I don’t know if any of you noticed or not, but last Sunday was Father’s Day. I have never been a fan of Father’s Day, myself. I always feel slightly manipulated by having to make the obligatory calls to my father or those that my own children feel they must make to me. I much prefer the spontaneous calls on other occasions. Father’s Day strikes me as a somewhat forced remembrance — a Hallmark holiday — dreamed up no doubt by some retailers and the greeting card industry to breathe a little business back into that vast mer-chandising wasteland between Valentine’s Day and Halloween. But last Sunday was dif-ferent for me. It was the first Father’s Day in my entire life that I no longer had a father to call.
My father died in late October of last year. It was not that his death was entirely unexpected — he was nearly 95 years old. So even though he was remarkably energetic and alert, and seemed to enjoy exceptional health, I had begun some time ago to prepare myself for this moment. Still when it came, it was sudden and a bit of a shock. My father had collapsed at home, and my stepmother Katie called for an ambulance to take him to the hospital. When he arrived they discovered he had pneumonia and that it had probably been developing for some time without his realizing it, for it was now deeply into his system and his organs began to shut down one by one.
That was on Wednesday evening. On Friday I booked a flight to Indianapolis and a rental car to drive from there to Muncie where my father and stepmother lived. As I drove I thought a lot about whether he and I would be able to have a conversation, whether or not he would even recognize me. But I did feel pretty much at peace about saying goodbye to him. A friend recently passed on to me a brief passage from Shakespeare’s Timon of Athens that exactly captured my mood during that drive from Indianapolis to Muncie:
It hath pleased the gods to remember my father’s age,
And call him to a long peace.Whatever else I thought of my father’s death, I believed it would be for him an entrance into a long peace. I never got to have that final conversation with my father. He died while I was still in flight trying to get to him. The following day I did visit alone with his corpse and I told him some of the things I had rehearsed to say to him during my journey.
When I began to reflect about my father last week I went back to reread the poem E.E. Cummings once famously wrote as a tribute to his own father, The Reverend Edward Cummings — like my own father, a clergyman and a teacher. And as I read, I felt a certain resonance with my own father:
my father moved through dooms of love
through sames of am, through haves of give
singing each morning out of each night
my father moved through depths of heightThat is the opening stanza of a longer poem, and it sets the pattern that repeats itself numerous times throughout the rest of the work. Like much of Cummings’ poetry it is full of quirky plays on words, tortured phrasing, and usages that force us out of common meanings toward new insights. For those who find poetry in general too dense or too self consciously manipulative of language, this poem in particular repays some thoughtful reflection:
my father moved. . .
through dooms of love
through sames of am
through haves of give
through depths of heightThe formula and syntax is the same in each case: my father moved through one particular experience toward something of a larger reality. Moved is the operative verb, and suggests both motion, as well as emotion: "to move through one kind of experience, as well as being moved by that same experience. That is, to move through is to "travel within," or to "pass beyond," or to "be animated by" something other than oneself. Then we notice in Cummings’ phrases that there are two conditions that appear to be in oppo-sition to one another. There is a certain amplitude in these opposites that suggests every experience may include all such conditions of opposites.
But there is a deeper suggestion here as well. The first condition in each pair of opposites is that which must be risked in order to attain the second possibility:
dooms of love, sames of am, haves of give, depths of heights. . .
As one critic commented, in seeking to express love for other men and physical participation in the natural world, Cummings recognized that his father had to expose himself to grave risks: the risk of rejection, the risk of alienation, the risk of failure. These are the risks that must first be embraced before they may be overcome and then emerge into the opposite condition. Here are some further examples of the same pattern in later sequences of the poem:
lifting the valleys of the sea
my father moved through griefs of joyor
scorning the pomp of must and shall
my father moved through dooms of feelor
my father moved through theys of we,
singing each new leaf out of each tree.It is the same pattern over and again: something must be risked and moved through --the risk fully embraced--in order to lay claim to its opposite. By this simple formula Cummings develops a beautiful and memorable tribute to his father that grasps us in peculiar ways. As another commentator put it:
No ceremonious procession from the bleakness of grief
to a measure of found consolation, this poem is celebrative
from the start. For in the courageous, creative joy of his father,
Cummings feels a living presence, one that defeats not merely
physical extinction but even the spiritual suicide of a world.Listen then to the final stanzas of Cummings’ remarkable tribute:
though dull were all we taste as bright,
bitter all utterly things sweet,
maggoty minus and dumb death
all we inherit, all bequeathand nothing quite so least as truth
--I say though hate were why men breathe--
because my father lived his soul
love is the whole and more than allAnd so it was that thoughts of my own father took me back last week to a rereading of Cummings’ beautiful remembrance of his father. One thing I believe that truly resonated was the idea that his father "lived his soul." That is also how I felt about my father. And when you are in the presence of such a person you know exactly what Cummings meant when he claimed:
because my father lived his soul
love is the whole and more than all.In many ways my father was an unremarkable man who yet managed to live a remarkable life. Like my mother he was the eldest of six children whose own parents spent their lives as officers in the Salvation Army. Like their parents before them, both of mine entered the Salvation Army Training College in Chicago after graduating from high school. That is where they met and married. And following their commission they were sent to work together in the height of the depression to a succession of small parishes in Illinois and Indiana.
Much of what most people know about the Salvation Army has come, I suspect, from an encounter with either Guys & Dolls or Shaw’s Major Barbara. One thing you ought to know about the Salvation Army is that it is not only a large social welfare organization that does very good work, it is also a vital, though small religious denomination with parishes all over the world. In imitation of actual military structure, the laity are known as "soldiers," and the commissioned officers constitute the ordained clergy. Unlike the military, husbands and wives are both required to be ordained. They work as a team. Each holds a rank, and each has specific responsibilities. By the time I was born my parents were no longer in charge of individual parishes, but were engaged in administrative oversight. But they would frequently visit local churches (or Corps), and it was not unusual to hear either one or both of my parents preach on any given Sunday. (By the way, you have never truly lived, until you have had to come home from school, salute your mother, and call her "Colonel").
One thing that especially distinguished my father was his intellectual curiosity and his passion for education. While stationed in Anderson, Indiana he sought and received permission to attend classes as an undergraduate at what was then a small teachers college in Muncie–Ball State. While he and my mother performed their duties with the parish in Anderson, my father also pursued his education, until he completed an undergraduate degree. When they were then transferred to Richmond, Indiana (where I was born), he continued his education at Earlham College, an institution that had been founded by the Quakers, where he earned a masters degree in Philosophy and Religion.
I always secretly believed that my father had a stronger vocation as a teacher than as a minister or administrator of programs. I think at that point he might have gone on to work on a doctorate and to become a college professor. But he felt a great loyalty to the Salvation Army and to my mother, for whom "the Army" represented a singular vocation, and he answered the call when they were promoted to higher administrative positions. Eventually he and my mother became Divisional Commanders, a role that is the functional equivalent of a Bishop in many other denominations.
Growing up in the home of Salvation Army officers is not always an easy or pleasant experience for children. Once inside the world of the Salvation Army it was okay; everyone knew what it was about. But I lived most of my early life in neighborhoods and schools that seemed far removed from that world. And whenever my two worlds inter-sected I often found it awkward and embarrassing. It was difficult, for instance, to explain why my parents wore military uniforms when they were not really affiliated with the armed services. In those days the uniforms were even more exaggerated than they are today. My mother, for instance, was required when working to wear a bonnet that resembled an upside-down coal scuttle.
I remember an incident when I was eight years old. We lived in a pleasant neighborhood in Kansas City, and I was playing with a group of friends on the street one evening, when my parents drove up. Normally they parked the car in the garage behind the house. But on this day they parked right in front and emerged decked out in full regalia. My heart sank with the embarrassment of having one more time to attempt to explain why my parents dressed the way they did. As I tried to become inconspicuous, hoping they would just walk into the house, I looked up, aghast to see my father bounding towards us. But suddenly a miracle occurred. As he approached, one of my friends noticed the "S" on the collar of his uniform, and blurted out, "Gee, mister, are you a submarine captain?" Yes! ! ! For a split second I thought my whole life had changed. I do not know how familiar you are with the geography of the midwest, but you might recall that Kansas City is not exactly a deep water port. That, however, was an anomaly the subtlety of which I was in that instant completely innocent. "Just say yes!," is the only thought I entertained in that particular moment. I am sure I believed that I could fake all the rest. But, alas, among all of his other admirable qualities, my father was always truthful, and he shattered my reverie just as suddenly as it had emerged.
My father was a wonderful administrator and much beloved by many of the officers he and my mother supervised. But he was never entirely comfortable with the evangelical Christian ethos that characterized much of the religious life of the Salvation Army. And so it did not entirely surprise me that late in his career, long after my sister and I had begun careers of our own, he made a fateful choice to leave the Army completely and to live as a civilian. At that time he was serving as a Divisional Commander in Indianapolis, and he then moved to join his younger brother who lived in Muncie to begin a business together developing real estate properties. For the next twenty years that is what he did. And he was successful enough to be able to sell the properties and live comfortably for the rest of his life on the income.
During that period of time he also kept alive his passion for learning by auditing several classes in literature at his old alma mater, Ball State, that by now had grown to be a sizeable university. (You perhaps know Ball State University as the alma mater of its most distinguished alumnus, David Letterman). In the process my father came to know several members of the English Department faculty. Then one late summer day one of them approached him with a compelling proposal. The English Department needed someone to teach a freshmen section and wondered if my father would be interested. He was, but reminded them that he had not earned a degree in English literature. His friend responded:
"We know, Paul, but we thought if you would be willing to enroll in the Masters Program, we would provide you with a teaching fellowship." My father thought this a splendid idea and wasted no time in applying. He was 75 years old at the time and threw himself into both teaching and the course work with unbounded enthusiasm. And so it was that my father was able in this mysterious way to return to the vocation I believe he had reluctantly turned away from years earlier.
My father marched right through the masters program and part-time teaching positions with great aplomb. Then he asked if he might continue on to work on a doctorate. The University accepted him as a doctoral candidate and continued its support. So it was at the age of 80 my father earned a Ph.D. in English Literature from Ball State University after having successfully written and defended a thesis on the fiction of the English novelist, Graham Greene. My mother had died several years earlier and never got to observe this part of his unfolding career. He did, however, meet Katie while taking classes, herself a widow and a former schoolteacher. They came to love one another, and eventually asked me if I would consider officiating at their wedding ceremony nearly 20 years ago. I, of course, was delighted to participate. And I am probably one of the very few people you may ever come to know who can look you in the eye, not flinch, and say to you "I married my stepmother" and mean that sincerely with no hint that my behavior was either immoral or illegal.
At my father’s memorial service last November I recalled some of the gifts he had given me for which I am deeply grateful:
--I am, for example, sincerely grateful for this full head of hair that has remained reasonably intact well past my middle years.
--I am grateful for the evenings in his study when he read poetry aloud to me and fixed in my imagination forever the power of the spoken word.
--I am grateful for the lively discussions we had around the dining table about current events and politics: about Joseph McCarthy, General MacArthur, and Harry Truman; about the Cold War and Nikita Khruschev’s visit to the United States; about the Civil Rights revolution and Martin Luther King, Jr.; about theologians and religious thinkers like Paul Tillich and Reinhold Niebuhr.
But like Cummings, what I most remember and value about my father are not those things he did or gave to me but rather the example of a man who "lived his soul, " who pursued his own work and life with integrity, who refused to accept the easy shibboleths of the popular culture, whose passion to reflect and to understand, translated into a life-long pursuit of excellence.
As I thought about my father’s gifts, I also recalled a wonderful observation by Gertrude Stein. She once told an interviewer about how much she had loved Paris and when he inquired what it was about the city she had responded to, she replied: "It was not so much what Paris gave to me but what it did not take away." That says precisely what it was that I loved most about my father: it was not so much what he gave to me as what he did not take away. My father never took away from me my right or responsibility to find my own true vocation. He never took from me the privilege or responsibility of seeking my own truth, wherever it led me. And he never sought to cushion me from the experience or consequences of my own failures or losses. But through it all, I knew him to be a loving and supportive presence. And I will miss that.
Most of you in this congregation have already lost one or both parents. All of you will at one time or another have this experience. Even more poignantly, I know that some of you have lost a son or a daughter. Whenever it may happen, we are always struck by that mysterious interplay between generations, that deep connection no matter how beautiful or difficult those relationships may have been in actuality:
–of that deep longing for connections, to love and to be loved by
fathers, mothers, sons and daughters;–to savor whatever it is we are able to learn from our own parents
or our own children;–to seek healing for all the painful rifts of misunderstanding and hurt;
–to forgive and to be deeply forgiven.
Robert Anderson put it succinctly in his play, I Never Sang for My Father, about the painful relationship he had with his own father:
Death ends a life, but it does not end a
relationship that struggles on in the mind of the
survivor for a resolution it may never find.But for all of us who have lost loved ones, I also recall the beautiful lines that Thornton Wilder used to end his novel The Bridge of San Luis Rey, with which I ended my remarks at my father’s memorial service:
But soon we shall die and all memory of those…will have left
the earth, and we ourselves shall be loved for awhile and forgotten.
But the love will have been enough; all those impulses of love
return to the love that made them. Even memory is not necessary
for love. There is a land of the living and a land of the dead and the
bridge is love, the only survival, the only meaning.I end with a prayer for my father, and for all of our fathers and mothers who have passed to the land of the dead, the magnificent prayer of John Henry Newman:
O Lord, support us all the day long, until the shadows
lengthen and the evening comes, and the busy world is
hushed, and the fever of life is over, and our work is
done. Then in thy mercy, grant us a safe lodging and
a holy rest, and peace at the last. Amen.