Today MyHeritage notified me that they have found a new "Theory of Family Relativity" to explain my relatedness to a young man in Ireland. Their theory is correct, and nothing new. I have met the young man and conversed with him. I have many hundreds of genetic cousins, many of them from Finland and Sweden. Most are at the level of fifth or fourth cousins. A fifth cousin is a descendant of a sibling of one of your great-great-great-grandparents. How many of those ggg-grandparents do you have? Thirty-two. How many descendants of their siblings are there? Usually at least hundreds or thousands. Such a family relationship may be historically interesting, but how important is it to your development as a person? Not very.
But the situation is different with spiritual genealogy. There are no companies that will trace those relationships for you, and yet all of them are important. How many do you have? Probably many. I have already mentioned some of mine in this blog: St. Francis of Assisi, St. Teresa of Avila, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Walt Whitman, Shlomo Carlebach. But I have not mentioned Lalla of Kashmir, Rabbi Yeshua, Gabriela Mistral, or Ted Bardacke. Are there any Unitarians in this group? Oh, yes. Any naked poets? At least one.
Have I met any of these people in person? Only Shlomo and Ted. The others have influenced me through their writings. Is that any less important than a physical meeting? I don't think so. It is a spiritual meeting.
Copyright © 2024 by Donald C. Traxler.
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