From L to R and top to bottom: My Uncle Bubba (Edgar H. Baker), Mama’s youngest sibling and my favorite uncle, who was a brilliant venture capitalist with a wicked sense of humor and huge heart; Uncle Ned Baker, Mama’s middle brother, who ran the four-generation family dairy business for decades with skill and grace; my Great-Uncle Powell Baker, the eldest of Granddaddy’s five brothers,  a savvy intellect and wise businessman appointed in the 1930s by the Governor as one of the original Commissioners of the Alabama Dairy Commission; my 2nd-Great Uncle George A. Hogan, a pioneering Birmingham physician who, when appointed State Prison Doctor by the Governor, was almost singlehandedly responsible for abolishing Alabama prisoner chain gangs in the early years of the last century after writing a scathing report on the practice, and who, with his five noted physician brothers, laid much of the groundwork for the city’s burgeoning medical complex which began with the Hillman Hospital in which they practiced and has today grown into what is indisputably one of the finest in the world; my two-time 2nd-Great Uncle George M. Elliott, a gentleman farmer of Story County, IA who also served as President of that county’s School Board for many years, “two-time” because two of his sisters, Luella and Suzanna, were married, in turn, to my Great-Grandfather Henry Clay Wilson (a founding settler of the Oklahoma Territory who participated in the Great Oklahoma Land Rush of 1889); my 3rd-Great Uncle Marion Elias Hogan who was murdered in the night during a burglary of his Bibb County, AL, emporium The New York Bargain House when he was only 45; my 4th-Great Uncle Judge Washington Moody, who founded the First National Bank of Tuscaloosa, AL in 1871 and served as president until his death 8 years later; my 5th Great Uncle James Briton Bailey who was one of “The Old 300” original Texas settlers awarded land grants by Stephen F. Austin and who settled near Brazoria, TX in 1823; my 8th Great Uncle Friedrich D. E. Schleiermacher (1768-1834), a German philosopher and theologian whose outsized influence has labeled him “the Father of Modern Liberal Theology” and who is surely the only one of my ancestors to have his portrait on a postage stamp; my 19th-Great Uncle Richard Plantagenet (Richard II of England, 1367-1400); my 38th-Great Uncle Pepin, namesake of the Broadway Musical “Pippin”, who served for a time as king of France before his early demise, after which his brother Charles took the throne, and became Charlemagne, first emperor of the Holy Roman Empire; my 48th-Great Uncle Tiberius II Constantine, Eastern Roman Emperor from 574 to 582; and my approximate 62nd-Great Uncle Joshua Ben Joseph, more commonly known as Jesus of Nazareth, the Son of Man. [All this, excepting the last one, can easily be verified here: https://www.ancestry.com/family-tree/tree/8130133/family (It costs nothing to visit Ancestry.com just to look and I invite you to do so).]

The First Thread: “Now I Lay Me Down to Sleep”

Christmas Card photo from those early years with my sister, Mimi, and me.

My parents were putting me to bed with nightly prayers long before I could remember it. I’m sure they started as soon as I could form the words. It was a tired world we lived in, where Norman Rockwell drove the Saturday Evening Post and the number one song on my third birthday was “How Much Is that Doggie in the Window.” After being held down as teens by the Great Depression only to be flung by the frightening excesses of WWII to the most exotic corners of the earth, all my parents Hank and Jane Wilson – and millions of their peers across the country – finally, really yearned for was the simple, the ordinary and the expected. So, it should be no surprise that the prayer we always, always said as they tucked me in – until I was at least of school age – was equally predictable: “Now I lay me down to sleep//I pray the Lord my soul to keep//If I should die before I wake//I pray the lord my soul to take.” And, then I would add my own personal coda: “God bless Mama and Daddy, in Jesus’ name, Amen.” Of course, as my perceptions enlarged, blessings for the grandparents were soon added, and when my sister came along, she also joined the list, which, as the nights turned into years, continued to grow until it embraced a whole “village:” neighbors, friends, aunts, uncles and dozens of cousins. Early on, it reached the point that my parents, well-versed in what was coming, would just leave me to finish when we got to that part, and many were the nights I fell asleep still thinking of people to add, never even making it to the “in Jesus’ name” part.

And – perhaps not as consistently as I’d like, or as humbly – as best I’ve been able in the decades since, I’ve tried to continue widening my prayer’s embrace, adding others to my list until, finally, I grew to realize that, if every human being is equally a child of the same Heavenly Father, then what I really should do is embrace everyone – include all the people of the earth in my prayer – for who would I, could I, omit without kicking sand into the eyes of God if we are all – every human being on the planet – loved with the love of a Father by Him who made us; if we are each and every one of us truly a son or daughter of God, without fear or favor, or respect of persons, places or proclivities?

Of course, logistically, even as a mental exercise, it is not easy to visualize eight billion people as individuals. On the other hand, everything, even praying, improves with practice, and when you start, as I did in those early days, with only your parents, then, over a lifetime, expand your conscious embrace as best you can, bit by bit, to include family, friends and, ultimately, a planet full of people, the step-by-step growth in “inclusion acuity” does help. Briefly stated (in reality this takes some time and dedication), I begin by praying for relatives and friends then move on to include our neighborhood, our nearest 10,000 neighbors, or so, and their angels. I can at least get my head around 10,000 people. Then I expand my scope to include the whole of the city, from 10,000 to 10,000,000, one neighborhood to 200 neighborhoods speaking 200 languages and following dozens of religions, then from the city to the whole of the planet, or 8 billion – the entirety of the planet in 200 countries, 1000 cities, a million towns, a billion byways, our 8 billion mutual cousins.

In other words, this first thread – that began on those early nights as a blessing for “Mama and Daddy” and grew to encompass the whole wide world – has wound itself into the essence of my being even as it has stitched together everyone on earth as family. And that ‘attitude adjustment,’ I find, is a source of imperturbable solace and strength. Richard asked me one day, after a passing stranger on the sidewalk had been particularly rude to us, why I wasn’t angry. “It’s hard to be mad at somebody you just prayed for,” I said, realizing, even as I said it, just how true it was.

The Second Thread: Not All Unseen Friends Are Imaginary

Okay, now please bear with me, dear reader, since this next question may seem ponderous, but I promise to lighten up quickly. The question is this: Who is Jesus, really?

There are many available answers, but none can be proved. He called Himself “Son of Man,” whatever that means, and even among learned theologians, opinions are so scattered as to be of little use. There are those who believe He never lived at all, or at best, was a clever charlatan with big ideas. Many others believe He was merely a man, but a man who could justifiably sit alongside Siddhartha, Lao Tzu, Abraham, Moses, Zoroaster, Mohammed and, one supposes, many other sages of old who might be named if they could but be remembered. I’d even go so far as to say that many “Christians” who go to church regularly really only believe Him to have been a man, a great man, perhaps, but, still, only a human who died on a cross and then went to Heaven like the rest of us hope to do, and, after all, aren’t all people who go to Heaven really “still alive?” So, perhaps, to say that Jesus lives is no great stretch….

And, then there are others, like me, who truly believe Jesus was something beyond extraordinary: the Creator Son of the Universe we inhabit; The One who made us and then became one of us the better to know and love us; an All-Powerful Personality who was, by choice, both completely Divine and completely human. But don’t think for a minute that I just accepted what someone else told me. My journey of faith has been fulsome and vetted by living.

The thread of my belief began to spin early on, for, if those nightly prayers were started before my memory tapes, our days at the Church of the Forest began even earlier. Mama had named it that, and it is, to this day, the only church ever built in Grayson, Alabama, a tiny sawmill town that used to be located smack in the middle of the lush and verdant Bankhead National Forest.

Think “Hansel and Gretel” and you’ll have the setting exactly, and, just as in the story, my forester father was the woodsman! His boss, a kindly lumberman named Clancy, was enlisted by my newly arrived parents to donate the materials to build the church in 1948, and then they rallied the townspeople to erect it. That was two years before I was born and, by the time I came along, it was a thriving little Baptist church. (They held an election – Baptist vs. Methodist – after it was erected. The Baptists won in a landslide.) Truly a “poor church serving the poor,” to quote Pope Francis, it had nothing like the resources needed to support a full-time preacher, so a succession of itinerant clergymen – from “fire and brimstone” to “down and dour” – made their way through, and, when there was no one else, Daddy filled in handsomely as a lay preacher.

It was there among friends – and everyone in Grayson was my friend – that I began to discover my singing voice, and “Jesus loves” were the first two words of the first song I ever learned (“Jesus Love Me this I Know”), and the second song, too, come to think of it (Jesus Loves the Little Children”). His name was said before every meal we ever ate, regardless of where or with whom we may have been eating, and His story was always front and center, whether at Wednesday night fellowship, or at Church School and preaching twice on Sunday, not to mention that He was right there in the pew racks, staring back at us even as we prayed to Him, with His flowing brown hair and deep blue eyes printed on cloud-shaped cardboard fans from the Double Springs funeral home.

Jesus fan on a stick. When I was a child, every country church in the south had a supply of these scattered among the pews, a necessity when summer Sunday sermons ran long.

In short, Jesus was as much a part of my childhood as the pine trees and sawdust. Of course, that doesn’t mean I really understood who or what He was. After all, life was immersed in Him in those parts, and as is often said, “If you want to know what water is, don’t ask a fish.”[1]

One of my favorite things about Sunday School in those early years was its exclusivity. Because I was the only child in town anywhere near my age, I was often the only pupil in the class, but like the good troopers they were, my teachers never seemed to mind, and would forge ahead using the Southern Baptist study guides, week after week, even if we were alone. And, it was in just such a class, when I was nearly five, that a frustrated Mrs. Lethcoe said to me with some insistence in her flat, North-Alabama drawl: “Tommy, Jesus just wonts to be your friend!” Well, now, that was something I could understand.[2]

Imaginary friends come naturally when you’re an only child living in the woods with nary a playmate for miles, and one of the reasons I took to Nell Lethcoe’s suggestion so instantly was because I already had relationships going with two friends who were, apparently, invisible to others (as neither Mama nor my babysitters could see them). They were little old British ladies who wore printed cotton tea dresses and flowery hats. Their names were Mrs. Seafey and Mrs. Coctiff, and I honestly have not the vaguest notion how I happened to cast them in those personalities. Nevertheless, they were my steadfast friends and we truly loved each other.

At some point in the last 40 years, the US Forest Service decided to leave the sawmill, but erase the mill town of Grayson, AL that surrounded it, the place where we lived from my birth to age seven. Now, all that is left of the simple but stately white house we lived in (and where this story took place), is this ivy-draped hole in the ground where our basement used to be. I had to clamber deep into the prickly underbrush just to find this. No doubt, the removal of Grayson from the center of a National Forest was an environmentally sound decision, but it is nevertheless, very sad to me.

Now, you may scoff if you like at the idea of “real” imaginary friends, but, dear reader, ineffable are the realities of faith, as they were meant to be. Author J. K. Rowling got it right, I think, in that last pivotal dream conversation between Harry Potter and Dumbledore, when Harry asks his mentor, “Is this real, or is this all just happening inside my head?” and the Professor looks at him with love and replies, “Of course it’s happening inside your head, Harry, but why should that mean it’s not real?” Were Mrs. Seafey and Mrs. Coctiff actually angels that only I, the innocent child, was permitted to see? I cannot say, but they were as real as real could be to me.

Every afternoon I would set the child-sized card table in my bedroom with my sister’s toy Blue Willow dishes and, at precisely four o’clock, the three of us would settle in for tea. We talked about many things over the months of our association, from the death of an elderly friend to the love of my baby sister, so once Mrs. Lethcoe had introduced the notion of a friendship with Jesus, I wasted no time asking the ladies that very afternoon if they agreed that we should invite Him to join us.

Well.

Within a nanosecond of my posing the question, there He was, sitting right across the table from me looking a lot like His picture on those funeral-home fans, only vital, robust, alive. His familiar appearance put me at ease, and His voice was low and gentle like a mountain brook burbling over rocks worn smooth. We loved each other instantly, or, at least, I loved Him instantly, as I gathered He had already been loving me for some time. The ladies, not a little astonished at what had just happened, were tickled to a rosy hue, and we had a wonderful visit together for the rest of the afternoon as He and I locked in a friendship that has only grown stronger with each passing year for, now, six decades. It is often said that to truly believe, you must believe as a child. I know exactly what that means.

We continued our afternoon teas for some weeks until, the final time, He told me it would be our last tea, but that He would always be as near as my desire; that I need but knock and He would never fail to answer any question or rise to any occasion. And, dear reader, after all this time enjoying His close association, nay, friendship, I can attest that He has been as good as His word to that little me all those years ago. To illustrate, I could relate many specific and moving examples, but this essay would be a book if I tried to tell them all in the fullness they deserve, so I only mention a few here without details [but with end notes]: when I was seven, I found myself unwittingly but not unwillingly maneuvered into signing an official Baptist commitment card to be His missionary for life[3]; at nine, I received a special dispensation from the Bishop for early baptism and confirmation as a Methodist[4]; at thirteen, in a profound prayer on the night of JFK’s assassination, I was led onto a professional path that held me fast for seventeen years, all the way through law school and ultimately to NYC; when I was seventeen, He helped me maintain my sanity through a very difficult relocation just before the end of my junior year in high school [5]; when I was nineteen, He confirmed to my satisfaction in another intense prayer that who I am was not a mistake and that my having been born gay was as natural and as much a part of His plan as the sun rising in the morning; and, when I was 23, during and after my mother’s losing battle with pancreatic cancer, two profoundly personal, inexplicable mystical interactions between my Friend and me occurred to absolutely seal the deal of our relationship for eternity [6].

In the crazy days of my youth, I used to ask Him for signs that I was on the right path, but I long ago stopped needing them when I began seeing them all the time, and the long and short of it is that for me to say, “I believe in Jesus,” is to understate the case. I know Jesus. We are BFFs in the most literal possible sense. I have seen Him with my own eyes sitting right across the table from me and heard Him with my own ears in the most unexpected of times and places. I know that He lives because He is my ever-present Companion, my long-time, oft-disappointed, ever-forgiving, proactive Loved One, and the thread of our association has only grown stronger and more resilient through the mercerizing years I have spent dogpaddling, as best I could, through life.

Oh, there have been times, even years, when my attention to our relationship has waned, but even then, when I finally came around, it has always been as it should be when old friends meet: as if there were no time between. That said, we are now far beyond those days, and the bonds of our companionship – of our real, true, living relationship – are, for me, unmistakable, undeniable and unbreakable.

The Third Thread: An Unexpected Obsession

Mama, age 8, 1933

Several years ago I received a letter addressed in an elegant hand on engraved blue note paper from someone I did not know, and, when I opened it, a confetti of small black and white photos fluttered to the floor. These, it turned out, were first- and second-grade school portraits of my mother and her siblings from the early 1930s, and had been sent by a distant cousin who had found them in one of her grandmother’s old trunks. I was thrilled, and was soon writing back to thank her and, while I was at it, to ask some questions about her branch of our family tree.

She did get back to me in great detail, but once the questions had surfaced, I decided to look for some answers on my own by logging onto Ancestry.com. The site was new and offering a two-week free trial membership, and, well, oh my word but did I fall down a rabbit hole! It was some months, as Richard will attest, before I finally resurfaced.

Uncle Ned, Age 7, 1933

And, what a Wonderland I found! The more I uncovered about the people from whom my parents and I sprang, the more I wanted to know. It was like the best novel ever, full of surprises and sudden turns to drive me forward, or rather, backward in time, as I met thousands of fascinating forebears and – as a quite unexpected delight – reconnected with history in a fresh and much more personal way through the stories of these real members of my family who fought wars, built log cabins, or traveled aboard clipper ships. It was an extraordinary journey, and as I continued, generation before generation, it became ever more clear just how rich the marvelous tapestry of family can be.

Aunt Peggy, age 6, 1933

Predictably, of course, there were some dead ends – family lines for which the information just petered out after a few generations – but a lot fewer than you might imagine, and I was surprised by just how many lines continued back for hundreds of years. Indeed, there were so many leads to follow and historical eddies to explore, that after following one line all the way back to the first century BC just because I was astonished that I could, I ultimately limited myself to researching only as far back as the “original immigrant” in each line. (But not, fortunately, before I clicked on yet another little green leaf “hint” to discover Lady Godiva, of all people, was one of my 30th great-grandmothers! Now, that was a rush.)

Uncle Joe, Age 9, 1933

And, though I did ultimately put down the genealogy for other pursuits, there were at least two great lessons that I came away with about the true nature of family and our intense interrelatedness across time and place.

The First Great Lesson: Families Don’t Grow on Trees

A family is not at all the vertical construct we generally imagine. In fact, families are shaped nothing like trees at all. Rather, picture a field of daylilies where expansion comes both from family groups of tubers multiplying underground, as well as from their seeds – pollinated by butterflies and planted by birds – spreading the beauty into every corner.

Now, this is counter-intuitive because the shape of the family we know is actually treelike, with a trunk and branches that leaf out into our loved ones. However, even with 20/20 hindsight, we don’t perceive the reality. Instead of envisioning the great flowering field of more than a million 18-greats-grandparents – let me say that again: more than a million, 1,048,576 to be exact, 18-greats-grandparents – that each of us, by definition, must have had only 450 years ago, we hardly think beyond those we can actually remember.

But the math doesn’t lie: 2×2=4 x2=8 x2=16 x2=32 x2=64 x2=128 x2=256 x2=512 x2=1024 x2=2048 x2=4096 x2=8192 x2=16,384 x2=32,768 x2=65,536 x2=131,072 x2=262,144 x2=524,288 x2=1,048,576. And, as hard as it is to believe, if you keep doubling it all the way back a thousand years, Lady Godiva, as it turns out, was only the most notorious of my 4.2 billion 3o-greats-grandparents!

I have struggled to find a way to illustrate just how VAST every family tree is but here’s another go. If every blue square in this chart represents a direct forebear (i.e., actual grandparent) the chart runs off the page after only six generations, and by the 20th would use up 9620 sheets of paper laid end-to-end at the same scale! If you could actually make a chart going all the way back to the time of Christ, you would need over 82 TRILLION sheets of graph paper, probably more than exist in the world, I’m thinking. Our interrelatedness is irrefutable.

The Second Great Lesson: We Are All Cousins

But that, you might well posit, is impossible. After all, there weren’t even 4.2 billion people on the planet in the 10^th Century, and, of course, you would be right. But in the end, it’s not about the size of the population but the number of fruitful matings, and it only took 2.1 billion of those. Plus, as it turns out, some of our ancestors were extremely good at conceiving. Consider two anecdotal examples: Genghis Khan and the passengers of the Mayflower. Only 45 years after the death of Genghis Khan, there were already 20,000 of his direct progenies in positions of power across the region, and today he has over 32 million direct descendants. [7],[8] Likewise, a staggering 35 million Americans claim to be ancestors of the original 24 surviving Mayflower males. 10% of the American population! [9]

In other words, we are all – and I do mean all – far more related than we think. Everyone reading this – however far away in time or space you may be from the here and now of this writing – is almost certainly my blood-kin cousin. And, even without the concentrated hubs arising from isolated populations or overreaching despots, this would still be unavoidable. Look at the math the other way ’round. Lady Godiva had eleven known children, but, again, for the sake of being ultra-conservative, let’s say she only had two who bore children, giving her four grandchildren who then only gave her eight great-grandchildren, etc., so that you generate the same multiples over generations as with the grandparents going the other way. Well, then, given a perfect progression, over 4.2 billion people living today share my 30th great-grandmother. And, the same calculus would also have to be true for every other one of my 4.2 billion 30th great-grandparents! How could we not be related? Seen through such a distant lens, the fabric of family is tighter than canvas and covers the whole of the earth.

Now, it is no doubt the case – at least common sense would allow – that Europeans are more related to each other than to Africans, who are more related to each other than to Asians, etc., but that said, we humans have been prone to cross-fertilization as far back as the Neanderthals,[10] and, it only took one 12^th Century marriage between a Crusader and a Mesopotamian, for example, to join millions of previously distinct forebears into one family that, by today, has extended the bloodlines of both to a great proportion of the planetary population.

A Joining of Threads

All these were fascinating, fun discoveries, but I still could not quite fathom my compulsion to keep looking deeper and deeper into family history. Why the obsession? What was my inner Father trying to tell me; teach me? I often took the question to Him in prayer, but the answer remained elusive. I did, however, after many hundreds of hours, finish the job of naming my forebears back to the original immigrants as best I could.

Of course, I should have known, having prayed the question with a sincere heart, that an answer to my quandary would eventually appear, and, though it took its time falling into place, it was more than satisfactory.

As I did my research, my growing understanding of family ties did have an impact upon my prayers for others – from the neighborhood, to the city, to the planet as described above – since I began thinking of all our neighbors as something significantly more, as actual cousins however distant, and it really does feel differently when you visualize them that way.[12] There is an undeniable intensification of the emotional investment when you truly see those you are praying for, however unknown, as literal family. Blood, as they say, is thicker than water, and what had become increasingly clear to me was the utter impossibility of drawing any dividing lines between our one family of, now, eight billion cousins. Family, as we learn from our very cradles, is always to be accepted with love and – despite foibles or follies, if necessary – not to be judged unkindly. How wondrous it would be, then, were all embraced as kin, to dismiss unkindness altogether!

And then, at long last, one marvelous morning as I prayed, all these threads of understanding, some having taken a lifetime to work their way up through my consciousness, came together in a blink, as most revelations do. Prostrate in the dark of my bedroom, I came to that part of the prayer where our nearest ten-thousand neighbors are my focus, and, almost without realizing it, prayed “for our ten-thousand nearest cousins… YOUR ten thousand nearest cousins…” And then I stopped as the full force of what had just happened washed through me. Of course! That was the point! I finally understood what my oldest Friend, my dear Friend Jesus, who had been holding my hand since those days around the tea table, had been trying to tell me. He had inspired my inquiries, step-by-step, until I could finally, fully see the reality that we – He and I and, yes, you – are not only friends, but literal, blood family!

And with the next breath came the next realization – flowing from my long-established understanding that Jesus was the eldest of a large family of children – that if they, too, had been my long-ago cousins, then He was also, by definition, my long-ago uncle! Uncle Jesus!

The “brotherhood of man under the Fatherhood of God” is an old but valid trope – though I would today amend it to read ‘sisterhood and brotherhood…’ – that relies upon a wondrous spiritual nexus: God as Heavenly Father of all His material children. But how much more tangible is this newly seen connection: to be a member of the actual family of God? And, better yet, to understand the Son of God to actually be one of your own? It’s one thing to ask a loving spiritual, but Heavenly, Father for forgiveness, and quite another to ask your favorite earthly Uncle for a favor. And, after all, He did choose “Son of Man” as his preferred appellation, putting the focus squarely upon His humanness rather than His divinity.

Uncles are Cool

As it happens, benevolent uncles were a big part of my childhood. My grandfather had several brothers, and my favorite relatives in the early years were my great uncles Edgar and Powell, both of whom were long-widowed and doted on me at every opportunity. Beyond that, my mother’s brothers, Ned and Bubba – yes, Bubba – were fundamental to the health of my self-esteem as I grew up truly a stranger in a strange land. Though I may have been the family’s limp-wristed misfit – the inexplicable outlier – they were always there when I needed them with a word of encouragement or even to help with more mundane things like buying a used car, or refilling the honey jar from the 55-gallon drum of Tupelo honey kept on Great-Grandmama’s back porch.

So, the realization that Jesus was not only my BFF, but my Uncle, as well, was a wonderful discovery, and one I took instantly to heart. Of course, it may not mean very much to you, if you don’t believe, as I do, that He is the Master Creator Son of the Universe who made not only our world, but millions of similar worlds to populate our heavens; or if you don’t believe, as I do, that out of all the worlds He made, He chose this one as the site of his materialization experience – from defenseless infant to Divine Teacher – the better to know us and love us as one of us, as well as to show not only us, but all His vast, starlit creation, the Way of Love through His perfected example. But I do believe all of those things, so for such a God to be, also, my literal Uncle is more than unimaginable, it is a gift far greater than anything I could possibly deserve or even ever have dreamed. God is my Uncle? Not only is He mine, He’s yours, as well.

And that, my dear cousin, is news worth sharing.

– February 9, 2014 [Seventh revision, April 8, 2023]

© 2023 George Thomas Wilson, All rights reserved.