AN EARLY FATHER’S DAY SERMON
by Forrest Church
May 18, 2003
Counseling a parishioner recently who was struggling to come to terms with the death of her father, it struck me that my own father had been dead now for almost twenty years. It seemed impossible. A single year can seem so long, especially to anyone who is waiting for it to end, while decades pass in an eye blink. It helps that my father is still with me. To this very day he remains my teacher. He teaches me something new almost every time he visits my dreams or when I stop to wonder what he might do if he found himself in my shoes. In fact—since we only hear things when we are prepared to listen—in the years since his death my father has become a good deal wiser than he was when I was young.
One recurring nightmare I had as a child featured him in a starring role. Both tantalizing and terrifying, I named it “Falling from the sky.” Whether the fear of falling is learned or innate, this nightmare ended with us plummeting together off a mountain cliff toward certain doom in the ocean below. The dream opened happily, my father and I touring together in the family car, a rakish 52’ Kaiser with plastic straw interior trim. But then, ascending through fog up a mountainside, we began rounding ever-sharper and more perilous hairpin turns. I can remember to this day both the thrill of adventure and the depth of my love as my heedless father, singing at the top of his lungs, would accelerate to keep pace with the danger. Feelings of excitement, adoration, and fear rose together in my breast as we broke through the fog and past the tree line, speeding toward the mountain crest. Far above us, I remember, was a castle in the clouds, beyond the peak, beyond our earthly grasp. By now I was terrified; he wasn’t—my dad the cavalier: reckless, undaunted, forever young. And then we fall, our car skidding off the road, plummeting over the edge of the cliff. The heart-in throat-terror I so vividly remember was not for me alone, so much as for my father, so beautiful and free, so incredibly vulnerable, singing still and laughing as we plunged toward the abyss.
When I was an infant, the doctors at Stanford Medical Center gave my father a death sentence. Unless a highly experimental radiation treatment for testicular cancer somehow miraculously worked, he had at most six months to live. It did work, but not without cost. The price for being among the first cancer survivors to be treated by radiation was radiation over-kill. With vastly higher and less carefully targeted doses, he was burned from his chest to his thighs. Though the cancer was gone, his doctors told my father that their treatment would radically shorten his life. So he picked up his pace. At thirty-two he was elected to the United States Senate, where he served for four terms. By fifty-nine, he was dead.
I have no idea how my father’s life crisis affected me as a child. Probably not directly, but indirectly, I am sure. As reflected in my dream, his devil-may-care attitude, irrepressible joy, and antic behavior are etched in my consciousness. He always did sing in the car. At restaurants, he would moo when he put his fork in a rare steak. And he would slide down the banister after dinner, positioning himself puckishly—and sometimes, when he sideswiped an incoming voter, apologetically— at the door.
All children experience the incipient fear of abandonment the very moment they begin to recognize that their parents are not an extension of their own being. The first time a child falls into something other than his or her parents’ arms must be something of a shock. Eventually, we get used to it. And then we seek it. We run from our parents’ arms, so as not to be held back from our own adventures. Finally, having long since learned that our parents are not gods, one day we learn from them what it truly means to be mortal. Unless untimely death finds us first, our parents, when they die, are there for us this one last time to teach life’s final lesson.
The fear of abandonment is but one expression of what I call existential fear, that vaguely objectified gnawing anxiety or dread that comes with the territory of being alive and having to die. As long as we are alive, we are not completely safe. No one, not even our parents (however much they may wish to protect us) can keep us from entering the house of mourning. And no one, neither they nor we (however careful we are) can keep us from falling into the abyss of non-being ourselves one day, falling never to again—on this earth at least—wake up and remember it was just a dream.
Both garden variety anxiety and impenetrable dread have no specific object, but fix instead on anything handy, grasping the straws of circumstance moment to moment, keeping us emotionally off balance. The fear of falling is an apt metaphor for existential fear. Life is dangerous. At any given moment, we can take a mortal fall. Grounded in life’s intrinsic uncertainly, existential fear is the generalized recognition that life will hurt us. Indeed, that it will one day destroy us. As a psychological condition, anxiety can be treated, often effectively, by medication and through talk therapy. But as a spiritual condition, it is woven within the mortal coil. It lives in the felt and frightening tension between being and non-being.
The principal danger of existential fear, and especially of dread, is that it invites non-being to possess our soul. We cannot freely invest ourselves—whether in wanting what we have, doing what we can, or being who we are—so long as we remain conscious that any action we might take hangs suspended under the threat of nothingness. Offering false protection against that threat (which nonetheless remains), existential fear counsels safety above all other human goods. If we do not climb—indeed if we do not venture out at all—we will not fall.
Even the best of parents imbue in us the validity of such counsel. In their temporary role of protector, understandably, they try to keep us safe. Any father who behaves as mine recurrently did in my dreams deserves to have his parenting license suspended. To instill a healthy appreciation for life’s dangers is part of any parent’s job. Certainly, their efforts leave a lasting impression. If first memories bore any relationship to our daily experience as toddlers, most of us would find engraved in our hitherto innocent subconscious the panic-inflected words, “Watch out!”
From the very beginning, eternal vigilance has unanticipated consequences. When a child is warned repeatedly against expressing curiosity, to his or her impressionable yet undiscriminating mind curiosity itself becomes suspect. Beyond this, absent their anxious parents’ repeated warnings, most two-year olds wouldn’t dream of plugging themselves into the wall with a fork. Those who do are more likely to be interested in testing their parents’ authority or provoking their attention than to be victims of untutored curiosity. Nor is the over-protected child all that much safer than is the average toddler. Even when maintained with smothering vigilance, the nick and bruise patrol fails in its object. Where it succeeds is in creating a frightened adult. After thousands of shrill warnings and half as many repetitions of the solemn words, “I told you so,” a child’s innate fear reflex gets armed with so many additional trip wires that it slowly morphs from sentry into jailer. Not that we would have wanted our parents to ignore our safety, but it is no wonder that fear so effortlessly reigns over the average adult mind.
If existential fear had a mantra is would be, “Better safe than sorry.” This advice is not difficult to follow. Since being sorry is unpleasant, playing it safe makes both emotional and physical sense. The question remains, is it that much better to be safe than to risk, say, something so alluring as the possibility of true love, or a challenging new job—even, perhaps, a perilous car trip with your father up a deadly mountain road? Safety and risk only appear to be mutually exclusive. One must be as cautious about safety as one is about risk. Take no other risks and you still run the danger of leading a sorry life. In fact, when it comes to things that really matter, often it s better to be sorry than safe.
Besides, to keep ourselves safe is impossible. People die in beds and in bathtubs. Joggers die and vegetarians die. So do non-smokers and teetotalers. Even people with low cholesterol die. Not to mention those who die from complications that follow on anxiety itself, such as high-blood pressure. The goal in life is not to be free of acceptable risk. Existential fear—the fear of falling—protects us not from death, but from life, by inviting non-being to the party years before one’s death day.
Existential fear stems from the feeling of not being in control of whatever may happen to us. We are riding in life’s car, but someone else is at the wheel. To battle this sense of powerlessness, even when sitting in the passenger’s seat, we press our foot against an imaginary break on the floorboard.
Not liking this feeling, we decide that, whenever possible, we will drive life’s car ourselves. I’m not talking about automobiles here, but of the felt need to cover all eventualities, which is as impossible to accomplish as it is tiresome to attempt. “Man himself produces dread,” wrote the Christian philosopher S¿ren Kierkegaard. We manufacture dread whenever we attempt to seize control of things over which we hold no final authority.
The illusion that we can fence out existential fear by controlling every exigency bleeds life of both spontaneity and joy. By our attempting to control them, dread and anxiety instead control us. Home becomes a moated castle, and the castle soon, a prison tower. Life is reduced to a grim business, our forays into the future at once manipulative and guarded. Fearing every transition from certainty to uncertainly, we devote all our energy and time to protecting ourselves against loss. So understood, anxiety is the very opposite of trust, with dread its most life-denying expression. The more we fear death, the more frightening life turns out to be.
Existential fear might best be described as an allergic reaction to life, kind of an emotional asthma. I have a mild form of asthma. Unlike many people who suffer from asthma, my particular case could not be less life-threatening. When struck by it, I panic nonetheless and my condition quickly grows worse. From the moment I am first conscious of an asthma attack, its severity grows in proportion to the concern I devout to it. Once I start testing my lung passages by breathing intentionally, with each forced breath they constrict. On the other hand, if I stop obsessing with the asthma and turn my attention instead to a basketball game or the book I am reading, slowly the attack subsides. Like mild forms of asthma, existential fear rewards our concern by giving it reason to grow stronger.
The word worry stems from the Anglo-Saxon root meaning “strangle” or “choke.” If I were to market a breathalyzer for anxiety—designed to open up passages choked by existential fear—I would mix equal parts of humor, meditation, and compassion. The journalist Linda Ellerbe describes enduring the experience of a double mastectomy by saying that “laughter is the mother of courage.” Meditation might be defined, in any of its various forms, as reverent attention to that which is greater than all and yet present in each. Compassion transfers our attention from self to other. Life opens up in every direction, the moment we stop trying to guarantee it on our own narrow terms.
I regret deeply that my father died so young. But I wouldn’t exchange my memory of him sliding down banisters for anything—or, for that matter, my memory of him singing in the car as the two of us sped winding up that dreamscape mountain toward our doom. Death is the hinge on which life turns, without which life as we know it could not be. Yet, unless we dare to risk our lives for something, for love and our neighbors and all the things we believe in, death, when it comes, will turn out to be meaningless. Life’s purpose is to live in such a way that our lives will prove worth dying for.
So, thanks Dad—not only for protecting me when I was too young to watch out for myself, but also for teaching me that life’s banisters are not only there to keep us from falling down the stairs.