What makes for a father?

Fifty-six years ago, my father died, late on a December night. As clearly as I remember his death, I remember the bitter cold. Within a day the temperature dipped to minus forty degrees Fahrenheit.

I was still young; too young (I thought, at the time) to lose a father. Later, I’d realize I was wrong. Nobody is too young to lose a father, although losing your father before certain things can be given and received can leave its scars.

We, the family of this father, were lucky enough. We had plenty of preparation for his death. He died after a yearlong battle with cancer and he died with his faith, generosity, and humor intact; and he had given us his blessing. Moreover, he died without bitterness, grateful, blessing life. There are worse ways to die and there are worse ways to lose one’s father. In our family prayers we had always prayed for a happy death. Some months after his death, after some warmer weather, I realized he had died a happy death.

But this reminiscence on Father’s Day more than fifty years after that bitterly cold day, is not meant as a eulogy (something he would be uncomfortable with), nor as a homily on what constitutes a happy death. It’s intended as a reflection on what constitutes a father, a dad, and how we are connected, formed, and sometimes deformed by such a figure.

What is a father? What is a father meant to do, beyond simply being a biological partner in bringing us to birth? How does his care or neglect, his love or his indifference, affect us?

Various schools of psychology and anthropology suggest that your father and your mother have very different roles in the formation of your person. It’s the mother who is your symbiotic link to life and it’s from her, much more so than from your father, that you get your sense of being loved, wanted, cradled, and cherished. Among all mammals, it’s the mother who must metaphorically lick the newborn and free it from whatever constricts it at birth. The mother, after birth, opens your body to life. It’s she who gestates, carries, and then cradles and nourishes the child. No child or adult at some level of consciousness ever forgets this and our sense of being loved or not is very much linked to our mothers.

But it’s the father who gives the child both the permission to enjoy life and the challenge to discipline. It’s the father who must, especially by the way he himself lives, model for the child the correct combination of pleasure and renunciation. It’s from him, more so than from the mother, that the child learns the combination of release and control, submission to constraints and the freedom to walk one’s own path.

And this task is key in initiating us into adulthood, in helping to lead us beyond being the little boy or the little girl, towards becoming the adult, the man or the woman. A father must do this, first of all, by showing us in his own life how one’s energy for love and one’s energy to confront and protect should form a harmony so that the chaotic energies inside us are contained, focused, blended, and creatively opened for the service of God and others. A father must show how enjoyment and creativity blend with necessary self-renunciation and how our energy for love and our energy to fight to protect community (especially its weakest members) can work in tandem so that they are not enemies. A father must teach us how to be both a lover and a fighter.

My own father, imperfect like all human fathers, didn’t always find, nor radiate, the perfect balance between enjoyment and discipline, lover and fighter, enjoyment and self-abnegation. As one of his sons, I then also do not always know how to walk that tightrope, and sometimes there’s a sloppiness in my life between laziness and overwork, love and anger, self-indulgence and masochism. Sometimes I can protect community and sometimes I can’t even protect myself.

However, most times I have my father’s steadiness, beyond the slopping around. I had a good dad. He both loved and fought, though sometimes he was too hard on himself and sometimes he thoroughly enjoyed his life.

I’m more than fifty years after that minus forty degrees temperature day when he died and sometimes my spirit still feels the cold of that day and then I’m a little boy, a pre-adult, alone, waiting for my father to lead me to adulthood, unsure of how to integrate enjoyment and discipline.

But, when I search for my father, for his spirit, not among the bones of ancestors, but among the communion of saints, I find him walking still the delicate tightrope he walked in life, and his spirit reaches back to help me in my struggle with love and confrontation, with enjoyment and renunciation, and then I feel a little more steady as an adult.