On Fathers' Day

All things counter, original, spare, strange; Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?) With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim; He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change: Praise him.

- Gerard Manley Hopkins, “Pied Beauty”

This last week, 11 June, would have been my father, William D. Whitney, Jr.’s, 103rd birthday. Though he died 36 years ago, he remains the most important man in my life, whose example still informs my sense of integrity and compassion, decency and virtue. Born near Boston, his own father died when he was 12, and his mother ran a real estate insurance company through the Depression, while still raising 6 children. Blessed with a grandfather who, each weekend, would bring a horse and wagon into town to take him to Spot Pond, where the older man worked as a warden, my father learned how to heal a heart and shape a life through presence, and stories, and good hard work. It was how he would eventually raise his own children— never resorting to theory, or brutality, but always meeting them as individuals, and inviting them to grow.

He was the first in his family to go to college— graduating from Holy Cross College in 1942, in the first class of Naval ROTC. Soon becoming a lieutenant, he left the Northeast to go, in command of an LCI, to the war in the Pacific. Though he spoke rarely about the war—telling mostly only the funny stories—it changed him profoundly. When he returned from the Pacific, the office his mother ran seemed stifling, and so, to her dismay, he soon left the company that bore his father’s name, and joined the FBI. It was as an FBI agent, while awaiting assignment in Washington, DC, that he met and fell in love with Kathryn Moriarty—to whom he would be devoted the rest of his life, and who would frustrate, inspire, chastise, and empower him (sometimes simultaneously).

They married and moved to Richland, Washington— which, in 1948, was about as far from Boston as one can imagine—and then, not long after, were moved to the Bay Area, where they ended up raising their family. Though he loved his colleagues and the stories that came from his days in the FBI, my father eventually found it as constraining as Boston had been, and left it to strike out on his own. He eventually ran his own business, helped build the parish in which we grew up (St. Gregory in San Mateo), and helped raise his five children—all college graduates, all shaped by his strength, encouragement, independence, and love. He was himself, and did not force his children into his mode, but pressed us to be authentic: to be women and men of integrity.

A few months after my mother’s death, I found a note my father had sent her shortly before his first by-pass surgery. It was dated 3/15/71, and it gave practical advice about what to do if he were to die and she was left with five (mostly young) children and a business. Though he did not die during this surgery, its advice shows such great sensitivity that, even now, it moves me—especially in its last few lines. After the advice, he wrote to my mother: “Also, I’d suggest you enjoy yourself—remember, whatever you do, have fun with your life, you’ll not get out of it alive, anyhow. Lastly, remember me in your prayers—and remember that I love you all ways and always, Bill.” The last phrase, “I love you all ways and always,” had been above his signature in many letters we found, and was inscribed, we discovered later, in my parents’ wedding rings.

He also added a P.S.: “I still think we have the greatest kids ever!”

Growing older, I have come to see that my experience of fatherhood is far different from that of many people; by grace or luck, I was blessed to be the son of this good man, shaped by a strong mother and a gentle wise grandfather. Yet, many people have suffered at the hands of their fathers—fathers who were, themselves, often wounded by abuse and by a image of “masculinity” that perpetuate dominance over dignity, power over compassion, and perpetual adolescence over mature responsibility. Indeed, even within religious life, I have found the effects of this patriarchal ideology—often seen as “clericalism”—which distorts and destroys even the men it presumes to empower.

Further, in a religious tradition that speaks of God as Father, there is a terrible tendency to cast upon God all the fearful, destructive qualities that have misshapen fatherhood in patriarchal imagination. Not the Abba of Jesus, God the Father (and the Church he represents) is cast as a severe and distant power, who pours out discipline upon his children, and possesses the Mother (i.e., Earth, or some other image of fecundity) as a master possesses a slave. Indeed, even if one uses a less aggressive image of the Father-God, and make him a benign old man in the sky, there are none of the qualities that one needs in a healthy relationship— none of the intimacy or playfulness, compassion or gentleness—in such images of the Father-God. Rather, all such qualities are put into the not-divine ideal of the mother (e.g., Mary). Such patriarchal religious ideology and language becomes fodder to reenforce cultural patriarchy, and to quash—at the level of primal imagery—any sense of the feminine in Divinity or of Divinity in the feminine. Thus, even when theology acknowledges such Father images as metaphorical, their sub-conscious power is such they we can easily be led back to the stereotypes, even against our will. While Jesus uses the term, Abba—Father, to imply intimacy, rather than to support patriarchy—i.e., not as a designation of gender but as a suggestion of the mutual relationship of the transcendent God and the living human—even our knowing that does not overcome fully the oppressive experience felt by those who have so-long endured social patriarchy, and perhaps, felt the pain of patriarchy in their own family.

Nevertheless, for all of the struggle with patriarchy (and the need to enrich our hearts, our minds and our prayer, with more feminine imagery), when I think of my own father—and of so many other fathers, step-fathers, godfathers, grandfathers, foster fathers, adoptive fathers, and father-figures—I think we would be the poorer simply to banish the image of father from our prayer. Rather, let us transform the image of fathering based on those blessed men who have shown us the passionate and compassionate face of the God as Father: the face of One who engenders life, though he cannot bear it himself into the world; who exists always in relationship with the life-bearer and the life-born; who experience suffering, but does not impose that suffering on others; whose very nature is encouragement and protection, guidance and example, love sent forth and received back freely. For those who have fathered us in such a way—including my own Dad—I give thanks to the God who has done the same.

Photo: God the Father, Cima da Conegliano, c. 1510–1517. Public domain