BEING DAD
by Jan Carlsson-Bull
June 16, 2002
Being Dad. Now how would I know what it is to be Dad? Well, I was a single parent for eight years, but this doesn’t quite qualify me for fatherhood. Sixteen years ago, I married a man who was a single parent for his own eight years, and I’ve learned a lot from Dan about what it’s like to be a father and a stepfather—not easy! As a daughter, I reflect on the life of my own father and consider the joys and concerns of his fatherhood. I do believe that I qualified as a joy and a concern. I know that so many of the men here this morning could provide a wealth of commentary on what it is to be a Dad--not just those of you who have sired children, but all of you who have nurtured the next generation as mentors, role models, benefactors, and advocates. You have given of yourselves so the lives of young people in this congregation and neighborhoods throughout our city and beyond can unfold with greater promise and possibility. Many of you have given generously. On this Father’s Day, we celebrate you all, whatever niche of fatherhood you have chosen.
Now the origin of Father’s Day is quite different from that of Mother’s Day. Unlike Julia Ward Howe, who issued a proclamation calling for an international day of peace and sagely named it Mother’s Day, Father’s Day evolved as the simple desire of a daughter to honor her father. It was 1909 when a Mrs. John B. Dodd—clearly the non-feminist practice of the day obscures her real name—wanted a day to honor her father, William Smart. Smart was a Civil War veteran, whose wife died giving birth to their sixth child. The child survived, and I can only speculate that this hardy infant was the early rendition of Mrs. Dodd. William Smart was not only prolific. He was what we might call a mensch, because he proceeded to raise by himself his six offspring on a farm in eastern Washington state. Let’s assume nannies weren’t even an option, that cleaning service was a foreign phrase, and that no other woman turned his head enough to claim his heart.
Unlike my Great Grandfather Edwards! To detour from the American Northwest, my great grandfather, The Rev. William Pendry Edwards, was a Baptist minister in the tiny village of Pontypool, South Wales. As a young man and the father of James—my maternal grandfather—his young wife Elizabeth died giving birth to a little girl, my Aunt Sally. While Rev. Edwards grieved, he did not tarry as a single parent. Barely a year later he married Susan, who proceeded to give birth to ten babies—for a grand family total of 12 children! I daresay it took at least two parents to raise this small village.
Let’s only hope that William Smart, with half as many children but quite on his own, was management smart and knew how to delegate. It’s fortunate that he was blessed with at least one child—and possibly more--who so appreciated his paternal devotion that she sought a special day to honor fathers. Father’s Day was first celebrated on June 19, 1910 in Spokane Washington. Like all good ideas, this one probably had several sources. And since Mother’s Day had made its imprint on the calendar forty years earlier, the idea spread. Yet it took until 1966 for the 3rd Sunday of June to be declared by presidential proclamation as Father’s Day. And it took President Lyndon Johnson to do it. I may be grateful to the late Lyndon Baines Johnson, but I am not surprised. Johnson was a father figure who loomed large in our national household and undoubtedly in his own, though I would love to have been a fly on the wall when his own willful daughters surely challenged his authority.
A father figure. What does that mean?
In his discourse on Father’s Day, Mark Greenside comments from mid-town on the East Side:
"I’m standing here in Grand Central Station," he begins. "All around me the place is a zoo. Crazy people, wackos, weirdos, loonies, junkies, refugees form every sore and wound in the world, screeching at each other…for this reason or that or no reason…and this kid, this babe, this lamb, this innocent, feels safe because this guy is standing there right next to him…..this seven-year-old boy feels protected from god, the world, insanity, nature, from anything and everything as it all takes place in front of him beneath the grand stairway leading down from the stars… He holds his father’s hand and looks at him as if he’s a hero with holy, unqualified love….It must be the reason people have kids."
I think I felt the same way about my own Father. I could look up to him, take his hand on a brisk winter day, and be off on an adventure knowing I was completely secure—not even having to think about whether I was or not—because Dad’s protector instincts just came through by osmosis. A simple trip to the supermarket was such an adventure. His idea of a staple was Roquefort cheese, and his recipe for Roquefort dressing—the Gospel according to Don White—was shared as readily as any Gideon Bible. Shy he was not. Present he was. I remember his tweed overcoat and his dapper hat. Men did wear hats once—not just baseball caps or the broad-brimmed creations that float through the likes of Denver’s Brown Palace. Well into his 50s, Dad wore an authentic haberdashery hat. In fact, some say he looked like that presidential haberdasher, Harry Truman. I know he talked like him and was as devoted to his family. When I think of my father—and he’s been gone for 25 years now—I can smell his smell, see his broad smile, and hear his laugh—a full-bellied laugh that could as easily been a sequel to one of his many raucous jokes.
To paraphrase our e.e. cummings’ poem,
"there’s never been quite such a fool [or a father] who could fail pulling all the sky over him with one smile"
It’s the nuances that linger—smell, texture, inflections, expressions, quirks. For those of us blessed or perhaps not blessed with seeing our fathers’ many seasons, the reflections of Joan Hoekstra brim with nuance:
My father’s thick, stiff fingers smooth a wrinkle in the tablecloth….I wish he could still play me a song…I hum a tune inside my head. "Rebecca," that was his song.
"Are you Frieda?" He stares at me, frowning.
"No, Daddy, I’m Joan. I came yesterday. I’ll be going home later today. I live in Calgary, remember?"
Still not sure, he stares at me.
"Win was here from Medicine Hat." He says the words with pride.
"She told me she’d been here….More coffee, Dad?"
He nods without answering. I fill the mug and he picks up his spoon and stirs.
"Don’t you want cream and sugar?"
"I guess so," he says. He pours from the pitcher. He reaches out again, then hesitates.
His hand moves slow and deliberate, like it did when he used to play chess. But Sunday chess games belong to another time.
Nuance, impression, haze. The same Dad, the not-same Dad, the metamorphosis of us all. I ponder the idea of Father as an archetype, a lodestar, desired and then fading."Our Father, who art in heaven."
Yes, there’s that one. That very pesky "that one" – the "father" part of the divine tripod we presumably don’t agree to. Yes, we’ve taken on most of the church fathers, with a heresy we relish. And yes, our Unitarian God is a hybrid: our meditative Spirit of Life; our Jewish Adonai; our Muslim Allah; our sometimes elevated sieve who doesn’t hold any water at all; our Father God, Mother God, parent God who belie the transcendence of gender and role. I wonder especially at the construct of God as parent. Is God an in loco parentis, meddling into our every coming and going, or a remote figure, hovering impressionistically beyond time and space?
The varied renditions of the divine coursing through the Pentateuch and the Psalms and the Prophets and the troublesome Book of Job offer up a God who intervenes with great willfulness and a God who would seem to care less, a God who forgives with the palette of a rainbow and a God who is vengeful and says so. One of the more troubling portrayals of a powerfully paternal God rises from the pages of Book of Genesis:
"....God tested Abraham, and said to him, ‘Abraham!’ And he said, ‘Here I am.’ He said, "Take your son, your only son Isaac, whom you love, and go to the land of Moriah, and offer him there as a burnt offering upon one of the mountains of which I shall tell you....
Genesis 22:1-2
It seems to me that not only was the fatherhood of God questionable at this point, but the fatherhood of Abraham was quite on the line. Nonetheless, Abraham is deemed a man of great faith, and he took his son Isaac to the stated place, built an altar, bound his child, and prepared to pass the test imposed by his God—his God. But something happened. Someone intervened, perhaps the better sensibilities of Abraham himself, for when Abraham lifted the knife, he heard a voice calling his name, saying to him:
" ‘Do not lay your hand on the lad or do anything to him; for now I know that you fear God, seeing you have not withheld your son, your only son, from me.""
Genesis 22:12
At that moment a ram appeared behind him. He took the ram and presented it as a burnt offering instead of his son. Abraham had passed the test as a man of faith, but as a father? Do we really think Isaac would have run out for a Father’s Day card that year? Do we really believe Isaac’s mother, Sarah, would have welcomed her husband home after such an escapade?
In the name of religion, outrageous deeds are done. In the name of faith, other covenants are shredded.
Isaac survived and grew into adulthood to become a father himself and the unwitting pawn in the intense rivalry between his twin sons, Jacob and Esau. From generation to generation our deeds run. Breaking a cycle is no easy task.
God’s goodness and harshness and willfulness and wisdom are not uncharacteristic of figures we have known or known of as fathers and mothers. Divinity and the projections we cast on it are at least as complex as humanity, from which we project.
A most different figure of the father is portrayed in the story of the Buddha. Born in the 6th century BCE in Northern India, Siddhartha Gautama was the jewel-like son of Maya and Suddhodana. Suddhodana was a man of substance and power, perhaps even royalty. Legend tells us that early in Siddhartha’s life, his father had gleaned from fortunetellers that if his son maintained his attachment to things worldly, he would become a leader who would do great things for India. If, on the other hand, he took a path apart, his life would be redemptive. Few fathers dream of their offspring as redeemers. It is understandable if not wise, that the senior Gautama created luxurious diversions for his young son to shield him from any traces of suffering or death. Siddhartha grew into a strikingly handsome young man and married a woman of grace and beauty, from royalty herself. They had a son.
In his young adulthood, Siddhartha felt a nagging restlessness. Something was amiss. He ventured forth and discovered the realities of sickness, old age, and death, realities from which his father had tried so hard to shield him. He discovered also a monk with a bare head, a simple robe, and a bowl, and learned of another way. Not quite thirty, he ventured forth from his gracious home in search of an alternative to his life of spiritual slumber. As he awoke—and the root of Buddha means "to awake," —he became enlightened by the truths from which his father had so carefully guarded him.
How natural it is for our parents—especially perhaps, for our father/protectors, to shield us from all hurt, all suffering, even death itself. The Buddha’s father was a good father; he just found it so hard to let his son find his own way, however redemptive that way might be.
How different the way of Abraham and Isaac. How different the path of William Smart, whose lonely labors and status as a widower must surely have imparted to his offspring the realities of suffering and death. How different the course of my Great Grandfather, whose preachings most certainly included the sufferings of Abraham and Isaac and the prophets and Jesus and whose fathering of twelve children must have provided a stageset of verities that none of them could deny. Yet how hard most fathers try to protect their children from the harshness that is history’s mirror. I think of that father in Grand Central Station, clasping the hand of his young son. I think of my own father wrapping his hand around mine against the chill of winter.
It was just a few days ago that I sat at home with my husband and sister-in-law and talked into the late night hours of our families and our legacies of soul and psyche. Then suddenly I remembered. I ran off in search of it, and inside the back cover of my own baby book, there it was. With great care, I slipped it out of the yellowing envelope that held its delicate pages. W.W.White, Lawyer, read the letterhead. Walter Wilmer White was my grandfather, my father’s father.
I recalled stories of my Grandfather’s childhood, how he had grown up with his brother as an orphan, how he had then become a Golden Gloves Boxer, how he had worked his way through college and law school, how he had married my beautiful and strong-willed Grandmother, who later ran off to Chicago to find herself. He was left alone to care for their two young sons. She didn’t return until well after my own parents were married. I recalled too my Grandfather reading the hours away in the library aroma of his law office—Kant and Hegel, Hume and Locke, Shakespeare and Wordsworth and maybe even a few women. His lofty intellect was matched by his warm wit and readiness to take me up onto his lap and tell me that our family came from the great land of Podunk. All this passed through my tunnel of memory as I carefully removed that letter from its envelope. He had addressed it to my parents on the occasion of my birth. As I share an excerpt, note that it was written during a bleak hour of our history. Our nation was embroiled in a World War. Nothing was certain. Chaos was at the door, but so was I.
Dear Donald and Lillian:
Your announcement of the arrival of a little daughter came to me a few days ago….I rejoice with you. The little Cherub has selected a splendid home for a dainty bud to blossom into a perfect rose. May she always be as pure and spotless as the falling snow, as sweet as the nectar of the Gods—and as gracious as a Lily.
Now, you have an excellent home for this little one, far removed from the turmoil and uproar of the embattled world, where monsters are sending forth their dogs of war to pillage, plunder, murder—then enslave the world. We are, indeed, fortunate to have been born in the United Sates, and how glad I am that I and mine were born in, and can live in and enjoy a country with such institutions and freedom as we have in the ‘New World’. Nature’s paradise, a beacon-light to all the world. Here our flag can float so proudly, and it can furl and unfurl, and weave and wave at will, as free as the Eagle that perches and dreams, or soars and screams, amidst the mountain crags, far above the storms that rage below….
And, at this time, perhaps the darkest hour in all the history of the world, a babe has come to bless your home, and how different the ‘setting’ from that of babes, now born in conquered lands. A little daughter loved and lovable has come to make her home with you. Guide well her footsteps, and she will bring to you pride and joy, and forever be unto you a benediction.
I know that you are happy, and that you have a happy home, and I am indeed glad that this is so—it makes life worth living…. With my best wishes for the best of all things best, for you and for yours, I am
Most Sincerely,
"Dad"
Being Dad. Perhaps today we remember especially those Dads we have lost, those Dads who have gone on before us through illness and old age and yes, through great disasters we have known. We remember the Fathers who struggled against poverty and against obstacles over which they had no control and against obstacles some decided not to surmount. Sometimes it was good enough. Sometimes it wasn’t.
In those words of e.e. cummings, "even if it’s sunday may i be wrong," for there is nothing right or certain about being a Dad or talking about being a Dad. It’s all art and more love than art. It’s a fullness of heart, and we know it’s more heart than mind. So for all you loving, artful, large-hearted nurturers out there, thanks for being Dad. Thanks for being Dad through your commitment, your constancy, your quirkiness, your slimmer bank account, your good humor and the good intentions masked by your ill humor, your admitted mistakes and your readiness to overlook ours, the choices you’ve made and the choices you wonder about, and your willingness to be vulnerable, oh so vulnerable.
Thank you, and Happy Father’s Day! Amen.
Sources:
e.e. cummings, "may my heart always" – on
Mark Greenside, "Father’s Day," in Gifts of Our Fathers: Heartfelt Remembrances of Fathers and Grandfathers," Edited by Thomas R. Verny, The Crossing Press, Freedom, CA, 1994, 7.
Joan Hoekstra, "Play Me A Song," in Gifts of Our Fathers: Heartfelt Remembrances of Fathers and Grandfathers," Edited by Thomas R. Verny, The Crossing Press, Freedom, CA, 1994, 169.
Christmas Humphreys, Buddhism, Penguin Books, New York, NY, 1976 printing, 29-31.
Huston Smith, The Religions of Man, The New American Library, 1958, 91-92.
Letter of W.W. White, Lawyer, Iowa Falls, IA, October 9, 1942.
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