The "Bridge to Being" Blog

My Parents in 1940

I could not have been more than 14 months when a vivid memory was indelibly imprinted on my little brain.  It was very early, just before dawn.  I toddled out of the bedroom in the gloom.  An electric heater glowed in the chilly shadows. There next to the warm coils towered Dad. [Twenty years later I would tower over him, but only in the gawky physical sense.]

I looked up at my father, crisply dressed in his khakis.  I distinctly remember asking him the following question:

“Where are you going?” 

And I remember his answer: “To the war.” 

Mom was still sleeping. I didn’t see my father again for almost four years.  But he came back, jolly, kind, life-loving and unscarred.  He modeled Fatherhood for me.  I am eternally grateful for the decades he shared with mother, my brother and me.

You can spend a lot of time reviewing last year’s Father’s Day sermons (June 18, 2006) in the mainline Christian churches. 

If you’re looking for a great Father’s Day homily or sermon, you will find that “many are called but few are chosen”.  My own internet search turned up a lot of discussions of the “mustard seed” parable last year, but precious little about fathers and fatherhood.

One of the “canons’ of Christian homiletic tradition is “Don’t ignore the gospel reading!” I would also humbly add another heartfelt injunction, “Don’t ignore the Dads!”

Surely the world’s most famous and revered first Century Rabbi, the “Son of Man”, who is recognized as the Messiah by not fewer than one billion people, has modeled for us the perfect father. 

And surely it is impossible to ignore the fact that most of the world’s current travails can be traced to a catastrophic failure of fatherhood.

Vernon Foster is an exemplary man.  He is an African American leader in Oakland, California.  In 2003, he wrote an Op Ed in the Oakland Tribune (linked to my website with his permission). Here is part of that he said:

“…African Americans must also address the issues of fatherlessness in their community or little will change. Alameda County represents more than 30 percent of the state’s welfare population, including individuals identified as non-custodial parents, the majority of whom live in Oakland. Fatherlessness is the engine that drives our most pressing social problems. Consider the following:

 

“Fatherlessness is the most important predictor of crime -- a greater predictor than either race orr income. More than 70 percent of juveniles in long-term correctional facilities grew up without their fathers. More than 78 percent of the hardened criminals are from fatherless households. More than 70 percent of men in prison come from fatherless households.

 

‘… Oakland is not only losing fathers, it is also losing the idea of fatherhood.

 

“What we face is not simply a physical loss affecting some households; we face a cultural loss affecting every home. … Many in the hip-hop generation believe that being uneducated is “keeping it real,” that a man’s responsibility to his child is the sperm he donated to the mother, and that prison is a right of passage. No school system, no political will and no amount of money can handle that charge. The schools are just a part of the inner city chaos.”

 

This is a generous excerpt.

“Who Needs Fathers These Days?

 

“It is hard to talk about fathers and their roles in the family these days without sounding old fashioned. In a society where many of the icons and celebrities of society are single mothers, in a society where a woman could walk across the block to the fertility clinic and buy herself a child, … one could as well ask, “Who needs fathers these days?”

 

“Today, Father’s Day, it would not be out of place for us to remind ourselves that in spite of all the changes in society, the father remains a very essential figure in the ideal Christian family. This is not a global condemnation of single motherhood since we know that many women are forced into single motherhood by circumstances beyond their control. But we would like to remind ourselves today that the ideal Christian family remains that of father, mother and child.

 

‘… Kids need fathers just as they need mothers. They need their fathers as role models as much as they need their mothers. A father’s love is different than a mother’s love, and the child needs both in the same way that our bodies need both proteins and carbohydrates in order to achieve a balanced growth.

 

“The crisis of fatherhood in the family contributes to the crisis of faith in our society today. Even though God is pure spirit and therefore cannot be male or female, the Bible usually presents God to us in the image of father. Jesus teaches us in the Lord’s Prayer to call God “Our Father.” Since we go from the known to the unknown, it stands to reason to say that the experience we have of our earthly fathers affects how we visualize our heavenly father. The crisis of faith in many young people today could be related to early life experiences in which the experience of a good and loving father figure was missing.

 

“Let us pray for all fathers today that they may be more faithful to their duties in the family. Let us pray God to give them the moral strength and the economic wherewithal they need to become good role models that their children can always look up to. And for all kids who lost their fathers through divorce or death, let us pray that the heavenly Father of us all may show Himself to be their father in such a tangible way so as to fill the vacuum left by the absence of a visible father.”