The Unitarian Fellowship of Peterborough

Music by Resonance

It’s a bit early for Father’s Day, but May 2 is Rev. Julie’s father’s birthday, and today we’ll consider what is handed on to us from our fathers, be they biological, philosophical or otherwise.

Religious Exploration: A world religions day, on elder, leaders and teachers
 

Opening Words

Story for All Ages          

Reading

from “Call to Purpose”       - Richard Solly

This reading comes from Richard Solly’s book, Call to Purpose.

As I stepped out into the sunlight I smelled cigar smoke.  I stopped and looked to see where it was coming from, but saw no one. I was about to shrug, dismiss it and walk down the stone stairs, but a found myself whispering, “Wait, stop now.” Though it was me who whispered, the words gave me the eerie sense that it was someone else whispering.

I stood at the top of the stairs. Suddenly, I realized the smoke smelled exactly like the El Producto cigars my father smoked at home when I was a child. Then it was a constant source of conflict because it sickened me. How many times I whined and nagged my father to put out his cigar while we drove to church. But outside the library I found the smell strangely aromatic and refreshing. Though no one was in sight, the smell in the open air was pervasive, as if someone were smoking right alongside me. I felt a presence that I identified as my father.

I was immediately overwhelmed with gratitude and love for him, feeling a closeness to him that I had never experienced. For me, the effect of the experience was so deep and lasting that I regard the moment as sacred, a gift, a revelation based on an awareness that I had never before questioned. 

Message

My Father’s Blessings                    
Today’s sermon is admittedly an indulgence. Please allow me that as I share memories of my father and explore the question of with what or how he blessed me.   It is my hope that as I explore these things, it will trigger similar memories and questioning in each of you...and that you will enter into a conversation with those fathers, elders, mentors, and teachers in your lives who have had a role in shaping who you are.

The last few weeks, I have had ‘fathers’ on the brain. On Monday, as I sat in the Minneapolis airport waiting for my return flight, I happened to sit next to a threesome composed of a father and two adolescent children. The father was wearing a shirt and tie, his shirt a bit frayed on the edges, and he carried a tote emblazoned with a Lutheran logo. I imagined him to be a pastor...a pastor and a father. The daughter was clearly devoted to him...sitting close. They appeared to be sharing a word game or puzzle. The son was more distant...sat a few seats away, reading a paperback, and at some point challenged his father on why he saw that book as containing darkness and evil. There was something really familiar in the interchange. The father was not forbidding his son to read the book, but rather was attempting to instruct him in the way he thought best. There was something really familiar and I shamelessly eavesdropped on their conversation.

In my father’s house are many mansions. I have long thought that the damage of my upbringing lay in the fact that my father, my parents, had prepared a special place for me, a mansion, a room...in which they expected and dreamed that I would dwell. But I never liked that room...it didn’t suit me...it rankled me...and therein lies my damage. I never had a place where I truly belonged...at least not a place where I felt unconditional love.   And while I continue to believe that this was very real damage, I have come to a place where I am willing to also believe that there was much blessing in the way I was fathered. 

I realize, particularly because Phyllis White’s memorial service was yesterday, that today’s order of service looks a bit like a program for a funeral. This is not coincidental. Today would have been my father’s 90^th birthday, and tomorrow will mark 26 years since he died, the day following his 64^th birthday. Twenty-six years ago I was twenty-nine (you do the math); I am now in a very different place from which to view my father’s influence upon me.

As I prepared this message, I listened to a tape of my father’s funeral service. I hadn’t listened to it in...maybe ever...so the voices elicited memories that were long buried. It recalled for me a particular aspect of my father’s life...that is, his ministry...as those who spoke there talked primarily about him as a minister, as a child of god, as a witness to his faith, so much so that there was an altar call at the end of the service.   But while my father’s faith was a pervasive part of who he was, and while he tried to be my minister, he was first and foremost my father.

All of us have had influences in our lives...some of them unavoidable, some of them chosen, some of them random, some of them omnipresent. It seems to me that influence is a mutual relationship. While the dictionary implies that influence is the ability, through power or even coercion, to have an effect, there must also be an openness to receiving that influence. For example, while my father would have done anything in his power to have influenced me to know Christ as he knew him, I was not receptive to that influence. Yet that tension in our relationship was also formative for me. Be it a blessing or a curse, my tendency to respond to many things with resistance probably springs from my relationship with my parents and their faith.

I’ve been reading a book entitled “My Grandfather’s Blessings” by Rachel Naomi Remen, an author probably better known for her work, “Kitchen Table Wisdom.” The title of her book was the inspiration for the title of today’s service...that along with the fact of my father’s birthday.   Remen’s book begins with several essays about her relationship with her orthodox rabbi-grandfather, a relationship that was key in her life even though he died when she was only seven years old. Because of the tender, accepting and wise ways in which her grandfather interacted with her and how he endeavoured to teach her life’s lessons, she inherited a feeling of blessedness.

Now, a relationship with a grandfather – at least as I imagine it, since my grandfathers were not present in my life – is a very different thing than a relationship with a father. In my experience of seeing them in action, grandfathers are privileged to tend those parts of a child that lie beyond food, clothing, and shelter.   Consequently, while Dr. Remen felt completely beloved by her grandfather, this was not her experience with her parents. Even so, however romantic her memories, I find in her book the intention to embrace her relationship with her grandfather for the blessing that it was...she names that his gift to her was the blessings that he continually bestowed upon her. Her perspective set me on a course to see what blessings my father gave to me. In what ways did Vernie Stoneberg strengthen and feed who I’ve been and who I continue to become? 

I expect you’ve already looked at the photos on the order of service. Since there were six children in my family (I’m the third in line), my mother was virtually always occupied with a ‘babe in arms.’ That left my father to hold the ‘toddler in arms’. I do remember being held by him. He was a tall man, and strong, and his arms and large hands gave me a sense of security and wellbeing.  

But one of my earliest memories is of my father bouncing me on his knee and singing the “She’s Too Fat for Me” polka. Yep. Ya think that just maybe that played a critical role in my development?   I won’t burden you with all the lyrics, but a line that repeats is “I don’t want her, you can have her.” It’s a complex memory for me...it is painful and happy, simultaneously. Sorta like an off-colour joke that makes you laugh before you wake up and see the implications. So you see, my father was wonderful, and yet he caused me some pain. 

How do I reconcile that? How do we ever make sense of the fact that what comes to us... from our parents and our teachers and our experiences... is rarely all good or all bad?

My father loved fun. He would wrestle with us on the living room floor...until something got broken or someone got hurt...and he would sheepishly take the admonitions of my mother right along with us. In the winter, when we lived in the country in South Dakota, he would go to the junkyard and buy the rusty hood of an old Studebaker...then tie it upside down behind the car and pull it like a sleigh behind our car on the snow-packed country roads, with all of us hooting and laughing as it lurched and wove between the ditches.   And, he was a big tease...a tickler who gave whisker rubs...all of which, like the knee-bouncing polka, sometimes had the effect of pain rather than fun. 

So, am I a product of the good times or the hurtful ones? 

My father was fiercely economical. Having grown up on a farm during the depression, he knew how to do what needed to be done. He would fix anything ten times before considering replacing it, often keeping the replacement he’d found on sale in a closet until absolutely needed. He kept a careful log of every penny spent in order to budget his meagre salary. He regularly butchered chickens. Once, I’m quite sure he drowned a litter of puppies we couldn’t afford to feed. 

My father loved my mother. There was whatsoever no question of their commitment to one another and to raising a family together. I never heard them raise their voices in anger. I never heard him complain about the extra burden on him when my mother’s multiple sclerosis began to limit her physical abilities.   He did the shopping (after clipping coupons), he helped clean house, he drove my mother where she needed to go...  My father in some ways was too good...making it pretty difficult to imagine a partnership that measures up. Is that a blessing or a curse?

My father was eulogized as a man without guile, as a man of consummate tenderness and grace. He was so humble that I often saw him as spineless, able to be walked all over.... I could be embarrassed of him, and when he chose three times to leave ministries where he felt his work was done, I wished he had had the gumption to hang in there. Is his role model a blessing or a curse? 

When he left his third ministry, I was out of college and living on my own. He had already had two heart attacks. He was only 60, but he decided to retire from the ministry, and he took a job on staff at a church where he was essentially a glorified janitor. After having made huge sacrifices in order to serve his God, he was left with very little, at least in any material sense. I admit I was somewhat ashamed of him. In retrospect I see that given the circumstances, complicated by my mother’s illness, his was a difficult and brave decision.  

My father was a solid singer, but he had no vocal training. Yet, two weeks before he died, he sang his first solo at his church...the hymn “Oh to be Like Him.” Is it a blessing or a curse to have a father who would stand up in a pulpit that might have been his and sing a song of submission?

So, here’s the puzzle. Have people, like Naomi Remen, who remember an idyllic childhood or fathering relationship, who live with gratitude for what has come their way, really had such a perfect upbringing? Or do they just choose to remember it that way, focusing primarily on the positive?   Did someone who feels a little short-changed in the parental category really have a bad experience, or are they choosing to remember it that way? Is it Pollyanna-ish or daft to choose to see the blessings in what we’ve been dealt, even when it hasn’t all been ideal? 

When I was in Minneapolis this past weekend, I learned that a college friend of mine had committed suicide. It breaks my heart. Jeffrey had so many talents. He was incredibly handsome. And yet, he had had a textbook-terrible childhood complete with living with a parent on the run from the law, and he consistently cut himself off from relationships. What would it have taken for him to choose life over despair?  

The other night at UU University, a question was asked about process theology, and I explained, as I have from this pulpit before, that it is based in the theory that we are always in a state of becoming, and that the movement from one moment of becoming into another involves ‘taking in’ from our past and from current external influences. In each moment, we choose what will affect our becoming, and the more intentional we are about it, the more likely we are to ‘become’ what we want to become.   In other words, and while I don’t want to re-write history or obliterate the truth in my memories, I can choose be ‘primarily’ influenced by the comfort of my father’s strong arms or by the glee with which he played with me, or...I can choose to remember the pain. 

I said in my recent newsletter article that a healthy and effective caring community requires a full spectrum of giving and receiving. It requires that some are willing to be on the receiving end of the blessings of community. In our chalice lighting we say that we choose to bless rather than to curse, but think about it. That requires there to be a recipient of that blessing. Each of us needs to be that recipient sometimes. And that means not only that we are open to receiving, but also that we choose to take the blessing rather than the curse from any situation. 

We are so darn realistic, so incredibly rational, and at least for me, that often leads me to want to see the whole truth, to take all dimensions into consideration. And where that fails me is that it limits my ability to simply choose my blessing.   But like suicide is a choice against life, each time we choose not to receive a blessing is like choosing small deaths. Each time we choose to feel cursed over feeling blessed, we contribute to the curse. It is not naive, it is not hick...to choose blessing is to choose to be blessing. 

In my father’s house are many mansions...some of them are not a fit for me, particularly his preferred choice for my life. Still, like the father in the airport, his wishes for me were well-intentioned. He may not have approved of my choices, but somehow he also gave me the space to find my own way. In my father’s house are many mansions, and among their many rooms, I can find a place where I can dwell in blessing. 

May it be so for all of us. 

Closing Words