Of fathers and sons

When goodbye is forever

ἐν τῇ τοῦ μεγάλου πολέμου σκιᾷ

My father was born in the shadow of war, 1936. In that year, Nazi Germany reoccupied the Rhineland, the Rome-Berlin Axis was formed, and Stalin began his Great Purge. He was 3 when the War began, only 9 when it ended. What seems to us now the distant stories of a great shadow over Europe, was the daily reality of his first ten years.

He went to sea, age 17, serving on merchant ships his whole working career. That's how he came to Australia, met my mother, and had three kids. All ancient history to me, untold in stories barely mentioned. Memories of my own childhood are few and far between; the oral history of my family before I was, a whisper and a shadow, a rumour of what was.

ἡ σκιὰ τοῦ ἄποντος ὄντος

Jacques Derrida's concept of the 'trace' aptly describes my father in my life: the mark of an absence of a presence, and the presence of absence.¹ Working at sea, he was home for 6/8/10/12 weeks, and then away the same. Even when home, he often seemed absent; when absent, there lingered the trace of his presence. In many respects I was raised by a (resilient, hard-working) single mother.

Late Capitalism is the age in which everyone has a computer in their pocket and a gaping hole where a father should be.²

I'm not entirely sold by Smith's account of fatherhood and the road, the idea that we're all looking for fathers, whether the fathers we should have had, or never had, or something. I kind of get it, at an abstract level. I just don't think of myself as someone who ever went looking for a father. Even though I grew up knowing the father I had so little. I would struggle to describe to you what kind of a person my dad was, there's so much about him I never knew, never got to know.

τὸ πατέρας ζητεῖν

I think I grew up in a generation in which many lacked fathers, of various kinds. Some had left, others were there but not there, others were just failures. I don't think my dad was any of those, but he never seemed to really take up the role of father, not as I think of it. I felt his presence as an absence. But unlike other generations, perhaps, I think my peers and I didn't go searching for father figures exactly. There weren't that many to be found. The generation of our fathers weren't that interested in playing surrogate fathers either. I found teachers, but I never found mentors; I found uncles and older brothers (metaphorically), but never fathers. We were a generation that raised each other, stumbling towards a concept of adulthood and masculinity and never quite sure if we'd arrived.

ἐν τῇ τοῦ θανάτου σκιᾷ

In the last week of his life, I went to stay with my parents. He had taken to bed, stopped eating, and slept almost all the day. It was clear that his body was shutting down. Old age the cause, more than anything. I don't think he had any illusions that he was going to recover. I knew that on Saturday morning, getting up to leave for home, I was going to have to say goodbye. Instead, it was he who left us that night. I looked in but briefly on his body, but did not linger. Without the life that animates the limbs, what was left by the trace, the presence that reminds us of the absence? He was no longer there.

My dad and I hadn't had a sustained, meaningful conversation in decades. It didn't get any easier in that final week, when he could barely speak and hardly hear. I don't think my dad ever quite learned how to be a father, and I'm not sure I ever learnt how to be the son he needed. Yet in the end I realised that for all the failures, his and mine, I loved him, and that I had forgiven him everything.

But what of God and Grace, of Heaven and Hell? What consolation is there in all your philosophy and stars, Horatio? I have wrestled all those questions and more besides in the days since his death. I don't have all the answers and you don't want them anyway. Or, to put it another way, there comes a point at which human systems of neat little boxes just stop, and we're left with mysteries. I think we need to be comfortable with those mysteries, even though they profoundly discomfort us. Because the solutions that people come up with are always worse than the problems they are trying to solve. The problem of evil, the relationship of free will and divine sovereignty, how God can possibly have a purpose that is both good and great enough to transform all the sorrow and suffering of this world: I think those are mysteries that exceed the limits of human reason.

But these things I do know. That God is good, just, merciful. That God loved my dad and hated his sin. That the cross of Christ is the supreme manifestation of God's love and goodness and justice, where he defeats death and sin and evil, forever. And that I can trust him, trust myself to his wisdom, his providence, his goodness, even in the midst of a grief that offers no hope. I know that for those of you reading this who don't share Christian faith with me, this seems terribly cruel, but I don't expect to see my father in the heavenly kingdom: my father never stepped inside a church all my life; he spent his whole life rejecting the forgiveness that God offers in Jesus. He thought my belief system was pretty much a cult. I don't find the alternatives very convincing or comforting: that we all cease to exist at death, and that's it? I don't see how that doesn't end in nihilism. Or that there's a God who indulges evil and wants humans to be free to trample on him and each other forever? That sounds like hell, not heaven. At the end of the day neither nihilism, universalism, nor annihilationism seem all that comforting to me, let alone true. I feel why people might want them to be true, but that doesn't make them so. And yet God loves the lost. He loves them more than we do, more than we ever could.

Dh'fhàg sinn an corp anns a' Chlachan
ach càit an deachaidh an t-anam?

Cha duirt bial a' Cheisteir guth
an robh an t-slighe geal no dubh.

Ach, a réir teagaisg 's aidmheil,
cha robh an còrr ann ri chaintainn.

Cha robh aon chomharradh air a ghiùlan
gun dàinig a' Bhreith as Ur air.

~ Somhairle MacGill-Eain

When I said goodbye, I said goodbye forever. I think that's what makes it worse, in many ways. All the comforts of the Christian hope, the joy of the gospel, the promises of God, are bound up in trust in Jesus and are held out as comforts, hopes, joys that we have in Christ. And my dad knew none of those. I couldn't save him if I tried. If 87 years weren't enough for him to find Jesus, then who am I to think that I could have done something. I do take comfort in Gen 18:25: Will not the judge of all the earth do right?

But I also take comfort in John 11:35: Jesus wept. I think it's an over-spiritualisation to say, for example as Carson does, that Jesus couldn't possibly be weeping for Lazarus since he knew he was about to raise him from the dead. That is about on the same level as people who say believers shouldn't weep for another believer because their tears show their lack of faith in the resurrection. Stupid nonsense. I think that Carson's reading, that Jesus was angry and sad at their lack of faith in the face of death, misses a more profound act of Jesus' solidarity with us in our humanity: he is angry and grieved at death, notwithstanding that he is going to raise Lazarus, and that he himself will triumph over the grave.

I don't think I'll ever forget the moment I had to tell my daughter. I could barely speak through the tears, and she hugged me for such a long time before I could even get those words out. And there I held her, feeling the convulsions of sorrow through her little frame. The tears of someone young enough to cry with abandonment. It's the lot of every father in this world to fail, to not be the father they should be. I know that I fail her in a thousand ways. No wonder we long for the embrace of a heavenly Father who never lets us down, welcomes us home, forgives us, and brings us back into the family in delight and joy.

Death is tragic. Grief is real. Life goes on. I get up each day, go about my business, find myself crying at odd moments. I think somewhere along the past few years I learnt that grief comes in a thousand different flavours, each individually the same; and that grief never goes away, it lessens and you cope better. I sometimes wonder if the elderly who have lost countless friends and family don't sometimes simply find the grief too much to bear.

The Christian hope is a profound one though. That indeed the story God is writing is bigger than the sorrows it encapsulates. That the victory of the cross engulfs the evils of this world. That God is good enough and powerful enough to turn every sad thing untrue, to weave a tapestry of such unimaginable beauty out of the sin, suffering, and evil of this world, that we will consider it all worth it. Such a vision is beyond my vision, but not beyond my faith. And I know that his loving arms are continually around me.

vale, mi pater, quem fere nesciebam etiam aderas. scio autem hoc tantum, te me amavisse, meque te, si etiam haud poteramus fari agereue. fuisti equidem pater, et hoc satis fuit, si nihil praeter. vale.

1. I'm pretty sure Derrida wouldn't really approve of my use of 'trace', but I am also pretty sure Derrida wouldn't approve of almost all appropriations and expropriations of his work. I'm 100% sure he'd roll over in his grave at the way 'deconstruction' is used by people.

2. Smith, James K. A.. On the Road with Saint Augustine: A Real-World Spirituality for Restless Hearts. 195.