My Ancestors, My Bedrock.

My Ancestors are a main, in fact central stone of my faith. I believe I'm a very young branch on a tree who's roots go deep in to this earth. It is not just our ancestors of living memory, but those of us alive now have ancestry that trail back with our DNA to the dawn of human history. Our ancestors must have survived wars, natural disasters and illness for us to be here now. I do believe they still keep an eye on their descendants and it is right that we should honour them and keep those we can in memory.

As far back as I've been able to research all my family are Christians of one form or another but this is no surprise, further back there is simply no way of knowing the beliefs of my ancestors, so I work through what my intuition tells me and hope that I might be pointed in the direction I'm meant to travel. One of the main things Christianity tried to do was server the links with our ancient ancestry and halt the old ancestral rituals, but somethings just seem to be instinct to the human race. We have an urge to find our roots or remember those we've lost, whether by a collection of photos, the telling of family stories or the visiting of graves of those we've lost. Family History is one of the worlds fastest growing hobbies, we are all still looking for those connections.

Setting up an ancestral altar or shrine, researching your family line, visiting graves and keeping them tidy are all ways we can show our ancestors respect, as well as simply talking about them and passing stories we know on to the younger generations. There are some festivals that many associate with the ancestors, one of the most common being Samhain / Halloween and for me personally Winternights, but also I believe they are around all year I choose to remember them year round.