My father was a seafarer. My father died in 1957 in a shipping explosion. Even though I have grown old, I was still too young to have na memory of him.Father’s day was a different day in our house. Our mother grew more depressed than usual.
We did not get to hear many stories about our father as we grew up. So we created an image of him made of a few photos, a few stories, and scraps of information. I suppose folks did not want to wade into touchy territory, so he was a mystery to my brother and me in many ways.
My view of fathers then had a bit of objectivity as an observer. Fathers struck me as more distant figures, and their children craved attention from them.I felt sorry for them as they were the big disciplinarians, as soon as they trudged home from work. So many of the men in Western pennsylvania were afflicted with black lung or a other occupational ailments, so they were not able to play with their children as they would have liked. So many of them virtually lived in bars that the wisdom they tried to dispense was often too leavened with alcohol’s obstacles to thought. By and large, they offered so much time and energy in working for their families that they had little energy to extend beyond that, so that they felt as observers in their own households often. Fathers seemed caught in children following in their footsteps, but in raising independent young people on the road to “make and get something for yourselves better and easier.”
I was around his age when we had our first child and then lived to see another child born. One of the few good things I did as a parent was to really try to note and revel in milestones of our children’s development, as I realized that my father did not live to see many of them.Contemporary fathers have high expectations of their more involved role in child rearing, but we have yet to come up with anything near a consensus of how that should be accomplished, even with respect to handling household chores.
It seems to me that my baby boom generation froze to some degree at least, in being teenagers struggling to come to grips with differentiating from our parents,perhaps especially fathers. We continue to refuse to buy products if they remind us our parents. Now grandparents ourselves, we lack the internal insight to even notice the contradiction in roles.
On Father's Day, I like to puzzle over Jesus and Joseph and God. I like to think that Jesus had a warm relationship with Joseph, within its cultural confines. some of the Jesus movies depict well just such a relationship.On the other hand, i had a professor who speculated that Jesus waited to begin his public ministry until joseph had left the scene. In our time, we have grown skittish of the gospel of John’s reference to god as Father by jesus. In part, that is due to a concern that such an emphasis becomes literal and creates a male image of God, the spirit, for many of us.
This year, Father's Day falls on Trinity Sunday. This great doctrine reminds us of the ineffability of the complex God whom we are all called to reverence. God is certainly greater than a projection of human fathers. We could even imagine God’s fatherly activity as being far beyond any earthly model of failure or greatness. At the same time, that majestic God hands over the creation of families to mere human beings, fallible as we are. God entrusts the dear creation and maintenance of human life to us. May we continue to attempt to be true to that immense trust.
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