Father’s Day is a multibillion-dollar affair. In the weeks leading as much as it, men’s ties, BBQ aprons, and golf-themed gifts fly off the shelves.
My own view on Father’s Day has an advanced history. After an abusive, impoverished childhood (detailed in my recent memoir, Motorhome Prophecies), I sometimes felt an anger toward my dad as intense as what Salvador Dalí, the Spanish surrealist painter, felt toward his own father.
I first fell in love with this good artist while visiting a museum dedicated to his work in sunny St. Petersburg, Florida. It’s a futuristic, fantastical constructing stuffed with spacious, airy light flowing through a glass atrium entryway attached to 18-inch thick concrete. It’s a fascinating and fitting home for this revolutionary man who pushed the boundaries intersecting art, science, and metaphysics.
Dalí clashed for a long time along with his father, a mid-level civil servant who didn’t appreciate his son’s creative, rebellious nature or his association with the surrealist movement. Adding insult to injury, he disapproved of his son’s muse and future wife, Gala. Dalí said he considered his true father to be psychologist Sigmund Freud, and later, quantum physicist Werner Heisenberg. Legend has it that Dalí gave his biological father a condom containing the artist’s own sperm, exclaiming, “Take that. I owe you nothing anymore!”
Obviously, that’s disgusting. But I confess there was a time in my life once I might need considered buying a sperm sample from a donor bank and sending it to my dad. I believed he’d die before I’d ever speak to him again.
God’s healing balm
As I shared earlier this 12 months for CT, I grew up inside an offshoot Mormon cult led by my father, who claimed to be a prophet. I lived with seven biological siblings in various motor homes, tents, houses, and sheds.
Besides time spent in homeschooling, I attended 17 different public schools. When I took my ACT exam, we lived in a shed with no furnace or running water within the Ozarks, where winter temperatures can hover across the freezing mark. Sometimes, we didn’t have food. I even have two siblings with schizophrenia, including one brother who tried to rape me and one who accused me of attempting to seduce him. I’ve suffered nine hospital visits for complications around depression, fibromyalgia, suicidal ideation, and PTSD.
My dad told my brothers they deserved their schizophrenia. And he warned me against leaving home for faculty, prophesying “within the name of Jesus” that I’d be raped and murdered. Despite all this, I landed a full journalism scholarship to Harvard, where I earned a master’s degree. Since then, I’ve largely enjoyed a productive profession and a life stuffed with travel, adventure, and caring friends, though it’s been scarred with periodic episodes of severe depression.
Eventually, though I never thought it possible, I forgave my father for what he did to me, my mother, and my siblings. Only through an unlikely series of events did I reach the purpose of visiting this man’s birthday celebration, grateful for the gifts he did impart and in a position to forgive the mental agony that made me wish to kill myself. (Sadly, three of my siblings have attempted suicide.)
The journey began with my Christian conversion, a call that began the strategy of opening my heart to God’s healing balm of forgiveness. Shortly after my baptism, Anthony B. Thompson became a spiritual mentor to me. Anthony is pastor of Holy Trinity Reformed Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina, and writer of Called to Forgive: The Charleston Church Shooting, a Victim’s Husband, and the Path to Healing and Peace.
We met through a Bronx pastor friend named Dimas Salaberrios, who invited me to a Manhattan screening of his documentary, Emanuel. Coproduced with Viola Davis and Stephen Curry, it tells the story of the 2015 shooting of nine parishioners at Charleston’s predominantly Black Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church. Anthony and I immediately connected over our shared passion for discerning God’s call on our lives.
Anthony’s wife, Myra, was amongst those murdered by the white supremacist killer, 21-year-old Dylann Roof. Mother Emanuel Church, as parishioners understand it, is a historic church with a venerable history within the struggle for civil rights. Anthony and other members of the family of “the Charleston Nine” shocked the world with their incredible act of forgiveness within the face of such a heinous act.
Roof, a scrawny neo-Nazi with an allegedly violent father, had driven greater than 100 miles across the state in hopes of sparking a race war. Instead, Charleston experienced the transformative power of forgiveness. Love and unity reigned, sparing the town the violence and destruction often seen after episodes of racial injustice. The words of the victims’ families carried enormous weight, and despite the fact that there was deep anguish of their voices, their message was loud and clear: Hate and vengeance had no place of their hearts.
As a pastor, Anthony followed up with the murderer and visited him in prison to reiterate his message of forgiveness, urging this intransigent monster to wish for God’s mercy and submit his life to Jesus.
For me, Anthony’s book on forgiveness proved invaluable. It knocks down all the most important myths that keep us from practicing it. All too easily, we imagine forgiving others means downplaying or excusing the sin and harm involved. Or that forgiving makes you weak and passive. Or that forgiving means you need to let an abuser hurt you again.
None of those statements are true. First and foremost, forgiveness is an act of obedience to God. And even if you happen to don’t consider in God, science proves that forgiveness is a strong, healing antibiotic for victims around the globe. For example, scholars with the Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health recently produced a randomized trial showing forgiveness improved depression and anxiety and promoted flourishing in five relatively high-conflict countries: Colombia, South Africa, Ukraine, Indonesia, and Hong Kong.
Forgiveness helps release us from the emotional and mental cancers of vengeance, insecurity, rage, and fear. It obliterates the ability that abusers maintain over us by releasing their control over our minds and hearts. Though we still might suffer bodily, financially, or in other ways, we now have begun to steel ourselves against the risks of self-sabotage.
Anthony built an exemplary life as a pastor and is now a logo of God’s redemptive power for hundreds of thousands of individuals. I knew that if he could forgive, then I could also.
With Anthony’s mentoring, together with quite a few prayer circles with other Christian friends, I learned to release my visceral hatred of the person who’d brought me countless shame and regret. The man who spoke curses over me, abandoned me, and certain drove my two sweet brothers to insanity, stealing any possibility of a traditional life.
The deep healing prayer ministries that helped me, including Sozo and deliverance prayer, involved a prayer minister or two talking and praying with me through specific events and traumas. We talked through how God was present in each of those moments and their aftermath, even when he seemed silent and distant. We reclaimed each moment and released the residual pain and sorrow in my heart and mind. Though pain returned, it progressively dissipated and is significantly reduced today.
In my late 30s, after years of not talking to him, I visited Dad at home with Mom and my two schizophrenic brothers for an easy meal. It was surprisingly peaceful. Battling dementia, Dad was still coherent and in a position to hold a conversation, though there have been moments when he looked as if it would drift off and his sky-blue eyes glazed over. There were no recriminations, no fire and brimstone accusations, no hateful sermons.
Honoring the dishonorable
We often get our view of God from our earthly fathers. That’s one reason our crisis of fatherlessness hits society so hard. Numerous studies show fatherlessness and paternal child abuse are crucial aspects in whether a baby drops out of highschool, falls into drugs and gangs, commits crimes, or becomes a single teenage mother. Whether we suffer the trauma of abuse or abandonment, this often leads us to forget who our real father is—God, our infinite source of affection, joy, and purpose.
Billy Graham said, “A baby who’s allowed to be disrespectful to his parents is not going to have true respect for anyone.” He’s right. My rage against my father manifested itself in how I disrespected myself, my romantic partners, and others in my life. I needed to forgive everyone in my life (including toxic coworkers, various church leaders, cheating exes, and others) and ask God to forgive me. There were LDS church leaders who hurt me, but many others who cared for and helped me. I needed to forgive all of the hurt and release my anger.
The Bible clearly says, “Honor thy father and thy mother” (Exodus 20:12, KJV). This passage sets no age limit on such honor. It doesn’t say they have to be honorable to be honored. This doesn’t necessarily mean that we must “obey” parents who could also be dishonorable. We must honor them. Honor has many shapes and affections.
In some ways, my father lived a dishonorable life, but that doesn’t mean I should retaliate and dishonor him by sending him a package of sperm or yelling at him on my grandparents’ grave. It means I have to live in a way that brings him honor, each to him as an individual and to my family name. The more I study the results of childhood sexual and emotional abuse, the more my heart grieves for the pain my father suffered.
For me, Father’s Day now means reflecting on the nice my father gave me while forgiving the remaining. Though I believed my father was the villain, I now see how he had suffered himself. He had been crushed by severe religious zealotry born of mental illness, the result of putting up with sexual assault as a toddler followed by isolation in addition to the death of his best childhood friend. He’s no kind of deserving of God’s mercy and compassion than I’m.
I pray for his life, especially during his struggles at age 86 with Alzheimer’s. Happy Father’s Day, Dad.
Carrie Sheffield is the writer of Motorhome Prophecies: A Journey of Healing and Forgiveness. This essay is customized from the book.
