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Heroes: A Father's Day Sermon
A Sermon Given
by Douglas Taylor
on June 16, 2002
at Cedar Lane Unitarian Universalist Church
Bethesda, Maryland
Summertime and the living is easy
Fish are jumping, and the cotton is high
Your pappy’s rich and your mammy’s good looking
So hush, little baby, don’t you cry.
-Gershwin
If I had to be pinned down about which of the many aspects of fatherhood I
liked best, I would have to say the lullabies. My wife and I have sung our
kids to sleep all along. The bedtime singing had waned in the past few years
with the older two, and is just now starting up again for Piran. Summertime
has always been the lullaby that has popped into my head most every night. We
also sing other show tunes like: Summertime, religious songs like
Amazing Grace, popular songs like Sweet Baby James by James Taylor,
and folk songs like Where Have All the Flowers Gone, as well as
traditional lullabies. It’s nice to be back into lullabies again.
I never had pegged myself for having the potential to be a good Dad. There
was a cartoon I saw a few years back which showed the father of the
comic-strip family saying to his wife: "I don’t think I would have been in
such a rush to become a father if I had known how much of it would need to be
ad-libbed!" I was not sure in the least what I was doing when I started out
this fatherhood venture. And I must admit that up until just a few years ago,
whenever I was together with other fathers I would sometimes think of it as
research or reconnaissance. I would watch them and try to figure out what
these men were doing that was particularly "fatherly." I even have gone so far
as to pretend to be interested in sports.
I have learned awhile back that people who grow up in alcoholic homes often
have difficulty knowing what "normal" looks like. I had trouble knowing what a
"normal" father was supposed to be like. Was I supposed to be the stern one
who enforced the rules? Is it my job to be a counter balance to the nurturing
our kids get from their mother? I was twenty when our first child was born. I
was at square one about what my role was and what I was supposed to be doing.
I had grown up in an alcoholic home, and I had no basis upon which to say,
"This is what it is supposed to look like when normal people do it."
My father and mother separated when I was four, and I have no memory of my
father living with us. My father lived in the next town over and visited on
the weekends. He hadn’t disappeared from my life completely, but he was not a
part of the home. The home I grew up in was comprised of myself, my two
sisters, and my mother. I do have an older brother, but he also abused alcohol
to the point that I never really got to know him until we were both adults.
Now, both my father and my older brother (as well as the older of my two
sisters) have dealt with their drinking problems.
For many years I felt that the only model I had for how to be a father was
one I refused to see any value in. It wasn’t until I was in seminary and had
started looking at my life from the perspective of faith and forgiveness that
I began to see my father as the person he really is rather than a sad
caricature of every bad thing I had heard about him. This is tricky stuff,
seeing people for who they really are rather than who we want them to be, or
who they sometimes seem to be. And for some reason, it seems to be
particularly difficult for men on the receiving end of this. It seems as
though men often get stuck in images of who they seem to be or ought to be and
they end up having a hard time being seen for who they really are.
The state of fatherhood in our society today is improving drastically. Time
was when the only options for a father was to be seen as the breadwinner who
was often away at work. In a book from the 1980's entitled A Choice of
Heroes: The Changing Face of American Manhood, author Mark Gerzon
postulates that men are held captive by the assumptions of what it means to be
a man. Gerzon writes about heroes because the images we choose to see as
heroic are the images we aspire to become. He wrote about two heroic public
images in America: the frontiersman and the soldier. These two primary images
are about conquest and aggression. The implications for fatherhood are
outlined in his chapters on men as the breadwinners, the providers for the
family. Gerzon makes two compelling arguments. First, that these American Hero
images run so deeply in the communal understanding, that they are undeniably
influential. "Traditionally," he writes, "men have identified with images that
were passed down from father to son, generation after generation. Embedded in
myths and rituals with prehistoric origins, their images represented the core
of early human cultures (Gerzon, p. 4-5)." The second argument he makes is
that things are changing. We are getting more flexible as a society.
This book is from the early 1980's. Some of the changes he writes about
include the advent of fathers being allowed into the delivery room during the
birth of their children back in the mid-sixties. I had thought the image of
the father pacing and chain-smoking in the waiting room was just a cheap
stereotype; I hadn’t realized that it was really how things were managed back
a few generations ago. I had not realized the gift I took for granted when I
was present for the birth of all three of my kids. Gerzon also documents the
dramatic increase of women becoming breadwinners and that impact on men. It is
heartening to be able to look back only a generation or two and note the
positive changes in assumptions that accompany manhood and fatherhood these
days. To illustrate this point let me share with you this story about the time
my son Keenan was possessed by a chocolate brownie.
As a family, we have never been big on sweets. We don’t tend to have
dessert very often and we avoid having junk food in the house except
occasionally. But six or seven years ago, while I was still in seminary, the
couple we had invited over for dinner brought chocolate brownies for dessert.
Big chocolate brownies. They may have been double chocolate, I’m not sure. We
were all looking forward to the treat. We finished dinner late, but we told
the kids they could get ready for bed, then join us for dessert before
brushing their teeth and hopping into bed. Well, when Keenan came downstairs
in his pajamas, he headed straight for the plate of brownies. I must of
blinked because I never saw the brownie go down. He inhaled the thing, and we
learned that night what happens to children who are not used to a steady
stream of sugar intake when they suddenly receive a jolt of the magnitude of a
double chocolate brownie! The phrase "bouncing off the walls" is usually just
a figure of speech. Keenan was literally bouncing off the walls.
We let them stay up for about fifteen extra minutes before we started
herding them up the stairs. Keenan was unusually difficult. I felt the need to
discipline the child, which in our house meant counting to five, and then
there would be consequences. Consequences were usually things like time-out,
denial of immediate future treats, things like that. Keenan hated it when we
counted to five on him. Brin didn’t care. She understood and responded with
due speed when we started counting; but with Keenan, it seemed as though
counting was a punishment in itself. So for him when we wanted him to know we
were serious and close to punishment, we would say, "I’m going to start
counting."
So there we were. Keenan was hopping up and down on the third step up
talking incessantly. His sister had already gone up to brush her teeth five
minutes earlier. I had joked with him. I had made him look me in the eye while
I told him to go. I had even tried the "Dad voice" and nothing worked.
"Keenan," I said, "I’m going to start counting." And, he whipped around and
pointed his finger at me and said, "No! I’m going to start counting."
Now twenty years ago, I suspect that after the laughter I would finish the
story with the familiar line "and after that, he couldn’t sit down for a
week!" Corporal punishment was considered an obvious choice for open defiance.
Instead, I stood there with a choice before me. Should I get angrier with him,
or should I laugh because it is such a funny scene? I laughed, and then took
him by the hand and sternly took him up to the bathroom where he could brush
his teeth.
The premise of Gerzon’s book A Choice of Heroes is that for a father
to be considered "heroic", there are many strong, dominating, and aggressive
models. There are, however, no heroic models for us to look to if we want to
be nurturing, caring fathers to our children. The "Father"of our country, or
the "King" of the wild frontier did not spend much time nurturing children.
They were busy founding and conquering the land and the people. This was the
way of things back twenty years ago when Gerzon wrote his book. It seems to me
that much has changed. We do have more flexibility with the role of a
nurturing father figure. It is an image in public consciousness that is
gaining in acceptability by leaps and bounds.
Think about the big heroes which flashed across the TV last fall. The Mayor
of New York was present. He was there, responding to needs. He did not ride in
and say, "I’ll make those bad guys pay for this." He let Bush play the old
style cowboy who would find the bad guys "dead or alive." Gulliani didn’t
conquer anyone, he didn’t defend or personally save anyone. He listened to
people. He freed up resources for people. He was present. Now, his personal
life was also on display in the media before tragedy struck and I don’t think
we can say he is a model of a nurturing father or husband. But he was, at the
critical time, a nurturing mayor.
So nurturing can be heroic. If I were to hand out paper and pencils and ask
you to write down the names of your heroes, could you do it? Do you have
identifiable heroes? What makes them heroic in your book? If you can’t think
of someone in particular, what qualities are you looking for that you are not
seeing in the people you know? I’m obviously looking for nurturing father
figures for heroes, but that shouldn’t limit your search.
And they certainly don’t need to be famous people. I read a poem once which
said:
The River is famous to the fish.
The loud voice is famous to silence,
which knew it would inherit the earth
before anybody said so.
The cat sleeping on the fence is famous to the birds
watching him from the birdhouse.
The tear is famous, briefly, to the cheek.
The idea you carry close to your bosom
is famous to your bosom.
The boot is famous to the earth,
more famous than the dress shoe,
which is famous only to floors.
The bent photograph is famous to the one who carries it
and not at all famous to the one who is pictured.
I want to be famous to shuffling men
who smile while crossing streets,
sticky children in grocery lines,
famous as the one who smiled back.
I want to be famous in the way the pulley is famous,
or a buttonhole, not because it did anything spectacular,
but because it never forgot what it could do.
-Anonymous
Well that turns the idea of fame on its head doesn’t it? The buttonhole
could be famous because it never forgot what it could do. Not because it did
anything spectacular? Well in the write up for this sermon I said I was
interested in the possibility of the heroic within each of us. Heroism is
grand, spectacular stuff. Heroes are people swept up by those qualities of
spirit we wish we had within ourselves. Heroes are those we emulate which we
slowly become. Our heroes do not need to be famous or grand; they can be just
people who never forgot what they could do, and did it.
On this father’s day, my wish for you is that the best of your father will
be found in you.
One of these mornings, you’re gonna rise up singing
Then you’ll spread your wings and take to the sky
Until that morning, there ain’t nothing can harm you
With mammy and pappy standing by.
-Gershwin
In a world without end,
May it be so.
Office@CedarLane.org
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