Love's Austere and Lonely Offices

June 18, 2000

Sundays too my father got up early
and put his clothes on in the blueblack cold,
then with cracked hands that ached
from labor in the weekday weather made
banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him.

I'd wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking.
When the rooms were warm, he'd call,
and slowly I would rise and dress,
fearing the chronic angers of that house,

speaking indifferently to him,
who had driven out the cold
and polished my good shoes as well.
What did I know, what did I know
of love's austere and lonely offices?

--Robert Hayden, "Those Winter Sundays"

The other night during a bout of insomnia I think I almost had this sermon written. As is often the case, it was better then, as I remember it, than it is now. Be that as it may, I was lying there thinking about fathers--my own and others'--and wondering what I could possibly say about fatherhood that might add to the store of wisdom and folly that already exists on that subject. What most often comes to mind in thinking about fatherhood is the failures--my own and others'--to be the fathers we really want to be. That's the easy part. But what I really want to speak about today is the successes--most of them in spite of ourselves--but, hey, who's complaining? We take our successes as they come, intentional or unintentional though they may be.

But then I thought, maybe the successes and the failures both need the light of day. Or maybe it's a case, as I said in my sermon a couple of weeks ago, of what we do with whatever failure or success we are handed. Clearly, where fathering is concerned, success does not always breed success, nor failure failure.

In what some have called the current "culture of the victim," it has become perhaps too easy to blame all or most of our personal misfortune on something--or someone--else. Often, Mom and Dad are easiest targets. After all, they have usually had the most influence on us, positive and negative; they have given us not only their virtues, but also, alas, their faults and foibles and even their genetic "maps." As we grow older, we even find ourselves looking and acting and sounding like them--the final humiliation, or humbling, of all our supposed superiority.

I have no doubt that some of us have been wounded by our fathers, but often I think dad's misdeeds turn out to be a convenient excuse for our own failures. At some point we need to grow up and take responsibility for our own lives, and that means pointing the finger of blame somewhere other than at our parents' shortcomings. If that sounds harsh, then so be it.

And I am a firm believer that failure and defeat are just as likely to produce a decent result as success and victory, particularly where parenting is concerned. When my children were small, I was convinced that some of my actions were damaging them for life. Now, whether influencing them for good or ill, I realize that I was not that powerful after all. Which is, I think, a relief?

A member of this congregation recently told me the following story, which she offered for an illustration in my sermon on Negative Miracles. I received it too late for use in that sermon, but it works just as well or better here.

She told me that when her father was dying a couple of years ago, she went to visit him for what turned out to be the last time. They had a long talk during which she told him that his alcoholism had not been the worst thing that had ever happened to her, that it had, in her words, "made me the person I am and I wasn't altogether disappointed with the outcome--thank you very much." She continued, "As you can imagine, he cried and I cried and it was wonderful. Daddy died about ten weeks later. I will be forever grateful that he knew how I felt and I hope that he was proud of the person he had helped to form."

This is a great story because it shows someone refusing to take the victim role, and because it demonstrates that how we deal with and interpret adversity is what is ultimately important. Indeed, adversity may help to shape us in ways that its opposite never could. As I implied a couple of weeks ago, perhaps we were not meant to be always happy, or to lead perfect lives.

My one caution in stories like this one is that sometimes those cathartic reconciliation's never come; and that, too, can feel like a failure. I know many who have waited in vain for some intimate disclosure, some deathbed confession from a loved one, some word of affirmation or forgiveness or just plain love which never came. Sometimes, the walls of resistance or denial or whatever it is are simply too thick for penetration. And that, too, can be ok, depending on what we choose to do with it, depending on how we choose to interpret it and use it.

In my insomniac musings the other night, I thought of the fictional father in Wallace Stegner's great novel The Big Rock Candy Mountain. Closely based on Stegner's own father--the whole novel is thinly disguised autobiography--Bo Mason would today be thrown into jail for child abuse. But his son Bruce, the narrator of the novel and Stegner's fictional counterpart, instead comes to a kind of grudging admiration and even pity, and, yes, love for his father, who becomes a representative of the true and ever restless westerner. Bruce, like Stegner, uses his experiences--the good, the bad, and the ugly--to become a writer who chronicles his family's life in all of it glory and failure. The father who might have ruined his life is understood to be more a victim of the times in which he lived than a villain whose main intent was to destroy his family. I recommend it as an antidote to the victim mentality, as well as a great American novel.

There was much to fault in my own relationship with my father, as I am quite sure my sons would affirm that there is in their relationship to me. In many ways my father was and remains a mystery to me. There were no deathbed epiphanies when he died.
But an experience of mine about seven months after his death is worth relating. I am still not sure of its full significance, but I think that it points to the fact that all of us are caught up into a larger web of existence and contingency than we know or can ever hope to understand.

The experience I am referring to took place during the 50th year commemoration of D-Day in 1994. While my father's death as an individual event did not strike me as a particularly mournful occurrence, coming at the end of a long life, his passing in the context of that W.W.II generation of men did. And so I inexplicably found myself in tears as I watched on TV the solemn anniversary of D-Day, tears that had not flowed at my father's memorial service or particularly at the time of his death. Dad did not take part directly in the D-Day invasion--he was driving the wounded in an ambulance as they arrived back in England. But who am I or any of us to say how deeply wounded he may have been by that second hand experience of the carnage of D-Day and the battles that followed? He seldom spoke of his experiences during the war, but he did one time mention how he had had to handle the basket cases--men who had lost all of their limbs in battle--stacking them in the ambulance like so much cordwood. That would be enough to scar just about anyone for life, it seems to me.

And so I cried, tears for Dad and Dad's generation and for what they had been asked to do. Tears that did not in the least penetrate the mystery of my father as an individual, as just my Dad, but which helped me, I think, to put him and at least a few of his faults into different perspective, and which opened the door a little to forgiveness and the relinquishment of any residual anger I might have held toward him. Besides, I have learned or at least I should know by now that holding on to that kind of anger just takes too much energy.

As I lay awake the other night, I thought of other fathers and sons that I know. My best friend from college, Skip Sickles, and his father Sonny, a shoe factory worker at Viner Brothers Shoe Company in Bangor, Maine. Skip's family epitomized the working poor. Both of Skip's parents worked, but these good Catholics had seven children of their own, and on most days just as many hangers on, including, for a time, me. Sonny would return from his work so dazed from inhaling the glue used in the shoe making process that he would lie on the sofa in front of the TV, oblivious to the chaos around him. What could this broken man possibly have had in common with his brilliant son, who would go on to earn a Ph.D. delving the intricacies and obscurities of Ezra Pound's Cantos, who could recite Shakespeare at length, and was one of the best actors I've ever seen?

And yet, there was the love of baseball which they shared--Sonny a Red Sox fan, Skip a Denison of those damned Yankees. And the love of words which Skip got from listening to the country western music that was a constant in the Sickles' household. I swear, Skip's prodigious memory included the lyrics to every country western song he ever heard. And the black humor--necessary for survival in the face of such awful and seemingly hopeless poverty. And the sense of justice--or in Skip's case, more the hatred of injustice that would allow his father to be destroyed physically and mentally by the terrible tedium and worse working conditions which he was forced to endure every day of his working life. I know that when Sonny died, only a couple of years before his son Skip died of cancer, it was a devastating loss for that son so dramatically different than his father, and I have often wondered if the two events--Sonny's death and Skip's cancer--weren't somehow related, so closely did they follow upon one another.

Would Skip have been better off had his family had more money and better jobs? Undoubtedly. But would he have been Skip? Like many children of poor families, Skip could have gone in a number of different directions, could have used the poverty and sadness of his childhood as an excuse, but instead it inspired him, in a way that bears closer inspection, to become more than he might otherwise have been. I'm not advocating poverty, of course, or discounting the pain, but just reiterating the fact that outcomes are very much a matter of our own choices and attitudes.

I don't know anything about poet Robert Hayden except the poem which I read to you this morning, and its wonderful line about "love's austere and lonely offices." That poem and that line in particular speaks to me about the difficulty many of us have in expressing the love that we feel for our children, and perhaps of our children for their parents, the love that is more often than not there behind "the chronic angers" of all our houses. I am not immune to that difficulty. I, too, often fail in all of the ways fathers, and I suppose mothers, too, fail in getting our love across to our children; unable to say it, caught behind my fears for them and my tendency to hasty judgement and my hopes for them which may not be their hopes, and all the other baggage from my own being an imperfect son to my own imperfect father. It is hard to keep old failures from getting in the way, but of course it is precisely that which we must do.

But it is also up to them, to our children--to all of us, really--to get on with our lives, and to realize that our destiny is ultimately in our own hands. It sounds like a cliche, but I cannot help but believe that it is true. Whatever our individual circumstances, for better or worse, it is up to us what we do with them. That includes genetics, as well. Our parents misdeeds and missteps and missed opportunities will always be a handy excuse for our own, but the sooner we get over them and get on with it the better off we shall be.

Like the parishioner whose story I related earlier, we need to recognize that no one comes from a perfect family with perfect parents; it's what we do with it that counts: what we do with all that is unspoken and even unspeakable that will count in the end.

All of us are children, and some of us are parents, and at least half of those are fathers. Being an adult is not all it's cracked up to be. But we can all come to know a thing or two about love's austere and lonely offices. May we find that the inevitable pain of life is not too much for us to bear. And may each of us take responsibility for our lives, which are the only lives we have, and which only we can live. Let us be about the living of them, and may we live them in forgiveness, and thanksgiving, and hope.
Happy Father's Day, and God bless you all, until we meet again.

Amen.

The Rev. Harold E. Babcock