Problems with fathers are nothing latest. They return to the start. Genesis alone is an unlimited catalog of fathers’ sins, whether those of Adam, Noah, and Lot, or the patriarchs themselves.
What about good fathers, though? Here is C. S. Lewis, writing within the Forties:
We have learned from Freud and others about those distortions in character and errors in thought which result from a person’s early conflicts together with his father. Far an important thing we are able to learn about George MacDonald is that his whole life illustrates the other process. An almost perfect relationship together with his father was the earthly root of all his wisdom. From his own father, he said, he first learned that Fatherhood have to be on the core of the universe. He was thus prepared in an unusual solution to teach that religion through which the relation of Father and Son is of all relations probably the most central.
I first read these words in my teens, when a youth minister—a spiritual father in his own way—began putting Lewis and G. K. Chesterton and Dietrich Bonhoeffer in my hands. This excerpt comes from the opening page of a MacDonald anthology Lewis edited. The Scottish pastor, preacher, and novelist’s writings were crucial to Lewis’s conversion, a lot in order that Lewis called him “my master.”
Lewis writes that MacDonald had “an almost perfect relationship together with his father.” This is remarkable on its face. But is it unique?
I don’t think so. Fatherlessness is an actual problem, but reports of the death of fatherhood have been greatly exaggerated. In fact, the explanation Lewis’s comment resonated after I was in highschool was that it named my very own experience. True, few of us would reach for the phrase almost perfect to speak about our dads. But good, loving, and faithful all fit the bill. Some of us actually need to be like our dads after we grow up—even once we have now, technically speaking, already grown up and turn into husbands and fathers ourselves.
You won’t know this from how we are likely to mark Father’s Day. Sometimes it takes the shape of shaming fathers for his or her failures, real and imagined. In May, nobody can say enough concerning the glories of motherhood. But once June rolls around, we overflow concerning the shortcomings of the trendy father. Other times, in our (comprehensible) eagerness to praise God as the right father, our talk of fatherhood drifts into abstraction and out-of-reach ideals. Flesh-and-blood dads within the pews never quite measure up; who could?
For this Father’s Day, then, here’s my proposal: Rather than specializing in fatherhood typically, let’s speak about particular fathers. None of us has an abstract dad. The only dads around are three-dimensional. Some of them, true, are guilty of the numerous paternal crimes with which we’re so familiar. But removed from all. So what are the actual virtues of particular fathers, yours or mine?
When I feel of my very own father, three virtues come immediately to mind.
The first has to do with blessing. Fathers are agents of blessing. Children wither away without it; with it, they enterprise into the world as if cloaked by an impenetrable shield. Think of the tragedy of the Von Erich family, as portrayed within the film The Iron Claw: a father with six sons, five of whom preceded him in death, three by suicide.
My colleague Randy Harris (incidentally, one other spiritual father of mine) recently spoke concerning the so-called Von Erich “curse”:
The movie would have us think that that’s not quite right. It’s not quite a curse. What it’s, is what happens when sons chase an elusive blessing from their father that never really comes. And perhaps I’m taken a bit with that reading because I’ve worked with students and ministers long enough to see what happens when a son or daughter doesn’t have the blessing of their father. … If you’re a father and also you haven’t given your child that blessing recently, you would possibly take into consideration doing that. It’s one of the crucial necessary things.
We know from Scripture that a father’s blessing bears enormous significance. But what’s it, exactly? It’s not approval or affirmation. Nor is it friendship or commonality. No, a father’s blessing is his favor—his unconditional, unapologetic, unquenchable yes to 1’s whole being. It’s his love in the shape of a lifelong gift, impervious to threat of loss. It’s the general public declaration: “This is my son, whom I really like; with him I’m well pleased.”
The biblical patriarchs’ blessings are one-time affairs, and are all of the more vulnerable for that. In our lives, paternal blessing is less a single moment than a posture stretched out across childhood and beyond. A father’s blessing says, I’m for you, come what may—even when what comes, as within the parable of the prodigal, is a son who spurns him.
I actually have never known a day in my life without my father’s blessing. It’s a security without measure, a present without earthly rival. Besides faith in Christ, it’s the thing I most hope I’m imparting to my very own young children—greater than happiness, greater than health, greater than a successful future. Thomas à Kempis calls life without Christ “a relentless hell.” I won’t say the identical for a life with no father’s blessing, but our culture is awash in stories that don’t share my reticence.
This brings to mind my father’s second virtue: the desire to interrupt destructive cycles and the resolve to guard life-giving ones.
My father didn’t grow up wanting to be like his father, who was mean and distant and drank an excessive amount of. By God’s grace, my dad entered college an atheist and left a married Christian. Meeting Christ meant a revolution for his trajectory as a person, above all as a husband and father. With the Spirit’s help, he could be faithful: to Christ, to his wife, and eventually to his three sons.
“Success” for him wasn’t measured by the standards of the world—pleasure, money, image, or other external marks. It was measured by fidelity. Not perfection, not sinlessness, but faithfulness. A faithfulness that included repentance, which is the one kind on offer for Christians.
There is a famous quote attributed to Frank Clark: “A father is a person who expects his son to be pretty much as good a person as he meant to be.” A pessimistic interpretation would see this line as an elegy for all of the ways fathers fail to be all they ought (or sought) to be. A more hopeful reading would see it as a vision of fatherhood that’s each realistic—I’ll fail—and self-giving—I’ll succeed if my son surpasses me. If, in other words, my son becomes a greater father than I used to be, and his son a greater father than he was, and so forth, perpetually. That is what my very own father wanted.
Fatherhood as an aspirational, incremental, generational improvement—ensuring steps backward never surpass steps forward—requires a strong resolve in two directions. On one hand, it means fiercely repudiating all of the history, circumstances, and temptations that may make fidelity less likely. On the opposite, it means protecting, renewing, and handing on all the great we have now received from others or built ourselves. This sort of fatherhood requires an indomitable will: the desire to like, the desire to sacrifice, the desire to be faithful regardless of the price.
Third and at last, a dad is a teacher. Mine actually was. Like it or not, all fathers instruct, and never only through example.
My catechesis got here within the automotive. Little did I do know that our minivan was not a way of transporting me to basketball tournaments around Texas. It was a devious device, one way or the other legal, designed to trap me for hours of undesired conversation: about God, about girls, about work ethic. About anything and all the things I didn’t need to speak about. But what could I do? Even if I didn’t speak, I used to be forced to listen.
These conversations were seeds that, in some cases, took an extended time to sprout, much less to blossom. And little question they often were as painful for my dad as they were for me. But they were much more necessary than the standard lessons, a few of which took (the best way to ride a motorcycle or shoot a free throw) and a few of which didn’t (the best way to fix a automotive or work a spreadsheet).
“You will know them by their fruit,” Jesus said of his disciples (Matt. 7:16, NASB). The same goes for fathers.
Last December, my brothers and our wives gathered within the back room of an Austin restaurant with a couple of dozen of my parents’ friends (and by “friends” I mean sisters and brothers in Christ with whom they’ve lived, led, rejoiced, wept, worshiped, and served since I used to be in diapers). We were there to have fun my father’s retirement from the corporate where he had worked for greater than 40 years.
My brothers and I each spoke, trying to elucidate what made our dad so good—as a mentor, as a teacher, as a faithful follower of Christ. For us, the query answered itself: This man lived an excellent life because he lived the good life. He knew what mattered and committed himself entirely to it.
Fathers live well not when their lives go well, but after they live as God wills regardless how life goes. Their children see it. I saw it. Such a life is itself all of the blessing a toddler needs; it opens every right door and closes all of the unsuitable ones.
My kids call him Pop-E. The eldest son, I raised my glass and told the room, I would like to be like Pop-E after I grow up.
Brad East is an associate professor of theology at Abilene Christian University. He is the writer of 4 books, including The Church: A Guide to the People of God and Letters to a Future Saint: Foundations of Faith for the Spiritually Hungry.
