2012.08.25 Fathers Matter Lots

Today would be my dad’s 101st birthday. Happy Birthday Dad.
   
Dad was a perfectly imperfect father for a “Mad Man” (TV show, not insane asylum.)  I loved him and longed for more of him all the time, and all our life together.  He died at 71 way too early for the length of my love.
   
Sometimes as a child I’d stand at Dad’s side and silently yearn, hard enough I imagined that he would turn from his preoccupations and take me onto his lap. Sometimes he did.
   
Today is also the day when I entered Hartford Hospital 45 years ago to have labor induced for the birth of my third child, already overdue by two weeks. It was August—too hot to be so huge.  I persuaded my OBGYN that this child should be born on Dad’s birthday.  That was my idea but son Rob refused to come out. He waited till August 31, then came with a rush and a hemorrhage and a loud wail, mercifully strong and full of presence. Happy Birthday Rob.

Cheryl Strayed the author of an exquisite (Oprah aside) memoir Wild, hallows the value of good fathering.  She once strayed into a therapist’s office and announced flippantly, “I’m like a guy sexually.”  Detached.  The therapist listened then asked, “Who detached from you?” 
   
Was this where she was supposed to tell him about her father? As she dove into the dangerous father topic of severe violence and equally severe absence sprinkled with endearments,  she stared at the familiar poster of a whirl of white in a black rectangle. It was meant to be the Milky Way in the middle of which was an arrowed sign that read, You are here.
   
After her tale of pain Strayed stared at the poster and reflected how much worse it would have been to be left alone with this father who didn’t know how to love me as a father should.  The bright therapist countered “What if you had a father who loved you as a father should?”
   
The question threw Strayed into confusion: “I couldn’t land on love or security, confidence or a sense of belonging. A father who loved you as a father should was greater than his parts. He was like a whirl of white on the You are here poster behind Vince’s [the therapist] head. He was a giant inexplicable thing that contained a million other things, and because I’d never had one, I’d feared I’d never find myself inside that great white swirl.” 

Dad held me as the apple of his eye, enough that I knew I am here. And Rob’s children know We are here because he loves them the way a good father should.

2012.01.01 Holy Naming

It’s New Year’s Day. It’s also the Christian feast of the Holy Name.

Some Christians think there is only one holy name, and that it’s the name of Jesus. They’re wrong.

Now don’t misunderstand me. I love Jesus, both the holy man of Nazareth with the ribald humor and the buoying laugh and also the one the Church elevates to messiah, one sent by Godde to liberate and bring the good news that what?.......we’re saved.

But then you look around and guess what?... we’re not saved or it doesn’t look that way with all the mess of our lives and all the messiness and corruption in the world.

Salvation isn’t rescue it’s hope. And hope that is seen isn’t hope.

Scripture makes a big deal of God’s naming us each one and all, a way to acknowledge each one’s special place in the Heart of Love.

So who named you? My dad named me LYnda because he wanted to call me Lyn which he did. He only called me Lynda when he was seriously pissed off, like when he hollered me back inside as I was scampering across our lawn while sneaking out to meet my boyfriend who waited in the darkened getaway car down the street.

The sound of my whole name caught my attention. I was saved from teenage sex, which frankly was far more threatening than my father’s wrath.

Just his calling me by my whole name was enough to make me remember he cared about me, for better or worse.

Or . . . he’d call me by my full name when he “got me.”

(Our little granddaughter Phoebe, three, recently commented about her Uncle Robbie who’d given her a large empty cardboard box to play with, “That Uncle Robbie, he really gets me!”)

Dad “got me” when I told him I wanted to be a priest and then went quickly into a long awkward and inadequate explanation of something I couldn’t explain. He said “It’s OK Lynda. I understand.”

How do you name yourself? How do you name God?

God names us, and in so doing "gets" us, than tries like hell to save us from harm, failing almost every time but still trying.

Now that’s holy naming. Listen and hope.

True Love is Always Steadfast and Chooses Life

Just recently my marriage partner, aka husband (I can hardly keep up with gender role diversity!) said something beautiful and true.

We were engaging in a regular practice at our Education for Ministry (EfM) group. We call it spoking in. Doing spokes is a metaphor for checking in or getting on board together after we have prayed and before we begin the theological reflection for the day.

Spoking-in is a metaphor. It brings to mind the image of a wheel with a sturdy rim and center and many spokes to connect center to outer edges. For us the center is Christ, the rim is the huge embrace of Godde keeping it all safe and moving, and our lives with all their many complexities are the spokes.

Often we mentors offer a suggestion or question to focus the group’s spokes. This week the question came from a scriptural invitation. It contains promise and consequence in the mouth of God (Deuteronomy 30:19) who tells the faithful: “See, I have set before you life and death, good and evil, blessings and curses. Choose life so that you and your descendants may live . . .”

We asked the group to share a time, recent or distant, when they had made a conscious decision to choose life. (It’s an easy question—and not, if you dare to think about it.) Responses ranged from taking a pass and time to reflect, to recalling major life choices, to sharing choices still beset with uncertainty.

My husband, co-mentor and brother priest responded with care saying something like: “Over the years I have chosen life many times as a father. I have chosen life by choosing to let my children have their own lives, that they may live. I have chosen to be steadfast in love and keep connection rather than to try to intervene or control.”

I felt tears as I listened to this fatherly love.

I have watched this style of his and seen his frustrations too, and my own. Why didn’t you say something? How come you didn’t ask?

I also felt some envy since I can be a mother whose love blurts and blats my own thoughts or anxieties. Maybe it’s my chatty gender. Many times I am quite wise in spite of it all.

There’s a place for all style and kinds of love of course, and all kinds are held in the mystery of divine love which supports us from within in the courage to speak out as well as the serenity to accept and wait.

All true love is steadfast; all true love chooses life.