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Spiritual
Lives of Fathers
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The
Rev. Naomi King
River of Grass Unitarian
Universalist Congregation
Plantation, Florida
June
15, 2008
©
2008
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We are, each us, the spiritual legacies of
our fathers and grandfathers and the people who served as our fathers
and grandfathers. That is the truth expressed in the video story “What
Dads Can’t Do” by Douglas Wood: the love is not expressed always in
words, but in what dads can’t do – set up tents without assistance and
not throwing very fast or hard – in the love and coaching and
connection with their children.[i] Fatherly spiritual legacies
also are deeply impressed in the ways we separate from our parents, and
how we then go on integrating the lessons – the legacies – we learned
from our parents. This is Koi’s story: his legacy are the kola nuts,
which ultimately help him perform the necessary tasks to have children
of his own and pass on his wisdom. Three gifts that we carry and
celebrate from our fathers are: patience or attentiveness, sacrifice,
and steadfastness.[ii] They are, not surprisingly, the
characteristics of being a good sport that Wood’s story calls us back
to, and the characteristics of snake, crocodile, and ants in the
Liberian folktale. These are three of the spiritual legacies I carry
from my father and grandfather and all the people who have served as
fathers and grandfathers in my life. My hope is that we will all
recognize them and practice them more widely, in celebration of
spiritually grounded fathers.
If I
learned one lesson from my father it is this: books do not write
themselves. No matter how hard one may wish it, no matter how
beautifully it was told in a dream, no matter how convincingly conveyed
around the table, books do not write themselves. As I say to him
frequently these days, neither do sermons and I work on a weekly
deadline. Writing of any kind typically is a kind of wrestling, a
spiritual and emotional and intellectual and physical feat where the
writer is forcing the body into an unnatural and uncomfortable position
for hours at a time while massaging words and squeezing phrases and
putting all of one’s heart into something only to have to edit it out a
little while later. No, books do not write themselves, and it is the
careful, painstaking craft of wordsmithing, turning this word and that
on the anvils of heart and ear, hammering and heating and hammering and
tempering and hammering, tapping, heating, tapping until the thing is
finished from head and heart and hands. It takes deeply cultivated
patience, and is at the same time the means of cultivating patience.
The practice leads into more practice, the goal ever elusive, for the
next book or the next sermon is just around the corner, waiting, since
it cannot write itself.
When I
struggle with impatience – as I often do – I have to remind myself that
little we make worthwhile just happens without patient attention. For
what I am aware I value increasingly as I grow older are my
relationships. They turn out to be what I have always valued, but I
didn’t know how to say that. I value knitting because it connects me
with my relationship with my grandmother, identifying mushrooms because
these signify my mother’s pursuit of the bolete and chanterelle, this
story because it is part of my friend’s, this moment because it was
with you. These relationships are what point toward meaning and purpose
and gratitude and love and affection. Since impatience is a sin of
relationship – a way to miss the mark of staying connected – the work
of patience is that which returns butt to chair, pen to paper, fingers
to keyboard, listening ear to speaking mouth, brother to sister, friend
to friend, father to child. The poet Li-Young Li describes his
experience of having this spiritual gift passed from his father to him,
as a small boy of seven.
“The
Gift” by Li-Young Lee (The Rose (1986) Boa Editions Limited)
To pull the metal splinter from my palm
my father
recited a story in a low voice.
I watched
his lovely face and not the blade.
Before
the story ended, he’d removed
the iron
sliver I thought I’d die from.
I can’t
remember the tale,
but hear
his voice still, a well
of dark
water, a prayer.
And I
recall his hands,
two
measures of tenderness
he laid
against my face,
the
flames of discipline
he raised
above my head.
Had you
entered that afternoon
you would
have thought you saw a man
planting
something in a boy’s palm,
a
silver tear, a tiny flame.
Had you
followed that boy
you would
have arrived here,
where I
bend over my wife’s right hand.
Look how
I shave her thumbnail down
so
carefully she feels no pain.
Watch as
I lift the splinter out.
I was
seven when my father
took my
hand like this…
I did
what a child does
when he’s
given something to keep.
I kissed
my father.[iii]
Fathers
need lots of practice baiting hooks.[iv] Koi treats the snake’s
mother so she can get better. The ants can retrieve every grain that
otherwise was lost. Writing happens one word at a time.[v]
Patient attention is a spiritual practice for all of us, and in our
practicing it, relationships are gained and the world is renewed with a
precious gift.
“Dads
can’t pitch a baseball very hard, or hit one very far,” Doug Wood
writes. This, until we’re a certain age, is s-o-o-o-o-o true. There is
a great deal of sacrifice that fathers are called upon to engage,
sacrifice that builds the skills and lives of the next generation, and
sacrifice that are just another way of saying “I love you,” even
sacrificing their most ardent wishes to have the best possible vision
and outcome for each of their children. But at some point, most fathers
encounter the issue of sacrifice – time, work, ability, dream, outcome.
The sacrifice play is the most noble of any in baseball, and those of
us who love baseball hold onto those moments because they help carry us
through the sacrifice plays we face each day. In a world that says
competition is the name of the game, it takes a mighty effort of spirit
and love and will to not put one’s all into moving one’s self forward,
but in moving one’s child forward in a different way. The poet Robert
Hayden, who grew up terribly poor in Detroit during the 1920s, was
barred from playing baseball because of his terrible eyesight. So he
learned his spiritual lesson about sacrifice from his father another
way, retold in his poem, “Those Winter Sundays”:
“Those Winter Sundays”
Sundays too my father got up early
and put
his clothes on in the blueblack cold,
then with
cracked hands that ached
from
labor in the weekday weather made
banked
fires blaze. No one ever thanked him.
I’d wake
and hear the cold splintering, breaking.
When the
rooms were warm, he’d call,
and
slowly I would rise and dress,
feeling
the chronic angers of that house,
Speaking
indifferently to him,
who had
driven out the cold,
and
polished my good shoes as well.
What did
I know, what did I know
of love’s
austere and lonely offices?[vi]
Our
sacrifices and the way we teach this lesson may take and may have taken
different routes. The writer Gary Soto speaks of his terrible struggle
with the devastating illness of depression and how he had to sacrifice
to raise his daughter, simply by getting up and staying present each
day. He observes:
“Occasionally I see fathers with their
daughters, fathers who, on first glance, might be bored as they hover
over them at play. But how many are ill, mentally pulled into
themselves, depressed and fraudulent protectors, bad clowns squeezing
out their own cajoling laughter? On the surface, these fathers may
appear familial magistrates for their children, fathers who loom tall
as trees. They are cheerful; they hold pails for them, toys, or upright
spilled trikes. The carefully peel back ice cream wrappers and rub a
healthy gloss on apples. They are young fathers, not unlike me sixteen
years before. What’s in the heart? I sometimes wonder. What advice
could I, a man walking past, offer? How could I solve the first crisis
of a child falling over shoelaces? Or the serious struggles that
follow? I walk past, or jog past. What can I say in my injured heart?
My friend, the world was ill, and I still got it done.”[vii]
For some
fathers, the daily sacrifice is simply in getting the work of raising
children done. Indeed, one of the things the child learns is how the
father has resilience to sacrifice and get it done, to sacrifice and
keep going, to deal with the world’s limitations, with the body’s
shortcomings, with illness and addiction and the economy and failure,
and to find a way through with strength and grace.
Of
course, sacrifice as a spiritual practice requires a good measure of
patience – giving up instant rewards may indeed be one of the earliest
things fathers and the rest of us are called to sacrifice as we go
through our lives. The uncertainty of the end, the wisdom to love
wholly but release outcome, the ability to endure the unthinkable, the
heart-breaking, the capacity to keep slogging even during the most
bitter and fearful moments of a father-child relationship are all part
of the lesson of steadfastness. Mark Twain quipped, “When I was
14, I couldn’t believe how ignorant my father was. By the time I turned
21, I was astounded how much the old man had learned in just seven
years.”[viii] David Sheff’s remarkable memoir, Beautiful Boy: A
Father’s Journey Through His Son’s Addiction is a testament to the
spiritual lessons Sheff had to learn, the three “c’s” of
Al-Anon.[ix] He didn’t cause his son’s addiction, he can’t cure
it, and he can’t control it. Sheff admits he still struggles with that
first “c”, but his growth in practicing care for his whole family and
in steadfastness is in his learning to accept the second and third.
Steadfastness is not in trying to control the lives of our children, or
to have our parents’ desired outcomes for us rule our lives.
Steadfastness is part and parcel of unconditional love. But
steadfastness only really kicks into gear when the relationship
develops into one of healthy interdependence. Sheff writes:
“Rather than codependent and enabling,
with me trying to control him – even if to save him – our relationship
can evolve into one of independence, acceptance, and compassion, with
healthy boundaries. The love is a given…My children will live with or
without me. It is a staggering realization for a parent, but one that
ultimately frees us to let our children grow up. I wish I had gotten
here quicker, but I couldn’t. If only parenting were easier. It never
will be. If only life were easier. It isn’t -- nor is that my
goal any longer. Once I desperately wanted things to be simpler, but my
worldview was broken over the course of Nic’s addiction and my stay in
the ICU. From them, I learned another lesson: that I can accept – in
fact am relieved to accept – a world of contradictions, wherein
everything is gray and almost nothing is black and white. There is much
good, but to enjoy the beauty, the love, one must bear the painful.”[x]
Steadfastness
as the spiritual legacy bequeathed to us is perhaps one of the ultimate
gifts to celebrate yet it is perhaps the most complicated. One
doesn’t bequeath steadfastness in a minute or an afternoon. One does
not do so by saving one’s children and cushioning them as they reach
adolescence and young adulthood from the pain of this life and the
choices they must make to become adults. Koi had his kola nuts, but it
was his choice how to use them – to further his future and begin the
cycle anew, or to eat them or throw them away. We give our children
tools, but we cannot bequeath the toolbox we’re still using.
Steadfastness begins in the hard spiritual work of holding onto one’s
self and one’s spouse and one’s friends and one’s life as the life of
child and parent separates inexorably, sometimes horrifyingly. The love
has to be a given. We have to learn how to hold and teach how to hold
the contradictions.
All three
of these legacies are spiritual gifts of practice day in and day out.
Together, they build a solid rock wall of faith, of endurance from the
stones in our lives. Rick Bass describes how he imparted these lessons
to his daughters:
“I do not
know how to staunch against the coming tides. I work at being more
receptive to the joys of the moment – to inhaling them more deeply. I
try to be as constant as I can. I am firm and try, in the beautiful
heart of my love, not to become manipulated. I try to stand firm.
“Mary Katherine and Lowery and I are
building a rock wall…The rock wall wanders – almost staggers, in
places, through the woods, enclosing nothing, bounding and imprisoning
nothing. We build it only because we like the beauty of it, and the
durability of stone, and the way it fits the forest as it wanders up
and down the hills, stable and secure, like a spine, or an earth anchor…
“We stack the rocks carefully. It feels
good to be working with such heavy weight. The wall just keeps getting
longer each year. It fits where it is. We lean against it and rest when
we’re tired. It’s so strong – so stable. We could stare at it for
hours…It feels good to be building something real: a physical model, a
representation, of the thing between us. It is like a map of our blood
– of who and what we are to each other.
“We work
on it a little each day. It adds up, accumulating a mass that is
dizzying to look at. It speaks not so much to who we are, as to who we
would like to, or can, become. Every morning when I wake up and look
out the window it lies there, within reach: a thing we have crafted
together. The rock wall speaks to more than happiness. The rock wall is
a leap of joy.”[xi]
May we
each celebrate and continue to build our leap of joy from the hard
stuff of our lives. May we each claim our father’s and grandfather’s
legacy, support the fathers we know, and encourage those who step into
the place of fathers, for this is sacred, real, heavy work. Our charge
is this, in celebration of fathers everywhere, of this Father’s Day:
this week, recognize a small wonder in a prolonged moment of patience,
in the heady blossom of a sacrifice, in a deep and abiding effort of
steadfastness. This is one of the ways we Unitarian Universalists
encourage, support, and strength the spiritual lives of our fathers,
one of the ways we honor and celebrate their spiritual legacies – and
ours.
Amen.
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[i]
Douglas Wood, “What Dads Can’t Do”. Igniter Video, 2008.
[ii] V. Aardema, Koi and the Kola Nuts. NY: Simon & Schuster, 2003..
[iii] Li-Young Lee, “The Gift”. The Rose. BOA Editions Limited, 1986.
www.poetryfoundation.org
[iv] Wood.
[v] Aardema.
[vi] Robert E. Hayden, “Those Winter Sundays”. Collected Poems of
Robert Hayden. Liveright Publishing Corporation, 1985.
www.poetryfoundation.org/archive/poem.htm?id=175758
[vii] Gary Soto, “Getting It Done” Fathering Daughters: Reflections By
Men. Boston: Beacon Press, 1996: 126.
[viii] Mark Twain,
http://thinkexist.com/quotation/when_i_was_a_boy_of_fourteen-my_father_was_so
[ix] David Sheff, Beautiful Boy: A Father’s Journey Through His Son’s
Addiction. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2007: 310.
Al-Anon’s
Three C’s “I didn’t cause it, I can’t cure it, I can’t control it.”
http://alcoholism.about.com/gi/dynamic/offsite.htm?site=http://keytoharmony.org/new/week1.htm
[x] Sheff: 310-311.
[xi] Rick
Bass, “My Daughters”. Fathering
Daughters: Reflections By Men. Boston: Beacon Press, 1996: 62-63.
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