Father-Love 

The Rev. Ron Sala

Unitarian Universalist Society in Stamford

June 15, 2003 

 

 

 

Who here remembers a show with Art Linkletter called House Party? House Party ran from 1945 to 1969, first on radio, then on TV. The idea was that Linkletter would have improvised conversations with small children. And anyone who’s spent more than about five minutes with kids knows that they can say just about anything. A few years ago, Bill Cosby started a new show called Kids Say the Darndest Things.

I’d like to share with you this morning one of Bill Cosby’s conversations from the show. The talk is interspersed with Cosby’s comments. Cosby writes:

In talking to very young people, I have gained insights into the Bible that you will not get in divinity school, unless you’re majoring in exorcism.

“Do you know what happened to Adam and Eve in the Bible?” I asked one seven-year-old boy.

“Sure,” he said. “They ate the apple and then God told them to get out of the Garden of Even, so they went to the airport.”

The Garden of Even, of course, is not to be confused with the Garden of Odds, a place in a different desert where I have done a considerable amount of praying.

“I’m not sure they went to the airport,” I told him, “because airports hadn’t been invented yet.”

I know my history.

“Well,” he said, “that’s how they got out of town when God told them they has to move.”

The Bible is full of miracles, and this clearly was the first one: The evicted couple taking El Al to a new neighborhood, where Eve knew that having a baby wouldn’t [be] a lot of laughs.

Well, that evicted couple, Adam and Eve, did have a baby, according to the Bible. (And it goes without saying that we need not take the Bible literally here.) That first baby’s name was Abel. Adam was a father! In fact, he was the first father. But Adam had problems, too. As Cosby mentioned, Adam and his wife, Eve, had been evicted. I seem to remember that they had violated the terms of their lease. You see, they were staying in a place with a garden out back, and they got in some trouble by picking the landlord’s fruit and eating it. They were hungry, I guess. They might have thought the fruit was really theirs, since the landlord never said he was going to eat it, only that they shouldn’t. It seemed a waste to let it rot on the branch. But right or wrong, poor Eve and Adam found out the hard way that to mess with the landlord is sometimes to bite off more than you can chew.

So, they got kicked out of their place and didn’t have anywhere to stay and just had fur coats to wear with nothing underneath and about that time he loses his cushy job cataloging species and has to become a farmer just to eat.

It’s in the middle of all this confusion that little Abel gets born. And then his brother Cain. And you know the rest. Cain kills his brother and gets deported. Just think how Adam must have felt. He was a father to two sons, one murdered the other a murderer. Before this he was talkative. He named the animals, he made up poetry about Eve, and he gave a lame excuse when the whole fruit thing hit the fan. But after this murder, hardly another word.

Adam didn’t have some excuse to give this time like he did in the garden. He was silent. But though Adam was silent, at least as far as we can tell from the Bible, he did not give up. He and Eve tried again and had Seth. This one was a lot easier to handle than Cain and Abel. We don’t hear anything about Seth getting into trouble. In fact, practically the only thing the Bible tells us about Seth is that during his lifetime people started to be interested in spirituality—as we might say today. Genesis says, “At that time people began to invoke the name of the LORD. Since there weren’t many people around at the time, I guess we can safely assume that he had something to do with that.

Adam is silent about the murder, except when it comes to being a father to more children. He and Eve have Seth and many other sons and daughters and Adam calls them Adam. In the Hebrew, Adam calls them Adam. Adam can be translated either human or humankind. It’s related to the Hebrew word adamah or earth. In other words, Adam, who has been miraculously created out of the earth and knows he as an individual will return to the earth, also knows that in a very real way he will live on though his children. Indeed what other answer can there be in the face of death than the creation of new life?

So, on this Father’s Day, we might ask, what kind of father was Adam? In answering that, let’s also remember that a Hebrew legend, not included in the Bible, tells us that Adam divorced his first wife, Lillith, because she threatened his sexual hang-ups. Not much of a role model there. Then he blames Eve for the same thing he was doing. No feminist hero there, either. It seems the only things he’s good at are talking and having kids. But when it comes to raising them, he makes some mistakes, perhaps, since one kills the other.

More favorably, though, Adam is the father of a uniquely good man, Seth. Perhaps he both a bad father and a good one rolled into one.

There are those who like to call what happened to Adam the Fall of Man. But a Fall from what? Eden, in which you don’t need a job and you get to play golf with God doesn’t sound like any place I’ve ever heard of. And anyway, even if it did exist, it’s hardly the place a person could be bad or good. Character can only develop in the midst of adversity. It’s only when Adam moves from Hollywood to East L.A., that we see what kind of person, indeed what kind of father, he is. And he’s a little bad and a little good—like the rest of us.

But sometimes we forget that that little-bad-little-good quality exists in all of Adam’s children, even in those who have followed after him as fathers.

Through most of history and throughout most of so-called civilization, fathers have been assumed to be good. They were in charge of the family from England to China. They were just a little lower than a deity called God the Father or were identified with yang, the male-sky energy that was superior to yin the female-earth energy. Even in the middle of the last century, in our own country, the basic rightness of fathers was generally taken for granted. Think back to shows like My Three Sons or Father Knows Best.

But now it seems like we’ve gone from Father Knows Best to “father knows nothing.” Who are our media fathers today? Al Bundy? Darth Vader? Homer Simpson? O.J. Simpson? It’s as if the producers and fans of many programs had uncovered the cracks in the uncritical “father knows best” mentality. Society began to admit to itself that many fathers were abusive or alcoholic or emotionally distant. All of these things are sadly true of many men and many fathers. But that’s far from the whole story.

Yes, some fathers fall quite short of even minimum expectations, but most of them do much more good than harm. Ronald K. Henry, then president of the American Law Institute, testified before the Subcommittee on Human Resources of the House Committee on Ways and Means in June 1992. He told the committee:

For every social problem that we experience—teenage pregnancy, drug abuse, poor school performance, low self-esteem, depression, suicide, or any other item on our list of social ills—research confirms that family breakdown and, particularly, father loss are primary causal factors. As acknowledged by groups of all political persuasions, from the conservative American Legislative Exchange Counsel to the liberal Progressive Policy Institute to the National Commission on Children, a political consensus has emerged to acknowledge the reality that public policy must begin to focus upon issues of family formation, family preservation, and demilitarization of the divorce process where parental separation cannot be avoided.

And how do fathers do good? Part of it is what they say, I’m sure. More of it is probably in what they do. Children of all ages may not listen but they see much more that we adults give them credit for. They will consciously and unconsciously copy the actions of their fathers, sometimes despite themselves. As 18th century English poet and essayist Alexander Pope said, “As the twig is bent the tree’s inclined.”

The case could be made that fathers are maligned, lampooned, and mistrusted to the point where we lose track of their merits. But through all the social turmoil of recent decades, many men have been discovering how to be a new kind of father. They are moving from being just a provider for the family toward being more of an emotional participant as well. They are beginning to see their wives’ careers as important as their own. They are learning new roles in the household and in child rearing. They are becoming less disciplinarians and more communicators. They are learning to share family power with their wives and children.

One example of this effort toward more present parenting by men is a program called Boot Camp for New Dads. It’s a hospital-based program in which brand new fathers are coached in baby care by “veteran fathers”—that is, men who have already completed the boot camp. The goal is fathers who have a closer relationship with their kids and their mothers.

It may seem a daunting task to expand the attitude of fathers one at a time, but once a man tries a new way, the effects are not lost on his son, who will probably be a father himself some day. What may seem revolutionary to the father may seem normal to the son. For instance, when I was a small child my father used to always take me grocery shopping. That was one of his jobs at our house. When I got to school I was surprised to find out that most of my classmates thought of grocery shopping as something mothers did. But for me, it was a man’s work. The important thing was that I grew up to see it could be done by a man or woman. A stereotype had not carried over to me to pass on to my kids.

This is just a small example of what my father gave and gives to me. Marlin Wayne Sala has been an example and inspiration to me in his gentle, conscientious ways. I still remember the fishing trips and sightseeing trips he took my brother and me on. I can remember his help with school projects and talk on the birds and bees. How many times he bailed me out when my car broke down or I was short on cash! I probably would not be a minister today if it hadn’t been for Dad’s example of the importance of spirituality and church life. I love him very much.

In Christian mythology, we find a second chapter on our story about Adam. Early Christians, such as Paul, recognized not only a first Adam, but a second Adam. In 1 Corinthians 15:45-49 we read,

Thus it is written, “The first man, Adam, became a living being”; the last Adam became a life-giving spirit. But it is not the spiritual that is first, but the physical, and then the spiritual. The first man was from the earth, a man of dust; the second man is from heaven. As was the man of dust, so are those who are of the dust; and as is the man of heaven, so are those who are of heaven. Just as we have borne the image of the man of dust, we will also bear the image of the man of heaven.

You’re probably thinking, “But Ron, that’s Christian!” Yes, it is Christian, but it’s more than just that. It’s an example of the future, enlightened person. The Gnostics called that person Anthropos, or the Human One. Mahayana Buddhists speak of Bodhisattvas, or an Enlightened beings who help others. Hindus talk about Shiva, the Lord of Consciousness. Christ, meaning “anointed one,” is just another name, another angle on the coming greater person that we all have the potential to become more and more.

If we go back a few verses in 1 Corinthians 15, we find the verse, “for as all die in Adam, so all will be made alive in Christ.” Our Universalist forebears loved this verse. They loved to point to the word, “all.” As opposed to the non-Universalist view, the Universalist says that we all have the Christ nature within us.

But if Adam was a father, was Christ? Christians, of course, have identified the earthly Jesus with the heavenly Christ. This was also true for most of our history as Unitarians and Universalists. But the simple fact is that we don’t know anything about Jesus with historical certainty. The record we have in the Gospels, however, is a remarkable one. Here, Jesus is the very opposite of the typical man of his time. He speaks with women in public and defends them against persecution. He takes time for kids, even though others tell him he’s too important for that. But he doesn’t have any kids of his own, at least any that are mentioned in the Bible. In a time and place in which marriage and children were a given, Jesus has neither.

But might we say that Jesus was a father of another sort? Not of physical children, but of spiritual ones. He conceived of God as a loving father, who he called Abba, or Daddy. As I read and reread the texts about Jesus, it seems that, just as Adam knew that he would live on through his children, Jesus knows that his spiritual and ethical insights would live on through his.

Perhaps one of the most beautiful things about Jesus’ type of parenthood, is that it isn’t limited to actual fathers or actual mothers. Some of us will never be that. Others of us may be fathers or mothers but not fit the stereotypes our society demands. But each of us has it within ourselves to turn to the world with a parent-like love as we realize that God the Father and God the Mother dwell in us.

I’ll conclude with a story about a father who did just that and gave his child something very special in the process. Dan Clark writes:

Once when I was a teenager, my father and I were standing in line to buy tickets for the circus. Finally, there was only one family between us and the ticket counter. This family made a big impression on me. There were eight children, all probably under the age of 12. You could tell they didn’t have a lot of money. Their clothes were not expensive, but they were clean. The children were well-behaved, all of them standing in line, two-by-two behind their parents, holding hands. They were excitedly jabbering about the clowns, elephants and other acts they would see that night. One could sense they had never been to the circus before. It promised to be a highlight of their young lives.

The father and mother were at the head of the pack standing proud as could be. The mother was holding her husband’s hand, looking up at him as if to say, “You’re my knight in shining armor.” He was smiling and basking in pride, looking at her as if to reply, “You got that right.” The ticket lady asked the father how many tickets he wanted. He proudly responded, “Please let me buy eight children’s tickets and two adult tickets so I can take my family to the circus.”

The ticket lady quoted the price.

The man didn’t have enough money.

How was he supposed to turn and tell his eight kids that he didn’t have enough money to take them to the circus?

Seeing what was going on, my dad put his hand into his pocket, pulled out a $20 bill and dropped it on the ground. (We were not wealthy in any sense of the word!) My father reached down, picked up the bill, tapped the man on the shoulder and said, “Excuse me, sir, this fell out of your pocket.”

The man knew what was going on. He wasn’t begging for a handout but certainly appreciated the help in a desperate, heartbreaking, embarrassing situation. He looked straight into my dad’s eyes, took my dad’s hand in both of his, squeezed tightly onto the $20 bill, and with his lip quivering and a tear streaming down his cheek, he replied, “Thank you, thank you, sir. This really means a lot to me and my family.”

My father and I went back to our car and drove home. We didn’t go to the circus that night, but we didn’t go without.1 

 



1 A Second Helping of Chicken Soup for the Soul



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