There is a quiet grief many in ministry carry.
It’s not always named, but it lives in the body.
It shows up in burnout, in boundarylessness, in inherited guilt, in a subtle sense of unworthiness.
Sometimes, we think it’s ours alone.
But as I’ve sat with the work of Daniel Foor in Ancestral Medicine, I’ve come to see that not all wounds begin with us.
Some are ancestral.
Passed down silently, through gesture and culture, theology and fear.
Passed down through systems we didn’t create—but often find ourselves holding.
And those of us in leadership—spiritual, pastoral, or communal—often carry not just our own pain,
but the echo of those who came before us.
We are shaped by lineages of harm, yes.
But also by lineages of hope.
Foor writes that healing is not only individual—it is lineage work.
When we attend to our ancestors, we don’t glorify the past—we ask it to participate in transformation.
We say: “What you could not heal in your time, I will begin to heal in mine.”
This is deeply resonant with the ministry of Christ.
Jesus doesn’t erase ancestry—he redeems it.
He places himself in a genealogical line.
He honours those who came before—warts and all.
And then he invites the Spirit to make something new.
In a similar way, Lama Tsultrim Allione, in Wisdom Rising, teaches that the wounds we carry—especially collective and gendered ones—are not failures of faith.
They are doorways into deeper power.
She invites us not to silence rage, grief, or ancestral sorrow—
but to transform it through embodied presence, ritual, and sacred practice.
To feed our demons, not to worship them,
but to listen, learn, and liberate.
In many ways, that is the work of spiritual leadership in this time.
Not to rush toward light,
but to hold the darkness until it reveals its wisdom.
Not to abandon the broken line,
but to become a point of renewal within it.
What if ministry wasn’t just about visioning forward—
but also healing backward?
What if the Church understood that ancestral trauma, colonisation, generational shame, and spiritual bypassing are not peripheral concerns—
but central to the work of reconciliation and Gospel embodiment?
What if tending to our lineages was not indulgent—but responsible?
A sacred task, done not only for ourselves,
but for those who come after?
Because healing is not linear.
It is ancestral.
And resurrection is not just what happens after death.
It’s what happens when we choose to bring the bones of the past
into conversation with the Spirit of the present.
We do this work—
with prayer, with compassion, with discernment—
not to fix our families or rewrite history,
but to say:
“The harm stops here. The healing begins here.”
“This body, this ministry, this altar—will be different.”