I did not grow up with an institutionalized religion or with a specific tradition. Instead, I grew up with a father who is a very spiritual man.
What does this mean?
It means that his spirituality doesn’t roar or try to make others submit to its way of life. Rather, it has more to do with what Judaism calls “commitments between man and his fellow men.”
It means that my father would pick up a piece of trash on the street and throw it in a trash can, making the world more beautiful, without blaming or judging whomever was careless and thoughtless enough to leave it like that.
It means that my father, discussing other people’s betrayals of his trust and other important assets, had been compassionate about their motives and had been understanding of their reasons.
It means that as the world crumbled around my father, chaos and obstacles striking violently at his dreams and his lives, he stood strong and still. The eye of the storm was he.
It means that as the impossible was thrown in his face as such, due to discrimination, circumstances, and cruel reality, he asked gently, softly, silently, “But wait, can it become possible?”
It means that as a teenager, when I screamed and raged against the unfairness of whatever it was that week, he just sat down, and exquisitely offered, “So that’s where you are right now. Let me sit here with you.”
Not all of us were blessed with a father that showed us what perseverance of spirit could achieve; what curiosity and patience could conquer; what focus and fearless stillness could bring about.
What does “Father” mean to you?
Some of us were raised by a father that criticized our every attempt at flight of heart and imagination. Or a father who exhibited complete inconsistency with the demands that he had made upon us as well as upon himself. Or, worse—some of us were raised by the dark shadow of an absent father. For these “us,” Father’s Day can prove to be a painful day, a day where we remember the unfairness or rigidity or suffocation of irreplaceable childish excitement and faith, which some of our fathers had inflicted upon us.
This Father’s Day, please take a moment to reflect on what this word means to you. Please allow yourself to look back and sit with what was and what wasn’t and in which ways you wish it were different. Not because it can be different right now, because you’re right to suspect that in many ways it’s too late. Rather, do so because it’s an opportunity to become familiar with parts of you that deserve healing from those experiences of pain and betrayal and abandonment that you experience when you hear the word “father.”
It’s true that no one can go back and make a new beginning, but it’s also true that we can make a new ending. And maybe, this Father’s Day, your decision to reflect on what you did or didn’t get or learn or love about your father figure —is a path to begin reflecting on what your own experience of life and love mean and can mean to you. Maybe you will notice what anger, fear, security, love, frustration, hate, compassion, safety, calmness, you hold within you thanks to— or in spite of— the father that you hold inside of you.
Even a father such as my own was not able to protect me from so much hurt in this world, not because he didn’t try or fought to, but because at some point — we become our own fathers and hold our own in the face of what the world throws at us or spares us from.
For the fathers that we had, for the fathers that we didn’t have, and for those that we had managed to raise within ourselves, this Father’s Day can afford us a chance to sit with all that was and wasn’t, with all that is and isn’t, and with all that may or may not become possible for us.
Fathers — in whatever form they hold in this lifetime for us — have a space in our heart that is at times larger than we know. In honor of this space, let’s allow ourselves to sit with that father that we did or didn’t have, and take the opportunity to feel gratitude, anger, resentment, confusion, love, hate, yearning, fear, dejection, terror, hope, contempt, and anything else that the word “father” brings in us. We may discover that the father that we have become for ourselves, for our dreams, for our loved ones or for our children, deserves a “Happy Father’s Day” from deep within our past and present.
The WILA blog is brought to you by the heart and expert wordsmithing of our Blog Countess, Eva Patrick, PsyD. “My passion for blogging is tied to my appetite for practicing psychotherapy – they both allow me to surrender to the uncertainty of life, and to find my way out through words, stories and the discovery of new ideas for doing, being and telling these stories in the world.”