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Dear Dad,
In nursery school I had an argument with another boy over whose father was stronger. He said his father was the strongest man in the world, I said you were. He said his father was going to beat you up and then finish the job with a rifle. Knowing even then your principled stance against guns, I replied that you would beat his father up and but would only finish the job with a bow-and-arrow. The nuns were not pleased with either solution.
You embarrassed me a bit every Sunday when we sat down in the pews after Holy Communion. You always lingered a bit too long on the kneeler, eyes clenched shut and hands raised to your mouth as you plunged into the depths of prayer. None of the other fathers did that. They were all rich and had big houses and boats and hunting rifles and let their kids have firecrackers and Air Jordans and Nintendo. We weren’t rich, and all you did was pray.
But now, two decades later, with every one of those rich fathers divorced and every one of those kids working boring jobs they probably hate, I think I get it. Your own father got lost in worldly things as he tried to provide for his family. He drank too much, and it made you and Grandma and your sister suffer. Instead of passing that pain on to us, you stood in the middle of it and took it head on.
When you prayed too long every Sunday morning, you were wrestling the pain into submission, putting on chokeholds, and stomping it in the face. You replaced it with Something Not of This World, which you gave to us every Saturday morning when you came to our soccer games, every weeknight when you made us bologna sandwiches for school, and every Sunday after church when you bought us Transformers comic books and donut holes.
And like Optimus Prime morphing from tractor-trailer to Interstellar Superhero Robot, you turned the pain of your past into loving action towards us, an act of transubstantiation more profound than anything the pastors could play-act when presenting the Eucharist. Those dumb little wafers weren’t the body of Christ—you were.
Now I realize that we WERE rich, and you weren’t anything BUT strong. Our riches were in Things Not of This World, and your strength was part of what kept them there. In conspiring with Mom to keep our allowances low, our TV-watching brief, our dinners green, and our curfews early, you kept us safe from the worst parts of the world. You never taught us to avoid the world, but to keep it at a wary distance, to uphold the best parts of the Bible, and to wrestle with suffering rather than avoid it or reproduce it.
But even you couldn’t fully prepare me for the dangers and the temptations of our shifting, chaotic world, and in its relentless onslaught I’ve found my own sources of pain, my own struggles, my own suffering. I’ve had problems with drinking, yes, as well as problems with relationships, problems with finances, problems with work. But I realize that even your strength isn’t enough to get me through these, and so, in lieu of your stolid Sunday morning example, I sit and I pray as well. And it is still embarrassing, to care so deeply for things so Not of This World, things like Love, and Commitment, and Honesty, and Responsibility, Fairness, Justice, and all the rest. But if you could sit still in the middle of that raging hurricane of Things of the World and turn that Garbage into the Gold that was my childhood, I know I can do it too. So thanks.
--Paul
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