In his latest book, Macauley Lord explores how we heal from moral injury
In the video, a purple sea of applauding bishops clusters around Macauley Lord as he steps to a microphone in the center of the room, hands clasped against his chest. It’s June 2024, and Lord is addressing the House of Bishops at the 81st General Convention of The Episcopal Church in Louisville, Kentucky, his hometown. “I presume to speak for all the descendants of James Craik, both those of us who identify as white, and those of us who identify as African American,” Lord begins softly. “Because it’s a virtual certainty, at least in my mind, that the Rev. Dr. Craik owned his own son, and owned his grandchildren. I haven’t proved it yet, but what it means is that growing up in Louisville, the Black people I saw who I thought I couldn’t possibly be related to may well have been my cousins, and I have wondered recently: did one of them wet nurse my mother; did one of them polish our silver; did one of them wash and fold my clothes?”
Moments before, the two governing bodies of The Episcopal Church—the House of Deputies, made up of clergy and lay delegates, and the House of Bishops—adopted Resolution D074, which renounced the theology of slavery held by the Rev. James Craik, president of the House of Deputies from 1842 to 1877, rector of Christ Church in Louisville (now Christ Church Cathedral), and Lord’s great-great-great grandfather.
A lifelong Episcopalian, seminary graduate, volunteer prison chaplain, and active member of St. Paul’s Church in Brunswick, Maine, where he lives, Lord has always known he was descended from “clergy royalty.” In addition to Craik, there was also Nathan Lord, a Congregational minister and president of Dartmouth College for 35 years. What Lord (whose full name is Nathan Macauley Lord) didn’t discover until quite recently was that these two Civil War-era men—one on each side of the Mason-Dixon line—were both staunch proponents of slavery.
Lord’s story starts with President George Washington, who together with his wife, Martha, owned more than 300 people. James Craik’s grandfather, also a slave-owner and Washington’s physician and best friend, named his son after the first president. “Young Craik begins to practice law and gets a patronage appointment from the president—postmaster, Alexandria, Virginia,” says Lord. “What does George Washington Craik do? He embezzles from the post office.” He also dies at 34, leaving nine-year-old James as the owner of his debt and his slaves. “Imagine what that would do to the soul of a child?”
The adult James Craik studied medicine and practiced law before becoming an Episcopal priest and taking the job at Christ Church, where began his rise to prominence. “My father thought that Craik, now a priest, is absolved of his father’s embezzling debt by the government but has to free his slaves in the process,” says Lord. “So, Dad thought, when James Craik is in Kentucky, he’s not a slave-owner. Dad was wrong.”
As for his other famous ancestor? Dartmouth “fired him in 1863 because, to him, abolition was an abomination, and he would not grant President Lincoln an honorary degree because Lincoln emancipated the slaves,” Lord says. “Nathan Lord’s son married James Craik’s daughter. So, I’m descended from Christian ministers for slavery.”
Most of this knowledge was acquired as a result of Lord’s research for his latest book. Like his first three, it was supposed to be about fishing; Lord is a celebrated fly-casting instructor who headed LL Bean’s fly-fishing school and was awarded the Fly Fishers International Lifetime Achievement Award in 2011. Unlike his earlier publications, however, this one isn’t a handbook or guide; it’s an exploration of fishing culture, specifically Black fishing culture. At least that was the original idea.
“As a child, and then as a young adult, college student, and post-college, I find it inexplicable—I have this remarkable affinity for African Americans,” says Lord. “And I’m formed, I’m sort of seared in a way by an event in my young life where the Black man who worked for my grandparents on their farm in Kentucky would drive me to and from my house in town out to their farm, so I could go fishing. His name was Clifton.
“I’m 12 years old. Clifton takes me to the farm on a Saturday, I catch a bunch of fish, I don’t put them in the bucket, I let them go because it’s a hot day. I hate seeing fish suffer. When Clifton comes to collect me, he says, ‘How’s the fishing?’ I always gave him the bluegill from my bucket. I said, ‘Oh, it’s been great.’ He looks in the bucket and cries out, ‘Oh, Cauley. Oh, Cauley, you got to keep the fish. They depend on me for your fish.’ ‘Who?’ Clifton lived in the west end of Louisville, the Black end of town. ‘My neighbors, the ladies, the old people.’” Lord says he felt a “sort of pull” to know more. “Curiosity, like a gravitational attraction. Who are these people?”
For this next book, Lord decided he would interview Black people fishing from the shore in the South. “White people don’t fish from shore in the South, they fish from boats,” he says. “I have this theory that Black people fishing from shore in the American South are connected to their enslaved ancestors. ‘My master’s not feeding me these fish, I’m getting them. I have some freedom, I have some independence when I’m fishing.’ And then as I start collecting people’s stories and getting farther into it, I’m like, ‘Hey, I’m connected to slavery. I wonder if I have Black cousins?’ I started reading about James Craik, and then in March of 2024, I walked into Christ Church Cathedral.”
Lord was in Louisville for research on the book when one day after a workout he decided he needed to attend a Eucharist. “I look at my phone, it’s 12:03, the Eucharist at Christ Church where Craik served started three minutes ago,” he says. After running to his car and driving 10 minutes to the church, he arrived sweaty and “just in time to take in the body and blood. And there is the dean of the Cathedral and Jason Lewis, one of the two canons to Bishop Terry White of Kentucky, the celebrant. The dean, Matthew Bradley, says, ‘What brings you here?’ And I say, ‘Well, I live in Maine, but I grew up here. And oh, my ancestor preached here.’ ‘Who is your ancestor?’ I said, ‘James Craik.’ And these two men go, ‘What?’ Because they’re getting ready to bring this amendment to the floor at the House of Deputies and then the House of Bishops to renounce my ancestor’s theology of slavery. Jason says, ‘You know what’s going on with James Craik?’ I said, ‘No.’ And he said, ‘You need to come to my office.’”
In the dean’s office Lewis showed Lord a page from the 1850 Slave Census, which says that Craik, who lived a little over a mile from where Lord grew up, owned seven people. “And then he shows me something my family had never spoken of, and I think had forgotten about—a pamphlet Craik authored, the words of which fully formed the foundation of The Episcopal Church’s resolution.” Entitled “Slavery in the South; or What Is our Present Duty to the Slaves?”, “the pamphlet described the enslaved as ‘a race of barbarians, gradually degraded by many thousand years of ignorance and brutishness to the lowest stage of humanity” but now under the care of ‘the most enlightened and civilized race upon the globe,’” according to the Episcopal News Service.
Like a stream carving a new bend, the experience prompted Lord’s book to take another of several turns. In his introduction, he references his experience as chaplain to a group of Navy SEALs. “I’m teaching them how to fly cast, and the third or fourth day in, I hear about the massacre of children,” Lord says. “They’re SEALs. They’ve been at war. Terrible, terrible things happen in war. But I keep asking myself, why do I have to open this book with the story I heard from the SEALs? All the guys on that trip were white. And suddenly it dawns on me: African Americans are profoundly morally injured. Slavery was a moral injury the size of an ocean. And what I learned in my week with SEALs, particularly about the massacre of children, is a moral injury the size of a sea. So, I realized that my book was not about only the legacy of slavery. My book is about how we heal from moral injury.”
This summer, just as Lord thought he was ready to start looking for an agent, the winding stream of his book curved again. He had submitted his DNA to Ancestry dot com two years ago, and out of 35,000 DNA matches he sent a message to a handful of his African-American matches. “Hi, my name’s Macaulay Lord. I’m a writer and I’m writing this book about the legacy of slavery and moral injury. And we’re cousins, and I’m white, and I’d really like to…I hope you’ll get in touch,” he wrote. Nothing came of it. In early July, there was a reply. “’Nathan Macauley Lord, please call me. Elwood Jones.’ I click him and find his DNA origins. He’s 70-percent African and 30-percent European, like me.”
Lord and his wife Carol met on Zoom with Elwood and his sister Mary, who greeted Lord with, “Hi, cousin.” The siblings knew nothing about James Craik, but Elwood, who is in his sixties, is a student at Virginia Theological Seminary. “Where did the Rev. James Craik live as a boy? About 1,000 yards from that seminary,” says Lord. “Where did Elwood Jones’ ancestors farm? Within a couple 100 yards of where James Craik lived. You can’t make this up.”
Recalling his conversation with the Joneses reminds Lord of how he felt being at General Convention to witness, and participate in, the condemnation of his ancestor’s legacy. “At one point Elwood, sitting in his room at seminary, got teary-eyed talking about his journey, which is the same as my journey, except that he’s on the other side of the power equation,” says Lord. “He got tearful because of how much it hurts. So, to be in the room with the deputies, and then the bishops—particularly the deputies, because they all stood and applauded what they as a church had just done—there were lots of tears. For me, it was like Jacob at Bethel after he had his dream. He’s laid his head on a rock, and he’s had the image of angels coming and going up and down the ladder, Jacob’s ladder, the ladder to heaven. And he awakes from the dream, and he says, ‘Surely God is in this place.’”
A fly fisherman might say that God is wherever there’s a gentle bend in the stream, the water is clear and cold, and your fly lands just right. But many fishing scenes are not so pristine—or so privileged. Lord tells another story that inspired his book. “I met a Black family: mother, daughter and uncle, out in the middle of nowhere near Perry, Florida. The mother and daughter were pulling all these bluegill out of a ditch. I say to them, this white boy traveling in the deep south of Florida, ‘What are you all doing way out here?’ The older woman looks at me and she says, ‘We’re just like you are, out seeing the world.’” And God is there, too.