Being there: thoughts on fatherhood...

I read a book recently titled “The Shack.” In it, the protagonist comes face to face with God personified as a large black woman. This engendering is as shocking to the protagonist as, I suspect, it is to most of the book’s readers. I also suspect the element of surprise, of grabbing hold of the reader’s expectations or assumptions or long-held beliefs and tossing them out the door (a nifty literary technique) emerges from the author’s desire to make a point about his own past.

Of course, God is not a large, black woman any more than God is an elderly white man with a flowing grey beard; God has no gender, though for centuries humans have been personifying God as a man – a father. The author of “The Shack” addresses this too saying, in part, that throughout history, human fathers have failed their children far more often than human mothers and so God felt compelled to become “father” to the world because that would fill the greatest human need. (I don’t know if I agree with the author on this point, but I would defend to my death his right to say it. We writers must stick together, after all.)

“The Shack” is a work of fiction, but thoughts on real fatherhood resonate this week as I reflect on the passing of my friend’s father, who was buried just a few days ago. At the man’s funeral service, I watched from the back of the room while each of his four sons paid his father respect before the casket was closed. The sons ranged in age from near fifty to nearly sixty.

In the room beside us were poster boards filled with snapshots of their life as a family: 61 years of marriage including sons and then their wives and then grandchildren and eventually great-grandchildren, all interspersed with pedal cars and big-boy cars, birthdays and dinners at the kids’, camping and fishing along with a beer with a bump… What I saw and heard and inferred as I watched those grown up and aging sons usher past their stilled father was that this man, this ordinary yet extraordinary man, this WWII veteran, retired bricklayer, had figured out how to be a father to his family throughout his life and up until the point when dementia stole his mind and he became a monument to his own history, the past that included his sons’ childhoods and their adulthoods.

As a culture, we’re encouraged to focus on the conflicts that surround us: wars, scandals, crime, corruption… this focus sometimes creeps into our family life, where we obsess about words that hurt, visits that were missed, expectations that go unmet, or nights when dad had one too many beers with a bump. Memories like these usually vanish when a stranger steps in front of you to close the casket that holds your father.

I am sure there are millions of ideas floating about on fatherhood. What makes one person a good father and another person a father who needs to kick it up a notch? I don’t have answers; if I did, I’d write a book as inspiring as “The Shack.”

But I do have this thought: if God can be a father to all who yearn for a father, then I figure fathers can by like a god for all who yearn for God. That means fathers can love us no matter how badly we screw up. It means fathers can be present to us, waiting in the wings to embrace us and lead us even when we desperately want to go it alone. It means fathers are there, whereever "there" happens to be. It means fathers can be love, personified.