Ancestral Prayer

My mother’s life work went up in flames, but in the ashes I found an invitation to reconnect with my entire bloodline seeking to heal and be healed through me.

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The young man cleaning out the garage glanced up from his blaring music as I approached what used to be the house next door. His was one of the eerily intact houses while what had been mine was one of the rectangular patches of dirt and gravel carved with trenches and punctuated by random chunks of stone and brittle trees. The liquid amber and crepe myrtle stood as tall as ever. A handmade green wooden bench with trellis arch leaned awkwardly in the back corner. The fire had taken everything else that my mother had poured her unrequited craftswoman’s heart into for over three decades.

It was that heart I had come for – not what might remain of roots, glass shards, or pottery scraps. And when I placed my plan upon the ground beneath what used to be her den, I could feel the lifeforce radiating up my arm. It held no wail of cracking timber or final breaths. It was alive and free. I understood why I’d followed the words of a shaman from halfway around the world that I’d never even met, back to this place: to discover all the hungry ghosts had been liberated and to reclaim what had always been the pure light at their core.

Many ancient, indigenous practices speak of the sacredness of our ancestors. Perhaps it’s my colonial inheritance that made me recoil from the idea as unnecessary and contrived. I’ve been eager to connect with the land, animal guides, and human teachers of nature connection, but those in my blood line who are dead and gone felt like dried leaves – rigid, brittle, better left alone to decay. They had forgotten their lands and traditions to brave a new world with a stiff upper lip and brazen work ethic and their stubborn commitment to go it alone was in me too.

What slowly began to dawn on me was that my mother was now an ancestor – my mother who amazed and inspired me with play, curiosity, and craft, who belittled and neglected me with bitterness, ambition, and sarcasm. All of the best and worst of her is in me. All of the best and worst of her came from all those before her. Who better to receive my overflowing gratitude and my heartfelt appeal to heal and release me – and our entire planet – than the very ones who began this destruction and watch now from the other side perhaps with insights and abilities beyond those of the living.

Then I discovered Sangoma John Lockley, known as Cingolweendaba meaning “messenger or bridge between people and/or cultures”, a blond-haired, blue-eyed South African who received the calling sickness from the Xhosa ancestors destinying him to train as a healer and share indigenous knowledge with the west. His teachings are intuition, dreamwork, and ancestral prayer. As patterns and compulsions beyond my lifetime cycled through me, I could feel my lineage, my blood and bones, aching for this – to gather that ancient wisdom from the ashes of what we destroyed for redemption, for survival in both body and spirit.

And so I was called to the ashes of my childhood home to follow Sangoma John’s instructions for gathering earth. I found a place at the back of the lot out of sight of the man cleaning out his garage and offered tobacco to the four directions. I called in my spirit lineage of guardians and guides, named my teachers, and honored the ancestors on my mother’s and father’s sides first by name and then by group back through the Pennsylvania Dutch, the Scotch-Irish, Bavarian, French, Jewish and Roma. All the people who had left and arrived, and now reach the brink with me – the generation witnessing our planet in flames.

Now the soil I consecrated rests in a dish on my altar, adorned with a bit of dried moss from where the Alder tree once stood and a chunk of charcoal from the burning. Every morning I call them in: the essential forces of benevolent curiosity that shape this cosmos, the archetypes and angels, my guardians and guides, the sacred landscapes that hold me, the ancestors who formed this body, the teachers who informed me through shamanism, depth psychology, esotericism, alchemy, sufism, Gnosticism, ancient Greek mysticism, Egyptian neteru, and all the shamanic traditions of the world.

It is said that connecting with the ancestors is essential because without them we cannot know who we are or what we are for. Without them, we lack context, clarity, and resilience for why we are here, for what is uniquely ours to offer and heal. No one alive can answer this question for me, only point the way with what they have learned and how they have lived. Only I can know the right thing to do in this moment as the irrepeatable intersection between genetics, learning, and divine spark.

It feels profoundly vulnerable to live life without a script. I, like many, have been vulnerable to the comforts of dogma, of seeking someone else to decide for me. I’m often paralyzed by anxiety over making the wrong choice or realizing I’ve made a mistake I cannot take back. Sometimes we do what we believe is right and discover we were wrong. But letting others decide only disempowers us. True dignity lies in developing our intuition through practice, faith, and humble reparations.

Prayer is where I honor the true source of my strength and where I appeal to what is beyond me for clarity and guidance. The most powerful prayer is one of gratitude for what has been given, what has been denied, and what has been taken away – recognizing it is all in service of our shedding and becoming. I never pray for personal gratification. I pray for clarity, courage, and kindness. I pray for resilience, acceptance, and compassion. If I seek guidance, the answers are offered simply: “Yes”, “No”, or “Not yet”. These inspire me to keep asking as I course correct. Sometimes the answer is “It doesn’t matter” or “Just love” and I realize the question that seems so urgent to me is actually irrelevant. So then I pray for help letting it go.

I also accept the answers rarely come in human terms – more often as sensations, images, metaphors, dreams. I trudge up the hill in distress and suddenly catch a rare glimpse of a redtail hawk – one of my guardians who rests in the position of expansive perception – inviting me to loosen fixation and widen my lens. I transition an important relationship and suddenly the recurring dream of missing the plane because I have so much to pack resolves as I chose a handful of vital items and board.

Sometimes we can connect to an essential goodness within ourselves that guides and sustains us and solitude becomes our temple. Sometimes we are grasping in the dark and must reach for the divine in the world through art, literature, friends, healers, nature. This is all part of a reciprocal remembrance between all beings – humans, animals, plants, spirits, the cosmos itself. We are who we are because of our relationships with others – those who came before, those who walk alongside, and those who are yet to come. They are all present with us every step of the way if we remember and reach for them.

Nancy   

Deep gratitude to Sangoma John Lockley, MaMngwevu, and the Xhosa people for tending the oldest shamanic tradition that is helping me reconnect me with my ancestors.