Our fathers sinned, and are no more; it is we who have borne their iniquities. Lamentations 5:7
“Dad? Am I a good person?”
“I think so, I know so, yes.”
“Will – will that help me when things get really rough?”
“It’ll help.”
“That’s not good enough, Dad.”
“Good is no guarantee for your body. It’s mainly peace of mind ---
“But sometimes, Dad, aren’t you so scared that even ---
“---the mind isn’t peaceful?” His father nodded, his face uneasy.
“Dad’, said Will, his voice uneasy. “Are you a good person?”
“To you and your mother, yes, I try. But no man’s a hero to himself. I’ve lived with me a lifetime. I know everything worth knowing about myself---”
“And, adding it up…?
“The sum? As they come and go, and I mostly sit very still and tight, yes, I’m all right.”
“Then Dad,” asked Will, ‘why aren’t you happy?”
“The front lawn…let’s see… at one thirty in the morning…is no place to start a philosophical…”
“I just wanted to know is all.”
Something Wicked This Way Comes
I haven’t found a better literary illustration to the power - and necessity - of fatherhood than this glimpse in on a son’s quest for answers. It should be telling the fourteen-year-old Will Holloway, from Bradbury’s sci-fi classic, holds this conversation with his dad. But it shouldn’t be surprising. It’s natural and, in my experience, nearly uncontrollable for a boy to seek out the one person looking for wisdom to many of life’s deepest mysteries from the one who most fascinates and perplexes him.
These sentences fell like a hammer reading the book, ironically enough, with my daughter last summer. So impactful were they, a photo of that page is now in my phone as a reminder of the influence – and responsibility – I have as a father, particularly a father with a son.
**
But what if Alex Holloway hadn’t been out on the lawn that night? What if this father had been preoccupied with other matters or his own interests? What if, as his inquisitive son contemplated these weighty questions, his dad was nowhere to be found, in spirit or body? What if the one person with perhaps the greatest influence in shaping this boy into the man he is to become, just wasn’t there? Where would Will have gone? His mother? Maybe. But I’ve witnessed and experienced, the natural pulling away of boys, teenage boys especially, from their mothers. Instead, I believe he would have swallowed those questions, stamped them back down. Because like many other boys, when a father isn’t there they don’t get asked nearly as often. Instead, they get buried deep his heart where they regrettably, but frequently, take root, blossoming later into poisonous flowers.
**
If honest, I must admit to being overly sensitive about my son. I pay closer attention to what’s going on with him and in him. It could be argued I’m too much that way. But the fact is, I feel a greater responsibility towards him than I do his sister. There are, I believe, two reasons for this. First, it’s easier. We’re both males with male brains. We like more of the same things, sports, cars, movies. Those ordinary interests lead to deeper personal connections. Second, that sameness presses more heavily because, right or wrong, I believe I have a greater obligation to him. Our shared masculinity means – actually demands - I bear a heavier load in readying him for the what’s to come. It is a fact that his experiences, and mine, have and will be different from those of his sister or mother. I have already walked down many of the paths he will someday tread, and I am scarred by many of those slings and arrows aiming his way.
Understanding this, I ask where else does he go for the answers only a father (a man) can legitimately provide? Who else could better map out the terrain of the journey ahead? Is there another who can better shape his ideas of what a boy and man is and should be? Those answers lead me back to the same thing, as it should for every father,
‘If not I, then whom’?
**
But this strong sense of duty isn’t without side effects. It leaves me sensitive to, and often judgmental of, fathers who can’t, or more commonly won’t, rise up to their calling.
The absence of a father in a child’s life is profoundly heartbreaking and terribly soul-crushing. Countless children have been robbed of the influence of a father, most through selfish reasons. It’s no less a form of child abuse for a man to abandon his children, in body or soul. To forfeit their future for personal convenience or fear. And while his absence affects boys and girls in proportion, it’s the former, in my experience, who suffers most for his father’s sin.
The Old Testament warns us; the sins of fathers are passed down. The consequences are not always immediate, and we’re only beginning to see the actual effects of a generation of boys, and girls, who were left alone to navigate childhood without a father’s hand on the rudder. Boys who never grew into healthy manhood because they had no one to model or expect them to be so. Men whose maturity remains stunted, incapable of developing into adults who can have healthy relationships with others, especially women. Men who prefer unreality – video games or pornography – to the real thing. Men who don’t, and may never, possess the necessary qualities and character to lead families and communities. Instead what we’re getting is a population of boys who can never grow up enough to wear men’s clothing. And worse, these boys pass on that trait. It’s hard to give what was never given.
**
I often try to imagine the narratives boys without fathers tell themselves? When they see friends spending time with their dads, loved and adored by them, nurtured by them. What does that boy, whose father isn’t there, say to himself when those feelings surface? Does he take responsibility for dad leaving? Does he start to feel inadequate? Unloved? Unworthy? Or perhaps all of it? Then as the boy begins recognizing his masculinity within, he will invariably start searching for someone, or something, that will confirm for him that sense of manhood. That will tell him if he’s on the right track. That is where the real danger starts because if a father abandons the responsibility and authority to lead his son, it will be given to something or someone who will – culture at large, sports, women, alcohol, or drugs.
Then what? If he was never passed the baton of manhood by the one most responsible for doing so, how can he be expected to pass it on?
The biblical warning, as always the case, is proven true.