The greatest question I ever heard was this: “What would your life look like if you followed Jesus?” Well, Jesus has led me to a mysterious beauty about racial justice that I could never have imagined.
In 2014, a team of geneticists published a paper in which they analyzed the DNA of a large dataset of African Americans. They found that people who identify as black in this country are, on average, 24 percent European. Where did all that European ancestry come from? Mostly from our white ancestors who were enslavers. Mostly.
A few of you were at General Convention in Louisville, Kentucky, in June 2024. I was there at the invitation of the Diocese of Kentucky because I am the great, great, great grandson of the Rev. Dr. James Craik. C-R-A-I-K. He was the 11th president of the Episcopal House of Deputies. He served in that role through most of the Civil War and for many years beyond.
Craik was credited with helping to keep the national church from splitting over the war. My father told me that he had been an enslaver as a lawyer in Virginia, but that he had not owned people as a priest in Kentucky. Dad was wrong. We’ve since learned that Craik had lived on a 30-acre slave plantation about a mile east of where I grew up in Louisville. Craik’s history as an enslaver there had been completely erased from my family’s memory because it was too uncomfortable.
So was this: In 1862, he published an influential pamphlet that extolled the virtues of slavery. For the enslaved! He wrote of what a terrible burden slavery was for owners like him. He called white people like me “the master race” and he called the people he owned a “race of barbarians.” And I ask, Who was the barbarian? In June 2024, just before the House of Deputies voted to renounce his theology of slavery, my presence in the hall was named. Now, a piece of Craik’s own DNA was right there with them. After the Deputies voted by acclamation with a resounding Amen to renounce his theology, we all stood and applauded. Many of us were in tears.
Then I was called into the House of Bishops. They were just about to affirm the Deputies’ vote. Kentucky’s Bishop Terry White introduced me as Craik’s descendant. Presiding Bishop Curry called me forward and directed the bishops to vote on the measure “by standing and applauding our brother.” Bishop Brown, tears in his eyes, came over and hugged me. So did Presiding Bishop Curry. When I addressed the House of Bishops moments later, I told them that I was virtually certain that my iconic ancestor Rev. James Craik had owned his own son right there in Louisville. I wondered openly with the House of Bishops: The woman who had wet-nursed my mother there, the man who had polished our silver, the lady who had washed and folded my clothes when I was little, where they my black cousins, long forsaken, denied by Craik and our family?
How did I get here? Well, I began work on a book five years ago for which I interviewed about 20 black people who fish from shore. I’m a longtime flyfishing writer. And I have found healing from my own wounds ever since I fished as child beside the still waters. In my book, I tell the stories of the people I met in the context of moral injury—a wound to the soul—which I assume is borne by every African American who descends from the enslaved. And I was drawn inexorably to write about my own ancestors like Craik who inflicted those wounds on the people they owned.
It hurts so much to think about this, to hear about it, that some states have made it functionally illegal to teach it in public schools. An acquaintance of mine in Kentucky is a good example: He told me that he prefers to think of the enslaved as people who were given jobs and housing and food.
My Christian ancestors broke families—raped them, probably whipped them, maybe sold off their children. My ancestors like Rev. Dr. James Craik, president of the House of Deputies, did this to people made in God’s image and even believed that they were doing God’s work. If you had forced yourself on a woman who could not say no, maybe that’s the story you would have had to tell yourself to assuage your conscience.
James Craik inherited his first human being, in Alexandria, Virginia, when he was five months old. Can you imagine what that would do to the soul of a child? When I hold him in prayer to seek God’s forgiveness for him, I try to remember that his relatives and their society did that to him when he was a baby. I can’t say that I know I would have done better in God’s eyes than Craik did. I can only say that Jesus is telling me today to build a bridge that connects me to my black cousins, and to walk across it.
One day a couple of years ago, I began to scroll through my DNA matches on Ancestry looking for black faces. Why did I wait so many years to do this? I was afraid of the weight of its moral implications, that I would have to leave some comfort to follow Jesus across a racial Grand Canyon. Sure enough, among the profile pictures of my DNA matches, there were a few black faces. WOW. So I messaged the ones that I found that first day. I wrote that I was white, that I was a chaplain who had gone to seminary, that we were related by DNA, and that I hoped they would get in touch. No one answered until this July when Elwood Jones did. We had our first Zoom meeting the next night, and he said we would be joined by his sister Mary. When she and I first made eye contact on our screens she smiled and said warmly, “Hi, cousin.”
Elwood is a 64-year-old student on a reparations scholarship at Virginia Theological Seminary, in Alexandria, VA. Incredibly, the Seminary is just eight-hundred yards from where little James Craik was an enslaver as a boy. When I told Elwood and Mary exactly where his plantation had been, Mary said calmly, “Our ancestors worked that land.”
My brother Sam still lives in Louisville, and he joined me in Alexandria a few weeks ago to meet Elwood and Mary and their families, our family. With their children and grandchildren, we looked into each other’s eyes, which were the eyes of our shared white ancestor, and we hugged, we laughed, we talked about God and fishing and grace. We hugged each other some more. When Elwood and I talked on the phone a few days later, he called our time together “mysteriously beautiful.”
By the way, our common ancestor was not even an enslaver but a laborer, born in Germany, who impregnated Elwood and Mary’s enslaved ancestor in about 1863.
Every African American you know—people who descend from the enslaved—is also descended from our ancestors like that laborer and Reverend Craik. What if every descendant of enslavers — whether you identify as black or white, that could be you—what if you were to submit your DNA to a site like Ancestry, then look for your distant DNA matches, ones that seem to be on the other side of the Grand Racial Canyon? What if you reached out to some of them—built a bridge to them, then met them, then maybe hugged them?
Questions people ask me:
- How did you build the bridge to Elwood? Remember that Elwood heard me hammering, a white man extending a bridge to him, so he built a bridge to me, too.
- Where did you find the instructions for all this? I, for one, found them in the Psalms and the Prophets. And then I watched as Jesus swung the first hammer.
- Won’t it be awkward, the two of us there together? Maybe at first, but give the Holy Spirit a little time, and it might synchronize your two hearts so that, at times, they could beat as one.
- What will I say when I get there? I speak for Elwood and Mary here: Just building that bridge and walking out onto it will say a whole lot.
So, I ask, What would our country look like; What would our lives together look like; Followers of Jesus, what would your life look like if you did this?
Amen
Read more about Macauley Lord’s journey here.