The First Parish in Bedford Unitarian Universalist 75 The Great Road, Bedford, Massachusetts 01730 On the Common 781-275-7994

“The Results of My DNA Test”

Rev. John E. Gibbons

Delivered at First Parish in Bedford

November 6, 2005

Sometime last spring, on NPR’s All Things Considered, I heard a story about the Genographic Project, a world-wide effort to collect more than 100,000 samples of DNA, representing the global range of human diversity.  I was fascinated.  Sponsored by National Geographic and IBM, the Genographic Project is an effort to “learn more about who we are, where we came from, and how we relate as members of one extended family.”

In part, this project resonated with values – religious values, really – that I first learned in a Unitarian Universalist Sunday School: I remember curiously looking at a famous photography exhibit by Edward Steichen titled The Family of Man.  Whatever the flaws of the United Nations may be, a UN flag was present in the church of my youth, as it is here.  As a child, I recall someone at church saying that 1 out of every 3 babies is Chinese and I wondered why there were so few Chinese in my classes (??!!). 

These values would later find expression in the Unitarian Universalist principle that there is “an interdependent web of all existence of which we are a part.”  Perhaps we are more globally-aware today but still I think we ought not assume that these values are communicated in our larger and sometimes xenophobic culture.  What we teach here – limited though it is compared with time at school or elsewhere – can still have far-reaching and profound impact on impressionable minds. 

So this Genographic Project resonated but, really, it also sounded very cool:  For something like $90, I was sent a little kit with a truly remarkable DVD about the Project, and a little plastic scraper – like a toothbrush – with which I could take a sample from the inside of my cheek, and a couple of small vials in which I’d put my DNA and mail it off for analysis.  The Project makes clear that this sort of DNA analysis will not determine if I am at the bottom of an unsolved crime, nor whether I am related to that cute red-haired child on the next block, nor whether I carry some dread disease.  It will only reveal – and “only” is not the correct modifier – where my personal DNA has been for the last 60,000 years and who are my most distant ancestors on the planet.  To me this sounded very cool, and I did it.  $90 also seemed a fair price for the sermon I was certain to get!

I was given a confidential ID number and, some weeks later, on the website of the Project, I was given my results.  Following the genetic evidence of the Y chromosome, it was determined (and I was given a certificate of proof) that I belong to Haplogroup R1B of marker M343.  I was also given a global map which is somewhat different from that Nancy Daugherty has drawn and does not specifically indicate that I was conceived in Oak Park, Illinois but it does show some amazing things.

I’m not a scientist so the scientists among you may need to correct some aspects of this, but it is clear that the species homo sapiens and all human beings – evolved 200,000 years ago in the highlands of East Africa.  From the DNA of those alive today, genetic detectives can trace back to a common ancestor, a single individual who is known as “Eurasian Adam.”  He was an African man who lived 60,000 years ago, more or less, on the savannas of what is now Namibia among the people now known as the san Bushmen – and it was Eurasian Adam who bequeathed a common Y chromosome to every human alive today.  Other hominid species existed still earlier, but the ones whose lineage survived were the descendants of hunter-gatherer Eurasian Adam – and Eve – who were a little smarter, more linguistically advanced, had better tools and were a little luckier.  It is they and their Bushmen kin who are the biggest branch at the base of the trunk of the human family tree. 

In the accompanying DVD, the San Bushmen today are shown tracking wildebeest.  It was the Bushmen who learned to read the hoofmarks and that way were able to comprehend the history of what had happened and to follow the trail of the wildebeest.  Lions and other predators would cross the trails of their prey and have no awareness of history; but by their intelligence the Bushmen could deduce, and by language they could communicate with their tribesmen, and with their tools they could kill their prey.  By reading the genetic evidence researchers today follow the DNA trail – its markers and mutations – and are able to read the human past and trace the migrations which the human family has made out of our common origins in Africa.

The DNA trail is long, winding and evidently arduous as there are numerous branchings and dead ends.  Indeed a long strange trip it has been, with unexpected twists.  The earliest substantial migration out of Africa, for example, took place some 50,000 years ago when beachcombers…(I try to picture this, you know, the flowered shirts, the boards)…beachcombers who followed the coasts of Arabia, India, and Southeast Asia – eventually reaching – guess where they first appeared out of Africa?  It was Australia and thus, our aboriginal heritage.

Later migrations out of Africa crossed Arabia to the rich grasslands of Eurasia; some crossed mountains and deserts to arrive in China; others found their way to India; and still others went north toward the broad game-rich rolling steppes of Central Asia, places like Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan and southern Siberia. 

The genetic detectives have mapped lots of these routes:  Adam and Eve were on the M91 out of Namibia; it’s M130 that went to Australia; M20 to India; and the M45 takes you to places like Kazakhstan.  And I do mean you because nearly all Europeans and Native Americans share this common ancestry.

Those of the M45 lineage adapted to different and hostile conditions, learning to build animal skin shelters and sew watertight clothing.  Melanin-rich dark skin which gave protection from the sun and allowed perspiration to keep cool evolved into lighter shades.  Bodies, too, evolved to be more compact and to retain heat in a colder climate.  Tools of stone, bone and ivory evolved.     

Branching off the M45, those who would become Native Americans took the M3 to northeastern Siberia.  Only 20,000 years ago perhaps as few as a dozen people crossed the Bering Land Bridge, uncovered during the last ice age, and entered the New World, some ultimately reaching the tip of South America.

Meanwhile members of the haplogroup R are descendants of Europe’s first settlers.  Still carrying the markers of Eurasian Adam and Eve back in Africa and that of the Central Asians as well, the Neandertals died out but the Cro-Magnon people survived and made their mark on the continent, making even more advanced shelter, clothing, tools and artwork, such as the famous cave paintings in Lascaux and Chauvet,.  Cro-Magnons, of whom most of you and I are descendants, are members of R1B, defined by M343.  With all people everywhere, however, it is Eurasian Adam and Eve, in Africa, who are at the base of our family tree.

It is here that I conclude my report of the Genographic Project and commend to you their amazing and even inspiring work (do take a look at my genographic map and other materials which I’ll leave up here after the service); and it is here that I turn to reflections about race and – it’s just your luck – to a short lesson in theology, including some terminology in Greek!

The attention of our nation and the world turned last week to Rosa Parks and amidst the encomiums and adulation (that sometimes missed the contributions of so many lesser or indeed unknown resisters of racism); nonetheless, for a moment, attention was again directed to the racism that is the central wound of our nation’s history.  After the Gulf Coast disaster and disgrace, I said that our nation suffers from AAADD, African American Attention Deficit Disorder: people who are not of color can’t seem to stay focused on what’s happening to people of color; but every once in a while, as when the Hurricane exposed our nation’s disparities of race and class, our non-African-American population is roused to a hazy awareness of our woundedness.  Alas, we are aroused only briefly, it seems, and then our attention drifts to topics of less distress.

In truth this is not only an American wound but a global wound.  You may have heard Pakistan’s president Musharrif asked why so little attention was paid to the recent Pakistani earthquake and was it because so few westerners were affected?  “Yes,” he said, “so it seems.” 

It has been conclusively demonstrated – by biology, genetics, DNA – that human beings are indeed one family and yet – pathologically it seems – we divide the world by gender and creed and class and, most especially, by race. 

Are you really white?  Are you really black?  Asking an American such a question would be like asking, are you really a man?  Are you really a woman?  Most Americans view race as rooted in nature – an objective fact, like sex or age – an absolute marker of one’s identity.  “The strangest thing about this conviction is that no other nation’s history and culture more compellingly demonstrate the fluidity and sheer unnaturalness of racial identity.”

Race – as has been proven by the Genographic Project – is not an objective and distinct fact.  Rather it is a fiction, an idea, and it is America’s worst idea.

A hundred years ago, Irish people were not considered white but they were “Negroes turned inside out.”  Negroes were considered “smoked Irish.”  In 1921, our government passed an immigration act to keep the “inferior” races of southern Europe – and Jews as well – from contaminating white people.  Jews weren’t generally considered white until after the Second World War.  Italians were thought of as white only a little earlier, though many weren’t so sure.  We have such a bizarre history of racial categorization that only recently, out of exhaustion, did our Census Bureau give up and let people classify themselves in as many ways as their hearts might desire.

Though it has become a cherished category, race is not an absolute but instead race is a convention that changes across time and place.  I remember watching TV with my father and, when there was a news anchor or performer or other person of ambiguous race, my father went into a minor apoplexy: “Is she black or white?” as if he or she had to be one or the other.  (Perhaps I’d best not go into in this sermon but the answer as to whether someone is he or she can sometimes indeed be, well, less than absolute.)

For many of us who traveled the genetic M343 into western Europe and then to the New World, “whiteness” became a way of defining ourselves against Native Americans, African slaves and – then and now – African-Americans.  We came up with the “one drop rule” such that a little ‘black blood’ could make you black but it took a whole lot of ‘white blood’ to make you white.  It’s easy to say, in retrospect, that this was a really wacky idea.  This was America’s worst idea.

Thus, to describe oneself as white is, first and foremost, to describe oneself as not-being-black.  From here on, it just gets bizarre:  so-called whites, African-Americans, and Native Americans – all have occasionally tried to escape race by building racially pure communities.  Black separatists were often abetted by white purists, including Presidents Jefferson and Lincoln; black nationalists like Marcus Garvey made close friendships with white separatists.  White separatism in the south, however, was uniquely dangerous because it was backed by force and violence.

There are no innocents in this horrible American misadventure of race:  Self-identified whites have committed enormous atrocities.  Nonetheless, African-Americans joined genocidal assaults upon Native Americans.  Whites created this mess; more often than not African Americans have been the victims; all, however, have suffered.

So now, at last, it’s time for theology and your lesson in Greek.

A couple of weeks ago, I suggested in a sermon that we needed a kind of x-rated liberally religious curriculum in civics and citizen formation.  X-rated because I’m concerned not so much in ‘how a bill becomes a law’ but in how we use our bodies to effect change. (It is interesting to see that our State Senator, Susan Fargo, has proposed a reconsideration of civics education in this state; I’ll be trying to find out more about her ideas.  I’m not sure, however, if she has in mind the x-rated stuff that I imagine we in this church could provide.)  In three weeks (on the 27^th), we’ll actually have a meeting of the curriculum development committee (to which you’re invited), but I’ve asked a variety of people for some preliminary thoughts.

John Buehrens, our minister in Needham and the former president of the UUA, has provocatively suggested that the major missing component in liberal civic education is the concept of metanoia, usually translated as ‘repentance,’ that is, some radical reassessment as a prelude to commitment.  John referred me back to the writings of the preeminent UU theologian James Luther Adams. 

So I’ve taken a fresh look at JLA, James Luther Adams.  What Adams says is that liberal religion requires, at its essence, some sense of humility – a willingness to be changed.  That is the essential requirement for membership in a liberal church.  Adams says:

“A sense of commitment requires a change of priorities, and a shared commitment involves a change of shared priorities.  The concept of metanoia, which is falsely translated ‘repent ye,’ is properly translated ‘change of heart, mind, and soul.’ But as Unitarians we tend to assume we are liberated already.  It is even said, ‘You can be a Unitarian without knowing it.’”

What Adams is referring to is a successful advertising campaign in the 50’s and 60’s, a campaign that asked, “Are you a Unitarian without knowing it?”  It became a famous question and, yes, many people agreed and many continue to agree that they have Unitarian ideas without calling themselves Unitarian.  The point Adams is making, however, is that – at our essence – Unitarianism Universalism is not about confirming our prejudices or affirming those things we already believe but, instead, Unitarian Universalism is most truly about the much more difficult matter of subjecting even our most cherished beliefs to reconsideration – to self-criticism and to self-renewal.

A lot of people come to First Parish because here they find like-minded folks; and that is OK and good.  But if we are to take our faith more seriously and deeply, we would explore the edges of difference and disagreement.  We are not here to confirm one another’s prejudices but to encounter one in all our particular peculiarities, which – in truth – we have in abundance.

Some months ago we adopted a new mission statement that augments a much wordier, eloquent and still-good statement you may find posted on our back wall.  The new statement simply says that “We (at First Parish) will forge connections across the generations and share our work, to change ourselves and our world.”  And despite whatever is incomplete or ungainly about that statement, the idea that we are here, in large part, “to change ourselves” is prescient, profound, challenging and spot-on theologically correct.  To seek “a change of heart, mind and soul” is indeed at the heart of our purpose.

At the outset of the Genographic Project, one of the researchers asks, “What do you to when everything you believe flies in the face of everything you know?”  The project, he knew, would challenge cherished assumptions.   

The results of my DNA test are just one example whereby our prejudices also may be challenged.  Upstairs, in one of our Sunday school classrooms there is a poster that says, “We are one family under the sky,” and that is more accurate than any elocution. 

And yet that family and its DNA trail are forever evolving, forever changing.  Cherished assumptions are constantly challenged or, like the conventions of race, should be challenged. 

You’ll recall the words of Wallace Stevens: 

They said, "You have a blue guitar,
You do not play things as they are."

The man replied, "Things as they are
Are changed upon the blue guitar."

And they said then, "But play, you must,
A tune beyond us, yet ourselves,

A tune upon the blue guitar
Of things exactly as they are."

We are here in this liberally religious community to play – we must – a tune beyond us, yet ourselves.

In one of his famous cartoons, Charles Schulz shows Snoopy, the dog, typing a manuscript on his dog house. Charlie Brown asks, “What are you doing, Snoopy?”  Snoopy replies, “Writing a book about theology.”  “Good grief.” Charlie Brown responds, “What’s its title?”  Thoughtfully, Snoopy replies, “Have You Ever Considered You Might Be Wrong?”

That is the essence of our faith, a willingness to experience metanoia, a change of heart, mind and soul; to allow that we may and are, in many things, likely to be wrong. We are here to play, we must – a tune beyond us, yet ourselves.

As was said by the man at the First Unitarian Church in Chicago at 1:30 in the morning, “The purpose of this church is to get hold of people – like you and like me – and to change them.”   

May we too discern and do what needs to be done.