Rev. Kathleen McTigue
June 10, 2001

On Fathers

Those of you who read our newsletter with eagle-eyed alertness to sermon topics coming up will recognize that we've switched topics on you. We hadn't originally scheduled today as an early Father's Day Sunday, but the topic I thought I was going to preach on left me feeling blank, and when I began casting about for what to do instead I realized that it's been many years since we've looked together at fatherhood. This is partly because almost every year the natural Sunday for this topic, Father's Day, falls on our Flower Communion Sunday (as it will this year). But truth be told it is also because it isn't really possible for most of us to think about 'fatherhood' as an abstract notion.

For those of you who are of the male persuasion and also have children, you are practicing the art of being a father — no matter how old or grown-up your children may be. There are times when you feel proud of how you're practicing and times when you feel an abject failure. There are times when you feel a passionate closeness to your children and times when you cannot fathom the depth of alienation and pain that lies there between you and your offspring. There is, in other words, nothing abstract about it. Being a father is one of the most central parts of who you are, and it's a vulnerable part of your heart to touch.

The topic of fatherhood is no less personal for the rest of us. Each one of us is expert only in having had a father. So when we think about fathers we come up against father, singular, one particular man and all our years of experience with his gifts and his failings. This too can be a vulnerable place in our hearts. Some of us had a deep and abiding closeness to a father who then died, leaving us a grief that even many years' time doesn't fully heal. Some of us lost our fathers in even more damaging ways than simple death, when alcohol, mental illness, abandonment or violence were part of our experience as children. Some of us have had almost boringly normal lives with our parents, with only the usual ups and downs, teenage years of alienation but mostly easy connection and gratitude. But even in these cases we have had to walk the path of growth and separation. We have had to spend some time figuring out who our fathers really are: not through the passionate and magnifying lens of our status as child, but simply as men, living their lives as they lived them.

My own story is a less than straightforward one, probably one of the reasons I have not preached about fatherhood before today. I am lucky enough to have three men in my life who fill some kind of father role for me. The most recent is my father-in-law, who for the last twelve years has been my east coast version. An unusual warmth of connection was there for us from the first time we met. The man who has been married to my mother for nearly twenty-five years now is a treasured colleague as well as my beloved step-father. But it's my real father, biological father, who inhabits my psyche as well as my life, and because of that privileged or cursed position it is with my real father that I have sometimes had — as we so delicately put it —issues.

Many years ago I saved a paragraph from a book, failing to identify either author or title so I can't attribute it but will share it anyway. This is from a woman who, after many struggles with her father, is describing a dream she had about him. She writes, "The entry to my father's house was a small shabby cellar door. Inside, I shivered as I saw that paper hung in graying clumps from the wall. Black shiny cockroaches scurried along the cracked floor and up the legs of a chipped brown table, the only piece of furniture in the bare room. The place was no bigger than a cubicle, and I wondered how anyone, even my father, could live here. Suddenly fear flooded my heart, and I sought desperately for an escape. But the door through which I had entered seemed to have disappeared in the dim light.

Scarcely able to breathe, my eyes frantically roamed the room and finally caught sight of a narrow passageway, opposite to where I had entered. Eager to leave this distasteful and frightening room, I hurried through the dark passage. As I came to the end my eyes were at first blinded by the light. But then I entered into the most magnificent courtyard I had ever seen. Flowers, fountains, and marble statues of marvelous forms shone out before my eyes. ... Only then did I realize that all this belonged to my father too. In fear and trembling, awe and wonder, in bewilderment, I awoke from the dream."

The reason I liked this dream description enough to save it is because it reminds me of two things that are critical for us to remember in our roles as son or daughter. The first reminder is how much of who our parents are we scarcely ever glimpse and will likely never understand. There are whole worlds of inner life, childhood memories and shaping, romance, yearnings and frustrated dreams that we can never know. The second reminder is how easily we see the dimensions of our parents that are parallel to the dark and broken room, and how difficult it is, when we've had struggles with them, to see and honor the nobler dimensions of who our parents are or were in their lives.

Throughout my early adult years I spent a lot of energy "working on" my relationship with my father, but there came a time when I began to relinquish that metaphor and process. It didn't seem to be accomplishing much anyway, beyond keeping me obsessively attentive to old wounds, real or imagined. Something shifted when I began to think less about what sort of father I had and began to wonder more about what sort of daughter I was. I discovered that at least for me, this meant looking with more care and a certain curiosity at what is and was, and relinquishing the ideals. Holding onto an image of an ideal childhood or an ideal parent is just like refusing to marry until we find a perfect spouse. That isn't the reality our world produces.

Learning to be a daughter meant recognizing that my father, like every father, is also a son, and that what he did not bring down on his children from his own father might be far more important than what he did bring. My father carried in him his own father's temper and weaknesses toward drink. But he had been a beaten child, oldest child of an alcoholic, first-born and overly responsible son to a man who could never seem to hold a job. It was only in my more mature years that I could realize the strength it had to take for my father to refuse to let most of those echoes reverberate through him to me, and to my brothers and sister.

And learning to be a daughter, finally, has meant claiming the truth that as long as we are both alive, our relationship is alive too, and like any living thing it can change, be created and re-created. It shifts as I age, and as I move into new stages of life, especially becoming a parent myself. It shifts as my father ages, especially as he confronts the cancer with which he's been living for two years now.

So what I want to offer you with our remaining time is a kind of meditation to and about my father, though it is inevitably far more about me. This is a way of touching and articulating the truth of what I think I know, not about fathers but about a particular father and what it has been like so far to be the daughter of that particular man. I offer you this meditation in the hope that although it is deeply personal and particular, it might lead you to your own meditation on your father, and on who you are as his daughter or son.

Whenever I see you after an absence,
one of my first surprises is that we are near each other in height.
You were always the giant of my childhood.
You were thirty years old when I came into your life, came into your hands,
a small and fierce part of you
pulling away, pulling out, created by your will
but launching out like a rocket to find my own way, own will,
declaring yours null and void.

But that was in the dim prehistory of my memory,
a gift from you, from my mother, the stories you can draw on so easily
of my life before my life belonged to my own two hands.
You tell me: "When you were a baby no one could feed you.
Long before you could talk you let it be known by your siren of a voice
that your hands alone would feed that baby mouth.
No one could come near you with a spoon and we
resigned ourselves, spread newspaper around the baby chair
and stoically watched as you, happy and determined,
covered your world with food
and got some of it into your mouth."

Second daughter, second child, you delighted in my bright naivete.
As soon as I could talk, so you have reminded me,
we played a game that amused you endlessly, a game of questions
to which the only answer could be, "my daddy!"
"Who is the bravest man in the world?", you asked, and without a pause
I cried out, "my daddy!"
"Who is the smartest man in the world?" and of course it was my daddy.
"Who is the handsomest man in the whole world?" you asked,
and I would tell you it was my daddy.
And for your grand finale, grinning like a demon, you'd say,
"And who's the biggest liar in the world?", and I would
triumphantly answer, "MY DADDY!"
These are still your memories, not mine.
What I remember from those far-away days,
those sun-bright, green grass child days,
are my own fragments lifted up by the strange gods of memory,
random, clear, speaking for all the other days of childhood
I cannot call up to mind.

I remember being small enough to play "horsie",
reaching up to hold your hands as you sat and bounced me
on one strong outstretched leg.
I remember your magic tricks, the incredible disappearing coin
that would reappear from behind my ear and leave me, every time,
in open-mouthed amazement.

In second grade, when I'd had my tonsils out
and you drove me home from the hospital,
what I remember was feeling so strange and weak in arriving home
the wind stopped me where I stood, and I could not move
or call out to your retreating back;
and then you turned and looked
and without a word scooped me up, although I thought I was too big,
and carried me, your baby again,
into the warmth.

And there were the days tenderness fell to temper.
What I remember about your anger
was that it could not be predicted, a volcano
dangerous and sudden,
the fury of your shout the most terrible sound of my childhood,
the hazard of your angry hand teaching us to tiptoe,
teaching us a dry-mouthed fear.

Over the years I have come to recognize you
in the shape of my body and soul and psyche.
From you I take that temper,
molded into something more tame and less haunting,
but when my rage arises I feel your voice rising in my throat,
and it is your scowl that rests between my eyes.
The eyes themselves are yours, a blue sharper and more startling
than my mother's.
From you I take the devilish laugh that rises up from a crazy cosmic humor
running deeper than my own awareness,
a river buried dark in bedrock sending up a sudden bubble
of a spring.


From you I take the glib tongue and slippery wit
that leads me into friendships and into trouble,
the ready mouth all four of your children inherited in spades,
all too wordy for our own good and able,
with a magic we could never invent,
to talk our way into other people's hearts
and then helplessly out again until we learned the hard lesson
that words wound as deeply as they charm.

From you the love of poetry and the flow of words on paper,
from you the heady power of debate and argument,
from you the scorn of stupidity and the dangerous arrogant judgments
I have worked for half a life to curb and soften.

It is possible to imagine that in a family story written differently,
father and daughter that we are would never have had a schism
growing to a chasm, a canyon,
across which we exchanged our cordial, distant greetings
for so many years.
But our story came to an abrupt turn in my twentieth year
when we were all old enough to be abandoned,
when divorce came to live at our house and within months
you had married the one you left us for,
trudging the path of mid-life crisis that by now
has been followed by so many men's feet it seems cliched
and boring.

I did not speak to you for a year.

It was all that I needed in the fierce absolutes of my twenties
to banish you from the land of heroes to the pit of miserable failure,
raking up over time all the large and small ways to claim
you had not been the father I needed at all.
So many ways the children can find to pass the father
through our created hells,
to blast them with the storm fury we hold in reserve for the parent alone
never seeing the ways we walk a path of myth and archetype, over and over again
killing the father....killing the father.

I do not know how you have forgiven your children
for passing through their days of hating you.


What I remember is that there came a time when I reached
some place of rest,
weary to death of dragging behind me my weapons of war.
Ready for a truce, I turned to look at you and
startled, amazed,
saw at last that all the weapons and all the war had been mine alone,
mine to polish and treasure and draw blood with,
mine to lay down and leave behind.

And so I left them behind,
and reclaimed for myself a father:
not a warrior, not a genius, not a king, far from perfect,
not the very best at anything at all,
but one of the multitude of wounded whose private miracle
is that you do not spend your life trying to wound someone else more grievously,
and do not walk in circles of self-pity,
but understand that life is everything it is:
dark pools of pain and straight even pathways,
brilliant mountains and valleys where the depths nurture astonishing dreams.

I carry now and forever the image of you, cradling my daughter, one week old
as you spoke her name, over and over as though calling her out to you
through those eyes alight with love,
and I saw as though it were revelation how she too
would carry your light, your shadow,
into years you could not touch.

Of all the gifts you have given me
there are three I treasure most:
the fierce independence you prodded me toward and suffered from;
the bone-deep trust in the goodness of my world
that lets me soar into its most foreign skies,
and the stubborn will to hold to my joy and trust
even when that imperfect world has shown its claws and drawn my blood.

There is nothing sentimental between us; it is hard as rocks:
we are woven through each other like veins of gold through a granite mountain,
and when I wander the caverns of my dreams or probe my soul for its secrets,
I am no longer surprised when the light glances off a part of you
lodged and anchored in me.

I am my father's daughter,
and the whole truth
is that I want to be.