Father's Day, a sermon, by Frank Casper

[fjc]

Honor Thy Father



The poet, Robert Frost, once said that home is where you go and they have to let you in. I’ve always regarded that statement as more than mere cynicism. To me, it’s an example of dark humor. It’s funny because it happens to express something true that we find embarrassing. It tells us something about the character of family life for some of us. It is a pattern that for many seems to stubbornly repeat itself in each generation, even while each generation vows or hopes this won’t be true with their progeny. It seems to say that we’re embarrassed and perhaps a bit guilty about the fact that as families we’re not inclined to enjoy spending anymore time together then we have to. And there it is. We are a family. We have an obligation to be together every now and then. But it is something we don’t really want to do. Or, even if we say we want to, and it’s probably true, there is some discomfort. Perhaps there is a lot of discomfort, depending upon the character and quality of the relationships between parents and their children.

It was like that in my family, particularly where my father was concerned. My parents had ten of us and, as I understand it, had my mother not miscarried a time or two, they might have had more. But my father managed to foster bad relations with each of us. We all left home the minute we could, and throughout our lives we were far more inclined to avoid my fathers company than to seek it. We thought it was mutual. That is why for us, this day, father’s day, was always more of a problem than a celebration. We all acknowledged the day, but frankly, we could never find anything suitable from Hallmark. I was glad for those humorous cards. They helped us avoid lying while advancing what good there was to our deeply ambiguous feelings about one another. “Honor thy father and thy mother,” goes the commandment. But even as a boy, I was impressed that we were commanded to honor our parents, not to love them.

What was it that made my father’s company so undesirable for his children? Well, his disposition. My father was an angry man. He was angry, moody, and volatile. He was for the most part unavailable for conversation, though ironically he was not distant. No, unfortunately, he was all too close in a menacing kind of way. One Sunday awhile back I listened intently to my minister’s sermon about that little noticed alert on every car in America, that objects in the mirror are closer than they appear. I enjoyed the way he turned that little phrase into a metaphor for how all things are essentially related. But when I told a friend of mine about that sermon, he laughed and said that there are certain objects in this life that he’d hoped were actually further away then they appeared. My father was one of those objects. We were always hoping that he was further away than he always appeared. To carry the metaphor a step further, when today we siblings look into the mirror, we hope that he is further away than he appears. We are all haunted by his angry ghost, and struggle still with the ways in which his unfortunate character informs our own. In the theology of my minister, all things are essentially related. But as my friend mused, this is often bad news.

What was he always so anger about? As a child, I thought it was just me. But I can see now that there was plenty to be angry about. My father did not get far in school and he had no professional skills, so his income was always low and the regularity of that income always a persistent problem. I think he was angry about having had ten children with no adequate means of support. I think he must have been angry at the humiliation of a life working at a series of menial jobs for menial pay, when he felt he had so much more potential that went wasted. He was angry with my mother for sure. It is said that my father joined the army during WWII largely in an effort to alleviate these pressures. But it is easy to see now that they shared an anger, embarrassment, and persistent disappointment at having failed to get ahead. I’m sure there was a lot of blame running around between them, which only added to the burdensome atmosphere. To my knowledge, none of this was ever resolved.

It is likely, however, that my father was probably the most angry with his father. We didn’t know much about that. Like I said, he didn’t talk to us. Neither of my parents were willing to discuss the past much and there were no grandparents to help out. What we did know was disturbing. My grandfather was a violent, abusive man. My father had always blamed him for the untimely death of his mother. There were frequent and violent attacks on my father’s person and dignity. There is a story told by an uncle. My father was once took a job as a cab driver. It was among the many menial jobs my father held and lost. One day he picked up some drunk outside a bar downtown. Minutes after the drunk poured himself into the cab my father recognized him. It was his father. They hadn’t seen nor heard of one another since my father escaped from home some 20 years earlier at age 16. My father took my grandfather to his destination, dumped him unto the sidewalk, and sped away. There were no words, no mutual recognition.

That same angry silence came between my father and mother. I recall one day some years ago my wife and I were driving with my parents out to a family reunion. They were in the back seat. It was a long drive but it was just a short while before my wife and I were looking at each other in mutual consternation. The silence coming from the back seat was deafening. What was wrong, we wondered? I stopped at a McDonald’s for some coffee, but also to get a break from the tension. My dad wanted to come in with me. On the way I took a risk that the occasion somehow allowed and asked my dad if something was wrong. He looked at me in shock, surprised, I think, that I would even ask such a question. “No,” he said, “what makes you think there is?” “Well geez,” I said, “you could cut the silence in the back seat with a knife.” “Oh,” he sighed, looking somewhat resigned and suddenly tired, “we just don’t have that much to say to each other anymore.”

For most of my childhood my family depended on a variety of public assistance. We call that welfare. My father was always embarrassed at our persistent need for that kind of help. It is true that much of it came in forms that humiliated my father, but we benefited from it enormously. In befriending a man who could not seem to make it, society in return gained 10 contributing members who have some sense of achievement. This is one of the reasons I call myself a political liberal. I’m living proof that despite their shortcomings, the programs we seem so ready to trash these days can actually work. When I was growing up during the 60s’, our society was trying to befriend its disadvantaged members. Many like my family were beneficiaries of programs from food to higher education. These were the keys to the wider personal, professional, and intellectual prospective I’ve come to deeply appreciate. My life was blessed by what I can only regard as an institutional form of friendship, a friendship that helped me develop a sense of my own equality and worth that far exceeded what was actually possible for my father.

That I call welfare a form of friendship may sound odd to some of you. After all, we don’t tend to think of social programs in these terms and besides, we live in a time when welfare has become a bad word. But according to friend of mine, friendship is the heart of what our moral development is about. He says that our moral development takes place in the context of that line that runs between friendship and enmity, and it is friendship that draws that line. Our moral development is the development of our capacity for friendship. The keynote of friendship is mutuality, and its primary virtue is shared truth. Friends say yes to having each other in their lives.

Saying that the world divides along the line between friendship and enmity might sound a bit obvious. But it is also profound. It is a theological statement about the nature of our experience, and you don’t have to look very far for verification of its profundity and importance. Think about 9/11, or Oklahoma City. But the point here is not to say that everyone can be friends. That’s nonsense. We don’t trust everyone we meet and neither should we. The primary point here is that to the extent we can we must acquire some grasp of how that line functions in our own lives. Knowing something about that and taking responsibility for our own contribution is what moral development means. It is what equality means. It is what freedom means.

Everyone has a mixture of friendship and enmity in relation to their own lives. It is important that we know as much as possible about how that mixture works in our lives. It will show up in all of our relationships. That mixture is what we are responsible for. Each of us is the kind of person who has the kind of friends and friendships that we have. Taking stock of that is a good way of taking stock of our lives. Our friendships are the most direct expressions of our character; but more than that, they are the turning point and testing grounds for what our character may yet be.

What can be known depends on the relationships that can be developed. It depends upon what others are willing and able to reveal, on our ability and willingness to understand it, and on what we are willing and able to reveal. Under conditions of friendship, this is one thing because friendship creates a safety zone where dangers can be faced, reactions shared, defenses reconsidered. Under conditions of enmity, it is something else.

My father was far more inclined to occupy the enmity side of that line. He learned to view the world more in terms of enemies than friends. He always seemed to be at war with his own life and with the rest of the world. In a way, this seems understandable. What with his father, the depression, and WWII perhaps it was just too much for him. The overwhelming message was that the world cannot be trusted, and he did not and would not trust it. Nor would he trust himself. For me, the story was somewhat different. For me the line running between friendship and enmity had been decidedly moved, largely because the society in which I grew up was deciding which side of that line it wanted to occupy in terms of its relations with its own members. It was deliberately engaged with the moral development of its own body politic. I cannot help but wonder what life might have been like for my father had he a similar experience. I can’t help but wonder what my life living with him might have been like.

When my father died it was a bit anticlimactic. He’d been ill and in the hospital for some time, ravaged by diabetes and many of its humiliating consequences. The final humiliation for my father was the amputation of his foot. After that he decided to die, so he did. I recall one visit to the hospital just before he died. I was living in New York at the time and a call from my sister, who happened to be the nurse caring for him, was enough to urge a trip home as it was very likely the last time I’d see him alive. It was. I recall sitting at the side of his bed and making what I considered small talk. I was telling him about a small business I was joining in New York, a venture that turned out to be a disaster in more ways than I can tell. But at one point he looked at me and said something that pierced my soul. “I believe,” he said, “that you can do whatever you set your mind to.” Not once can I recall him ever lending anything in way of encouragement or support to me or any of my siblings. Quite the contrary was our reality. But there at the hour of his death was evidence of his tender side. It’s not that he had never revealed that side of him before. He had. It was he, after all, that always rushed to our side and doted over us when we were sick. It was the only time we were nurtured by him as children. Then there was Christmas, a holiday both he and my mother looked forward to and they worked hard to make each of them special. He was also quick to defend us against the unfairness of and threat from others, and in doing so attempted to teach his boys what it meant to be a man. But as is often the case between parents and children, what I learned from this attempt was not what he was teaching. And it needs to be said that he did not abandoned us, as many fathers do. He hung in there with his sense of responsibility, and gave us what tenderness he could reveal. In this regard he was a much better father to us then his father had been to him. These things tell me that despite all the betrayal, he had not ultimately accepted enmity as final. There was something better in him that survived, though crippled and eclipsed.

At my fathers funeral I wept and grieved. I wept and grieved for his life, not or his death. He seemed to have lived his whole life consumed by some titanic struggle with himself and his world, a struggle that seemed wholly uninterrupted by tenderness or perspective. But now I can see that at some level he thought that something more, something better should have been possible here, even though he had very little evidence for it. If true, then I can honestly say we shared that faith, an important faith to share. It is a faith that friendship can prevail, that people can enjoy each others company, can be useful to each other, and help each other develop and display those virtues appropriate to their circumstance. I believe this to be the faith of my religion. It is in the context of that faith that I’m trying to see my father. Everyone has a way that they wish their fathers had been. And then, there is the way that they really were. I’m trying to see him now, not as a child, but as one flawed adult to another. That is the friendship I extend to him now. Late perhaps, but at least no lies need be told. What better way to honor my father?