Pre-Father's Day Post

My father was admitted to hospice this past week. He will be receiving care at home, which is a blessing.

Naturally this happening right before Father's Day has me thinking about my father's life and his impact on my own. I once told a story about him as part of a homily; my mother points out that it was at Mass on Mother's Day, and I still owe her a story, but time for that later.

I included it in my book, Elijah and the Ravens of Carith, and it is that version that I reproduce here.

Much has been written about charity since Paul’s famous passage in his letter to the Corinthians, and nothing perhaps has surpassed those words. Certainly nothing I can say will! All I want to do here is offer a reflection based on my personal experience of charity, love, from the perspective of the one who has received it.

Some years ago a woman who was on retreat complained to me that I kept talking about love and she had no idea what I meant by it. This startled me, because I knew that this was a supremely generous and self-sacrificing woman. I tried to point out the ways in which she herself was showing love, but she stopped me.

“I don’t know what it means to be loved. You keep talking about God loving me, but I have no reference point for that. What does it feel like to be loved? What does that mean?”

So I pondered for a while my own experiences of being loved – by parents, by friends, by those who had been (or thought they had been) “in love” with me. As I did so, three common elements emerged, and I shared those with her. What follows is what being loved has been like for me.

First, acceptance. The people who loved me accepted me. They did not always understand me or necessarily approve of everything about me. My parents, for example, would have preferred that I go to college nearby instead of choosing to attend a university fifteen hundred miles from home. They were not pleased when I entered the Catholic Church while at that university, and they could not understand fully why I would choose to enter a monastery after graduation and forego having a family of my own. Yet in all of this, they accepted me. That was part of their love.

Second, challenge. Acceptance by itself can be pretty limp. If those who loved me just let me be, I would never have grown. Instead they challenged me to be better, to face my fears, to try new things. As a result I learned that I could stand up before a crowd and speak, that I could go to a foreign country and learn a new language, that I could even dance (more or less). Part of their love for me was the challenge to go beyond myself.

Third, commitment. Acceptance and challenge became love because they stayed with me. They didn’t just say, “Okay, this is who you are. This is how you can become better. Stay warm and well fed. Bye!” They walked with me, sometimes wept with me, sometimes helped me up and other times let me get up on my own. But they were there.

Acceptance, challenge, commitment. That was my experience of being loved, and those elements were present in all of the varied relationships that were worthy of the name love. This story about my father illustrates this.

When I was fourteen, I learned to drive while working on my grandfather’s farm for the summer. An older cousin took me under his wing and taught me how to drive an old army surplus jeep. It was in less-than-perfect shape, and I had to learn to double shift and sort of slide into and through second gear. It had little pick-up, and I had to push the pedal to the metal to get it to move, but by the end of the summer, I was managing well enough to feel confident when I began my driver’s education classes at school.

One day in the fall, before I had actually gotten into a car to drive in driver’s ed, my brother was playing down the road when dinnertime rolled around. My father tossed me his keys and told me to go get him. I made excuses, but he assured me I could do it. After all, it was a country road with little or no traffic, the distance to cover was only about a block each way and I had learned to drive over the summer. Right?

I got into my father’s Plymouth with some trepidation, but also with some excitement. After all, this was an automatic transmission. I did not have to worry about the clutch or shifting gears. How hard could it be?

I started the engine, sat for a moment, pushed it into reverse and, as I had done many times with the jeep, floored the gas pedal.

Unlike the rickety old jeep, the Plymouth was in good shape and had approximately a gazillion horsepower engine. It flew out of the garage, narrowly missing my mother’s car and the central supporting pillar, across the curve of the driveway and into a tree in our neighbor’s yard.

I was physically unhurt – there is much to be said for the physical resiliency of a fourteen-year-old – but when I got out and saw the crushed rear fender, I was sick at my stomach. I waited for someone to come, but apparently no one had heard the crash that to me has seemed to shake the Texas countryside. There was nothing to do but go tell my father.

I went back into the house, where he was still reading the newspaper and told him what had happened. He folded the paper, got up and said, “Let’s go see.”

We went out and he walked around the car. He jumped up and down on the bumper a couple of times and got it loose from the tree. Then he turned to me and said, “Get in.”

Get in? Get back in the car? Surely you jest!

He was serious. He had me get back in the car, in the driver’s seat. He got in and had me start the car, pull away from the tree and down the drive, and then he talked me through driving down the road to get my brother and all the way back. His only concession to my poor driving skills was that he let me get out and put the car back in the garage himself.

To me, that was a great act of love. My father accepted what I had done. I know he did not like it or approve of it. But he accepted it, and more importantly, he accepted me as the one responsible. He then challenged me to do better by having me get back in the car and drive. Finally, he committed himself to me by getting in the car with me, even though he saw what I had just done. That may have been the greatest act of love of all.

Accept. Challenge. Commit. Go and do likewise.