WENONA, Ill. – In a hallway of Bethany Lutheran Church here, there’s a photo display of young people in confirmation classes.
In the one showing the class of 1918 you can see good-looking twins, Inez and Einar Helander, children of Alfred Helander, my grandfather’s brother. It won’t surprise you that Inez and Einar – or Eva or Carl Helander, also in that 1918 class – did not join us here on a recent Sunday for the 85th annual Helander family reunion (my mother was a Helander). All of them are gone.
But Inez’ son Mark was here, along with another set of twins in the family, Vera and Verda (originally Helanders), who just turned 88.
This is what we Helanders do, those who can make it. We come together and look each other in the eye once a year. We take each other’s pulse. We report on births and deaths. We sometimes wander together around this fabulous flat farmland, where my grandparents, Swedish immigrants, began life together planting seeds and praying. And we visit cemeteries, where Helanders galore are buried.
Mark and I, in fact, went out to the Wenona Cemetery together after eating three metric tons of Swedish food, and we found the graves of lots of people to whom we’re related. We told each other that we do this because it’s way too easy in this instant-messaging culture to miss the humanity in one another.
In some ways, that’s also why I show up at my church nearly every Sunday. I can’t be an active part of a community of faith if I’m not physically there. To pretend to be there in spirit might be helpful for an occasional event or worship service I can’t get to, but religion as I understand it places a high value on bodily presence.
It’s why my own religion, Christianity, holds to the doctrine of the resurrection of the body. It’s why we speak of the “Real Presence” of Christ in the sacrament of Communion. It’s why the Bible says to greet each other with a holy kiss.
I don’t know if my grandparents and their fellow Swedish immigrants who helped to start Bethany Lutheran Church here just before the 19th century turned into the 20th understood all of that. I just know that after my grandfather’s four brothers and sister got settled in around here, they decided they needed to hold an annual family reunion. (Maybe that was because my grandparents eventually left Wenona and moved all the way to Streator 12 miles away, where my mother and her sister grew up.)
So each year they would pick someone’s house or church and bring oodles of food and however many kids they could round up and they’d sit around on a Sunday afternoon eating and sharing stories and looking each other in the eye, taking each other’s pulse.
My mother used to take us to these events when we were kids. Sometimes she’d make us sing songs for the afternoon’s entertainment. One day as we were driving out of Wenona heading back to our home in Woodstock, 100 miles to the north, we asked Mom how many cousins she had.
She thought and thought and finally she said, “I have 92 second cousins that I can think of, but I lose count.”
She was winging it, of course. And, besides, numbers don’t much matter anyway. Heck, we had only 23 people at this reunion.
What matters, instead, is the commitment to remain part of the family, to stay connected somehow to people who are related through no fault of their own but who share part of the same story.
Isn’t that the way faith communities work? We don’t really get to pick who else joins our congregation, but whoever it is turns out to be someone who shares part of our larger story of spirit and body and belief.
I am part Helander by blood, but it’s my choice to stay connected. I am Presbyterian by choice, and also my choice to stay connected. That’s why, when we finished eating sausage and herring and lingonberries and pies here, I drove over to Streator to visit the graves of Inez and Einar’s aunt and uncle, my grandparents. Sometimes you just have to show up in person.
Bill Tammeus is a columnist for The Kansas City Star.
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