June 21, 2009

Forgiving Our Fathers

The Rev. Mark Ward, Minister

Unitarian Universalist Church of Asheville

Asheville, NC

SERMON

Walking into the houses of our fathers, it is said, means beginning in questions and entering into mysteries. The role of mother in a child’s life originates with biological fact: she is the child’s bearer and first source of nourishment. Biology offers no guidance to a father’s role. Indeed, from a biological perspective there is strictly speaking no specific role for the father after his insemination that helps create that early embryo.

Human development, of course, is more complex than the simple biological facts, but those facts nonetheless raise a quandary about what place the father, that male contributor to a child’s existence, ought to have in that child’s life. It is a quandary that I dare say occurs to, even bedevils every man who ever has been a father. It certainly has occurred to me.

So, it is little wonder that when we look at some of humankind’s oldest stories the role of the father, not infrequently, is an ambivalent one.  The Greek myths portray the early gods as at-best-distant fathers when they weren’t consuming their offspring, who later, on one occasion, had to be rescued from the god’s innards. Many of the celebrated heroes of myth also qualify as dismal dads. Agamemnon, of the Iliad, for example, had his daughter sacrificed to gain fair winds on his trip to Troy.

In the Bible, relations between fathers and their children aren’t much happier. The premier example comes in the story of Abraham, who, ordered by God to make a sacrifice of his son Isaac, accedes to do so before God himself calls him back from the deed. Reflected in that story is the struggle that many men endure between their own sense of their life’s calling and an only vaguely understood duty to their children.

Sad to say, many see fit to sacrifice that duty to what they envision in some way as a higher cause. Others, befuddled by the expectations of fatherhood, essentially check out, physically or emotionally, from any serious engagement with their children. That doesn’t necessarily mean they won’t be around, going through the motions, figuratively punching the time clock and accomplishing chores. But they’re not truly present. That spark at the center of their lives is not engaged. And that is where the lack is felt.

Some years ago in his book Iron John the poet Robert Bly reported that in men’s gathering where he had taken part, participants had complained in many different ways that, in his words, “there is not enough father.” The sentence, Bly said, implies that father is a substance like salt, an essential part of the diet. And in recent years as psychologists have explored the role of fathers in upbringing they have confirmed that, while our biological existence may not require the participation of fathers, our psychological health does.

Men inevitably bring a different rhythm, a different style to upbringing than women do. Our culture plays up the demanding, forward-driving style of masculinity, but there is also the humorous, playful, irreverent side, as well as the capacity for gentle compassion. All of these are facets of the gift that fathers have to give to their children, yet depending on the context where those men are raised they may or may not be encouraged, even permitted to express them.

How many of us, I wonder, have known interchanges such as the one W.S. Merwin describes? An exchange where we are on the verge of a significant moment of sharing with our fathers that suddenly is short-circuited? We each see it coming and both in some inexpressed way steer clear of it.

Some 30 years ago my father wrote a letter to me and my four siblings describing his interactions with his father, my grandfather, on one day during the final weeks of his life. Both men were physicians – my grandfather a radiologist and my father a psychiatrist. And so, my father wrote, much of the conversation centered on details of his condition, which was clearly terminal. At one point, he said, he probed a little further, asking his father if he had any feelings about what was going on, if he wanted to talk about anything. His only reply was a quick shake of the head. My father volunteered that he regretted that the two of them had never been able to talk together, and, he added, “I said that I loved him.” His father’s reply, my father wrote, was “I know,” and nothing more.

Walking away from his father’s room, my father wrote, “I have the awful feeling of waste.” He said that he regretted that the barriers that had long divided them could not be breached, even at the end. And he wrote to me and my siblings, “let’s all of us make sure that your father and his children do not repeat this tragic situation.”I would like to be able report that he, and we, kept that resolution, but the truth is we didn’t. As I was growing up, my father’s practice kept him working 60- to 80-hour weeks, which meant that while we lived relatively well, we saw little of him. That pattern continued as each of the children left for college and careers and even when he settled into retirement.

I am happy, though, that when the time came four years ago that, as had happened with his father, terminal cancer was bringing him to the end of his life, we had both been able to tell each other in a heart-felt way that we loved each other. Still, when the last days came in October with a hurricane bearing down on the hospice that was caring for him, he withdrew again back into himself, and in his final hours we were left to watch his body desperately struggle against death, unable to console him.             

So, how do we understand this gift that we hope to give and get as fathers, daughters and sons? The Hebrew scriptures frame that which fathers look to give and children look to get as a blessing. Rachel Naomi Remen says this is important because, in her words, “when we bless someone, we touch the unborn goodness in them and wish it well.” 

Strictly speaking, she says, “a blessing is not something that one person gives another. [It] is a moment of meeting, a certain kind of relationship in which both people involved remember and acknowledge their true nature and worth, and strengthen what is whole in one another. . . . When people are blessed they discover that their lives matter, that there is something in them worthy of blessing.”             

In the movie “Smoke Signals,” the main character is prompted to travel with a friend to pick up his father’s things after learning that he has recently died. The father, alcoholic and abusive, had left the family years before and the son was reluctant to go, but his friend urged him to and offered to help pay for the trip.             

Arriving sullen and suspicious, the son discovers a friend of his father’s, a woman whose relationship to his father was unclear. But she draws him out and tells him how much his father spoke of him. He won’t buy it, but finally she convinces him to enter his father’s trailer. There he discovers, deep in his father’s wallet, a faded photo of his mother and himself that on the back is labeled “home.” Embodied in that photo is the blessing he sought, the assurance that he was, indeed, loved, and it gives him the opening to begin remaking his life.The film ends with the son’s friend speaking as if from a trance: “How do we forgive our fathers? Maybe in a dream. Do we forgive our fathers for leaving us too often, or forever when we were little?Maybe for scaring us with unexpected rage, or making us nervous because there never seemed to be any rage there at all.Do we forgive our fathers for marrying or not marrying our mothers? For divorcing or not divorcing our mothers?And shall we forgive them for their excesses of warmth? Or coldness?Shall we forgive them for pushing or leaning?Or shutting doors? Or speaking through walls?Or never speaking? Or never being silent?Will we forgive our fathers in our age? Or in theirs? Or in their death?”                 

The days leading up to my father’s memorial service were a haze, in part because of the chaotic circumstances surrounding it – what with the hurricane damage and my father’s stressful last hours – and in part because only days after my father’s death I was with Debbie at her mother’s bedside when she died.             

Thankfully the role of delivering the eulogy was given to someone outside the family, the man who my father had always identified as his best friend, and yet who I had never met before that day. A former Methodist minister, he told us that he came to know our father by having been treated and healed by him and eventually recruited by him as a part of his therapeutic team. He told us of many ways that our father had changed the lives of many people, that he was a “true, innovative healer.”  He was known for taking on the tough cases and brought many “forgotten schizophrenics out of the back wards of the state psychiatric hospital and into the mainstream of life.”             

He said my father beamed with pride over the accomplishments of all of us children and at my mother’s preaching in her second career in ministry. “He loved his family. He loved his patients. He loved his friends,” this man told us, “but he also ran into the reality that love is never enough.”             

“Sometimes he got it right. Sometimes he got it wrong. Just like each of us.” Still, he concluded, speaking to him, “you gave life to many, many people. And we celebrate you for your gift. Be at peace.”             

At peace, indeed. It was the blessing I needed. The opportunity to finally hear of and take pride in the life of this man who I loved and who I know loved me. That love may not have been enough. Certainly more frequent expression of it would have helped. But it gave me a place from which to understand him and forgive him all that I had hoped for but never received from him.             

It is in the capacity of every father to offer a blessing to his children, to give them through his own genius and his own gifts the understanding that their lives matter, that they are worthy in his eyes. We understand that fatherhood is and must be a constructed reality, not an inherited or inherent one, something that some are born to assume and others are not suited to try. It is a reality created out of commitment, intention and love. And so it is the preserve not only of those able to pass their gametes on to another but also of those men who can resolve in many ways to touch the unborn goodness in another and wish it well, those who can sit down and tell a story while painlessly lifting the splinter out.The good news for those of us blessed to be fathers now or who are soon to be is that it is never too late to start. It is, as Joyce Poley wrote, a matter of our taking one more step, ‘til there is peace for us and everyone, just one more step.

Let us praise, then, those who endeavor to take that step, whatever pressures their own lives may bring, whatever demons may haunt them, who stick around and stay involved, who challenge us and cheer us and never let us forget how dear we are, who bless us, over and over again, with their own wild and precious lives.