strengths, and give ourselves a little grace around the places we struggle? 

My Quebecois Catholics ancestors’ legacy also shaped me through my father, who left the Catholic church to become a Buddhism. After becoming a follower of the Vietnamese Zen master Thich Nhat Hahn when I was in elementary school, he passed down Buddhist teachings and wisdom that shaped my life path and sense of self. 

Thich Nhat Hahn actually spoke a lot about connecting with our roots and honoring our ancestors. He reminds us that we are part of a living lineage that ultimately connects us to all beings in a web of interconnection that he calls “interbeing.”

“Our ancestors are always with us,” he said. “We are the continuation of each one of them. Their blood, their spirit, and their wisdom flow in our veins, and we can communicate with them in our daily life.” 

In his book The Art of Living, he offers a beautiful mindfulness practice for recognizing our interconnectivity with our ancestors. It’s simple: As you perform your daily acts, whether sending emails or washing the dishes or taking a walk, try performing those acts not as an individual, but as a “whole lineage”: 

Whenever I walk, sit, eat, or practice calligraphy, I do so with the awareness that all my ancestors are within me in that moment. I am their continuation. Whatever I am doing, the energy of mindfulness enables me to do it as “us” not as “me.”

This Sunday, we’re contemplating the identity shift from me to us, from a separate individual to part of a living lineage. What would it mean to see ourselves as one link in an unbroken chain extending backward and forwards in time? Would we gain a new source of guidance and support—and how might that help us through the challenges we face in our lives right now? 

Sending warmth and light as we move into the darker months ahead,

Carolyn