Asatru Folk Assembly - September 10, 2026


Connections


Episode Stats


Length

12 minutes

Words per minute

153.9

Word count

1,950

Sentence count

106

Harmful content

Hate speech

1

sentences flagged


Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
00:00:00.000 Hello, my name is Daniel Young. I'm a Goathe with the Austro Folk Assembly. Thank you for 0.99
00:00:07.760 listening. Today's sermon is titled, Connections. One of the teachings that stayed with me over the
00:00:16.200 years is Stephen McNallan's teaching about connections. It's a simple idea. We exist
00:00:22.520 within a series of relationships, connecting us to our gods, our ancestors, living folk,
00:00:28.300 to the world around us, and to the generations yet born.
00:00:33.420 When we begin to think seriously about those connections,
00:00:36.500 we begin to see that very little about our lives exists entirely on its own.
00:00:41.120 We are part of something that began long before any of us arrived.
00:00:45.560 And if we do our work well, it will continue long after we're gone.
00:00:50.580 This idea has become increasingly important to how we understand our religious lives.
00:00:54.700 we can look backward and see our ancestors stretching into a past so distant that eventually
00:01:00.900 their names disappeared from memory we can look around us and see our families our friends our
00:01:07.420 communities the land beneath our feet and the world in which we have been given the opportunity
00:01:12.740 to live we can also look forward toward children and grandchildren and generations of descendants
00:01:20.900 whose names and faces we will never know.
00:01:24.220 We stand somewhere in the middle of all that.
00:01:30.700 And for our brief time here,
00:01:32.680 the inheritance has been placed in our hands.
00:01:35.260 We receive it, honor it, we improve upon it,
00:01:39.140 and then eventually we pass it on.
00:01:42.480 We should begin with the fact
00:01:43.940 that we have received an extraordinary amount
00:01:45.960 simply by being born into this world.
00:01:49.040 None of us started from nothing.
00:01:50.900 Before we ever drew our first breath, countless people had already lived, struggled, worked, loved, buried their dead, worshipped their gods, celebrated victories, and handed something forward to the next generation.
00:02:07.720 That continued generation after generation until eventually life reached us.
00:02:12.720 we've received more than life itself though we received language and stories
00:02:19.260 knowledge and customs tools and technology we inherited communities that other people built
00:02:27.180 and knowledge that other people discovered we traveled roads that we did not build
00:02:32.320 we benefit from work we didn't perform and we possess knowledge accumulated through thousands
00:02:38.100 of years of human experience. The same thing happens on the smaller scale of the family.
00:02:44.800 We carry things that came to us through parents and grandparents, often without realizing how far
00:02:49.880 those things have traveled. Maybe a grandfather taught a father how to work with his hands,
00:02:55.160 and that father eventually taught his children. Maybe a grandmother taught her children how to
00:03:00.340 hold a family together during difficult times, and that lesson survived yet another generation.
00:03:05.360 maybe what reached us was simply an example of courage endurance loyalty or just keeping one's
00:03:13.400 word those things travel through families and they travel for generations when we understand
00:03:20.020 how much we have already received gratitude should follow naturally that gratitude lies
00:03:25.980 at the heart of the gift cycle we receive and because we have received we give and through
00:03:32.880 For giving, relationships are maintained and strengthened.
00:03:37.760 We understand this readily in our relationships with our Iser.
00:03:41.240 We approach them with gifts, prayers, praise, and gratitude.
00:03:45.360 We recognize the blessings that flow through our lives and respond through our own acts of giving.
00:03:51.660 The same principle can help us understand our relationship with our ancestors.
00:03:55.920 We honor them through the rites we perform.
00:03:58.000 We speak their names, preserve their stories, keep their photographs, light candles and incense, and place gifts upon our altars.
00:04:06.300 These are meaningful acts because remembrance itself maintains that connection.
00:04:11.260 Yet the relationship follows us when we walk away from the altar and return to our ordinary lives.
00:04:17.240 Every day gives us opportunities to honor those who have come before us through the lives we choose to live.
00:04:22.540 When we cultivate courage and discipline or provide for our families, pursue wisdom, practice hospitality, and become people upon whom others can depend, we are doing something worthy with the life that was handed to us.
00:04:36.380 Virtue becomes a part of the gift that we return.
00:04:40.300 This is why our conduct matters so much.
00:04:43.200 We live among people who are connected to us.
00:04:45.160 Our spouses, children, grandchildren, friends, neighbors, and communities all experience the consequences of the people we chose to become.
00:04:55.080 Courage spreads itself outward, as does generosity, discipline, loyalty, hospitality, wisdom.
00:05:03.380 These strengthen the relationships around us.
00:05:05.920 Through those relationships, our actions can reach considerably farther than we may ever see.
00:05:11.160 The same responsibility extends to the world around us.
00:05:15.160 We live upon land that existed long before us and will remain long after we are gone.
00:05:20.280 We share that world with the land they do and countless living things.
00:05:24.220 Our homes, communities, the woods and fields around us.
00:05:28.340 The places where we gather become part of the inheritance temporarily placed in our care.
00:05:33.860 Caring for these places is another way of acknowledging this connection.
00:05:37.920 This leads naturally to the question of improvement.
00:05:40.360 every inheritance eventually reaches a living set of hands and right now those hands are ours
00:05:48.440 we have the opportunity to preserve what is worthy repair what has been damaged
00:05:53.040 and strengthen what has grown weak we should add something of our own before passing it onward
00:05:59.820 there's a very old and very human idea contained in planting a tree whose shade we may never enjoy
00:06:07.500 Someone puts that tree into the ground, knowing that years may pass before it becomes large enough to shelter anyone.
00:06:14.420 The person who planted it may never see it fully grown.
00:06:17.920 They plant it because somebody will.
00:06:21.020 Much of the work worth doing in our lives works exactly that way.
00:06:25.240 We teach our children lessons whose full value they may only understand when they have children of their own.
00:06:31.660 We establish family traditions that have become more meaningful with every generation that practices them.
00:06:37.600 We care for land whose trees may someday tower over people who never knew us.
00:06:43.300 We build communities that may continue after their founders have long since joined the ancestors.
00:06:49.480 We preserve stories and practices for our descendants who have yet to draw the first breath.
00:06:56.900 There's something deeply religious about that.
00:06:59.900 This kind of work, it places our lives within a much larger span of time.
00:07:05.220 We become another set of hands carrying something that was handed to us forward.
00:07:11.060 That also means we should look carefully at what we have inherited.
00:07:15.300 Our ancestors were human beings who lived full human lives.
00:07:18.420 They succeeded, they struggled, learned, they built, loved, fought and endured, and they made mistakes.
00:07:27.960 Their entire experience belongs to our inheritance.
00:07:31.660 Their successes can provide examples for us.
00:07:34.420 Their failures also provide lessons.
00:07:36.500 And their endurance reminds us of what human beings are capable of.
00:07:41.580 We take those questions together and ask a simple question.
00:07:45.820 How can we leave this better than we found it?
00:07:48.760 We can ask that about our families.
00:07:50.900 We can ask it about our homes and communities.
00:07:53.740 We can ask it about our traditions, our religious practices.
00:07:57.020 We can ask it about our relationship with the land.
00:07:59.740 We can even ask it about ourselves.
00:08:02.340 What have we strengthened during the years entrusted to us?
00:08:04.940 What have we learned?
00:08:06.200 What have we repaired?
00:08:08.000 What have we built that someone else will someday receive?
00:08:12.380 These questions become even more important when we turn our attention toward the generations yet unborn.
00:08:18.460 It's easy to feel connected to an ancestor whose photograph sits on our altars.
00:08:23.260 It's easy to understand the responsibility toward a child or grandchild who stands right in front of you.
00:08:28.780 It takes a little more imagination, though, to recognize our connection to someone who may not yet be born for a hundred years.
00:08:36.100 Those people will live with the consequences of the choices that we are making at this very moment.
00:08:42.460 They'll inherit families shaped by families that we are shaping now.
00:08:47.040 They will inherit traditions influenced by the traditions that we practice now.
00:08:50.480 they may hear stories about things happening within our lifetime they may walk across land
00:08:57.080 that we cared for use things that we built repeat words that we taught our own kids
00:09:01.860 or practice rights that we help preserve in that sense we are already becoming their ancestors
00:09:09.240 we usually think of becoming an ancestor as something that happens at death
00:09:14.080 Yet the life that future generations will remember is being lived right now.
00:09:22.160 The stories that they may someday tell about us are being written in ordinary moments.
00:09:28.280 The inheritance they will receive is being assembled through thousands of choices that may seem very small while we were making them.
00:09:35.380 Someday our part in this work will be finished.
00:09:38.120 Our children will become elders.
00:09:39.780 Our grandchildren will themselves become grandparent.
00:09:42.960 The things that we spend our lives building will pass into their hands, just as the work of previous generations eventually passed into ours.
00:09:51.320 Perhaps someone will place your photograph upon the altar.
00:09:56.100 Perhaps a descendant will tell a story about us around the family table.
00:10:00.380 Perhaps someone will one day own one of our tools and remember who first used it.
00:10:06.000 Maybe our names survive for several generations, or perhaps eventually they will fade, as nearly all names do.
00:10:12.960 what can continue much further is the effect we had on the people who followed us
00:10:17.280 and that brings us back to connections we're connected to the icr through worship
00:10:23.120 gifting gratitude and relationship we're connected to the ancestors through blood blood memory
00:10:29.280 inheritance and veneration we're connected to the living through family friendship community
00:10:35.360 responsibility and shared experience we are connected to the land and the beings around us
00:10:40.720 because this world is that which sustains our lives we are connected to the generations yet
00:10:46.080 unborn because they will someday inherit whatever we leave behind all those connections meet here
00:10:53.200 and the lives we are living at this very moment behind us stand countless generations whose lives
00:10:58.400 eventually made ours possible around us are the people with whom we share this short span of time
00:11:05.120 Ahead of us are generations we will never meet, waiting unknowingly to receive what we place into their hands.
00:11:12.120 And for a little while, we are caretakers of that inheritance.
00:11:16.120 So let us receive it with gratitude and honor through the quality of our own lives.
00:11:22.120 Let us strengthen what has been entrusted to us and add something worthy of being remembered.
00:11:28.120 Let us care for our families, communities, our traditions, and the world around us
00:11:33.120 us with an awareness that our actions travel further than our own lifetimes.
00:11:38.740 Then, when our time has come, we take our own place among the ancestors.
00:11:43.580 May those who follow us be able to look upon what we left behind and know that we carried
00:11:47.480 our part of the burden well.
00:11:50.020 We receive what those left before us placed into our hands.
00:11:53.960 We honor them through the way we live.
00:11:56.820 We improve what is entrusted to us.
00:11:59.200 And when our work is finished, we pass it on.
00:12:01.840 May those who follow us do the same
00:12:04.700 Words are wind, deeds are iron
00:12:08.440 If you like this material, leave a comment below
00:12:12.280 And don't forget to like and subscribe
00:12:13.740 You can also check out our weekly live stream, Victory Never Sleeps, right here on YouTube
00:12:18.800 You can also find us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to your podcasts
00:12:25.120 And if you're not a member of the AFA, what are you waiting for?
00:12:28.340 Head over to runestone.org and click on the join link
00:12:32.360 Thank you for listening.
00:12:34.100 Hail the Aesir, hail the ancestors, hail the folk, and hail the Austrian Folk Assembly.