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June 3, 2001 Sermon

Rev. Nancy D. Dean

June 3, 2001

Doing Something Worthwhile

As late as fifty or sixty years ago, in academic circle, particularly those such as Oxford, Cambridge, Harvard and Yale, to be able to quote lengthy passages of Greek and Latin was generally considered the mark of one truly well educated. I am still impressed by such marks of education, while this is not high on my own list of skills and talents. I was in the last class of my Idaho high school college prep students to have to take one year of Latin as a graduation requirement. Unfortunately, Vini, Vidi, Vici: Caesar’s famous words, I came, I saw, I conquered, is about all I remember. Yet, when I want to understand a particular term or understanding we have about something, I find it natural to recall some Latin root that gives us a deeper insight into the reasons for, the meaning, in things. I think my Latin teacher would have said that was the real reason for the course in the first place, not to bore people with arcane phrases.

But the idea of volunteering, the subject for this morning’s sermon, led me to think about where the idea comes from to do something just because one wants to help. This is a particular virtue of this country, remarked on by Alexis de Tocqueville, the early 19th Century French politician and writer best known for his classic study of the United States, titled, Democracy in America.

We only became a more clearly defined, greater group of volunteers later on in the 19th Century, and since, especially under the influence of Unitarians and Universalists. Names like Clara Barton of the Red Cross, Dorothea Dix, the mental health reformer, Albert Schweitzer who set up a hospital in east Africa, Pete Seeger the folk singer and labor-rights supporter, are all names of Unitarians that signal selfless giving, hopeful teaching.

So what is there in the idea, the word, volunteer, that tells why people are motivated to do good things, good deeds for others when there is no monetary gain or immediate social benefit in such actions?

Looking to the Latin we can find a clue. Volunteer comes from the Latin, voluntaries, that is: to do something of one’s own accord. Voluntaries comes from the word voluntas: that which is one’s free will or wish or inclination.

So to volunteer is to do something of your own free will, something you wish to do or have happen, something you feel an inclination to do, just because you want to. Amazing when you think of the counter-side of our cultural personality. We Americans who are the premier capitalists of the world, the money-makers, the growers of business, who concern ourselves with the GNP, Gross National Product. The stock market, which, in case you did not read my April newsletter, is in fact warming with the weather as I predicted. I volunteered that prediction. Every little bit of help counts, like in the old story about a large, well-dressed woman, laden with many packages and bags, who got on a crowded bus. She stood in the aisle, looked around, and loudly complained, "Isn’t anybody going to give me a seat?"

A rather thin, elderly man stood up and said, "I’ll be glad to make a contribution."

I am sure that you have noticed yourselves, as I have, that when a disaster strikes anywhere in the world, Americans are quick to help. I remember my father leaving the year around nurturing of the apple and plum trees from which he made his living, to go into the mountains in my home state of Idaho to help fight forest fires that sometimes got out of hand and threatened communities. A very tall, skinny man to begin with, he would return after a week or two of these labors, thinner still, sometimes covered in soot and dirt, worn out, and haggard, only to pick up where he left off and try to catch up his own money-making work.

This kind of volunteerism is repeated every day of the week, in some way, somewhere across this land, around the globe. So there seems to be a kind of empathy, some sort of built-in desire to do for others as we would have them do for us, to recall the Golden Rule. But, there is no doubt that Americans excel in this. Why? Maybe our Puritan background that taught us to give of ourselves to get stars in our heavenly crowns. Maybe our capitalism that teaches us that we are all better off if we help each other. Perhaps you can offer some of your own thoughts during our time for discussion.

Whatever it is, I see it all the time, especially in this congregation. Every person does something for this congregation that is giving, and most of you give beyond this congregation as you participate in fund-raising for various organizations, as you dive in to help a friend or neighbor in that myriad ways that show you care. It is in many ways a mystifying thing, this volunteering. Yet, as Irma Bombeck put it in this morning’s reading, volunteers are, "the only human beings on the face of this earth who reflect this nation’s compassion, unselfishness, caring, patience, need and just plain loving one another."

The fact is, this congregation would not, could not, exist without all of you volunteers. I am constantly aware of this fact. After all, I am the only full-time employee of UUSMC, with Doris, our Director of Religious Education, and Bob, our music director, as our two part-time staff, and who both do far more than their salaries ever cover. Yet, we have gone from 50 to over 130 members, set up Sunday services year after year, for over eleven years, and have voted to build our own home over on Polly Drummond Road, and that is the work of thousands of hours of volunteers. No minister could ever do it, no matter how famous (or infamous!), without a large body of volunteers who do all that they do just because they want to, because they see something greater that adds meaning to life than only doing that for which they/you get immediate or financial gain.

Mind-boggling is the only accurate word for it!

Last weekend we celebrated Memorial Day, and I recalled in my sermon that Memorial Day came from Decoration Day, which was originally set up to honor the dead of the Civil War. The reforming Harvard University president Charles William Eliot, a Unitarian, wrote of the 54th Regiment of the Massachusetts Infantry, which distinguished themselves in the Civil War (the movie Glory was about them) which is the inscription on the Robert Gould Shaw monument on the Boston Common: "The white officers, taking life and honor I their hands, cast in their lot with men of a despised race unproved in war . . . ." and "The black rank and file volunteered when disaster clouded the Union cause, served without pay for eighteen months till given that of white troops, faced threatened enslavement if captured, were brave in action, patient under heavy and dangerous labors, and cheerful amid hardships and privations."

Now the more cynical will say that these people had a lot to gain from their volunteering to serve and fight during the Civil War. Freedom for the Blacks, and a more stable Union, especially financially for the Whites, but I do not think any one could stay in service to such a cause without a sense of doing something greater than what they might ever gain. After all, there was a very strong possibility that they would die in the war.

One of the most touching verses of Hebrew scripture is in the Book of Isaiah, Chapter 6:8, when the prophet’s sins are purged by an angel and then the Lord is heard saying, "Whom shall I send, and who will go for us?" and Isaiah responds, "I, here am I; send me."

There’s a related story about a large Quaker meeting in the late 1940s, where this verse was read. At that time, after the creation of the state of Israel, a respected, neutral person was needed to act as mayor of Jerusalem until things stabilized. (Which, in truth, has yet to happen.) One of the best-known figures among Quakers was Clarence Pickett, the executive Secretary of the American Friends Service Committee. (The AFSC and the Unitarian Service Committee, now UUSC, where the only two groups permitted to aid in post-war Europe reconstruction, because neither proselytized.) Anyway, Clarence Pickett was an experienced peacemaker in tense situations. As the meeting proceeded, the question kept being raised, "Who will go? Who will face the dangers of acting as mayor of Jerusalem?" At last a bold Friend arose and said in an impressive basso profundo voice, "Here am I. Send Clarence."

This year I have been more than gratified by the response to my requests for volunteers, especially volunteers to serve on our various committees. Not one person has said no to me in recent months. That is not always the case, for there are times when people do have all that they can do, but perhaps many of you realize that we have a lot to accomplish for UUSMC, especially as we look forward to the new building and growth that will bring; perhaps it is just the confluence of circumstances or even the orientation of the stars, but there seems a renewed willingness to help which is wonderful to witness. Of course, like Clarence Pickett, we sometimes find ourselves doing things we did not necessarily sign on for.

Sometimes, though, in our desire to help we can overlook the real issue, the larger questions. We can be so determined to help that we don’t bother to find out if our help is wanted or the right kind of help that is required.

Some of you, in your management seminars, may have heard this one:

One late summer evening in New York, a man stopped on Fifth Avenue and stated to search for a lost object. A passerby obligingly lit a match to help the man. Others presently joined the search, each with more lighted matches, all in silence. Finally the searcher gave up in disgust and started to leave.

"What did you lose? Asked one of the helpers.

"Oh, I was just looking for a match I dropped."

My husband also told me about the "Going to Abilene" phenomenon that he learned about in one such Dupont Engineering seminar.( This is my version of it.) It seems there were some people sitting around one hot afternoon in the Texas panhandle area. One person said, "Anyone want to go to Abilene and get some ice cream?" Another, said, "Do you?" and another, "How about you?" "Abilene is fifteen minutes away," says another. "I love chocolate ice cream!" "You can get the best ice cream, Blue Bell ice cream—a Texas tradition, at Jones’ Ice Cream stand." On and on went the comments and questions, until eventually, they piled in the car and went to Abilene, to Jones’s Ice Cream stand, parked, got out, then one ordered a coke, another got a bag of chips, two ordered nothing. "Didn’t you want ice cream?" they asked one another, and it turned out that really no one wanted ice cream, but they all went along thinking it was what everyone else wanted. Going to Abilene has become a catch-phrase for many Dupont-ers for making sure everyone is truly on the same page.

The moral of the story for us is that we want to do what really needs to be done, not just what we want or think ought to be done, or not tell others what we think ought to be done, that we ourselves are not willing to do. That would be just wonderfully hunky-dory wouldn’t it? If all we had to do was tell other people what we thought should be done. Actually, I am amazed by how often I hear this sort of thing in the various organizations in which I am a volunteer, and occasionally even here.

Happily, the overwhelming majority of you who are members of UUSMC jump in and do what needs doing, are responsive to the requests of others for help, and are aware in some way of your place in the making of history as we prepare for the future.

Part of what always draws people to our UU congregations is the need to do something worthwhile, to make a difference, not only for yourself and your families, but for the larger community as well. And you do! Sometimes we talk about being one of the drops in the bucket of human goodness, but what I see is that each of you is really adding several drops any given day. And once in a while we are able to toss in a whole cupful of goodwill and desire to add our portion to the increase of human caring and love.

I do not have to tell you that most of the time we are far more rewarded by those things we do voluntas, of our freewill, just be cause we see the need, than we ever are by the purely self-serving.

So, to remember Irma Bombeck’s loving admonition to honor volunteers, for all of you of UUSMC, let me say, on behalf of us all, a heart-felt Thank you. Thanks for being here, for doing all that you do, and please don’t ever stop. It really is too frightening to consider what the world would be like without you! amen

June 10, 2001 Sermon

Rev. Nancy D. Dean

June 10, 2001 Blessing of the Animals Sunday

Blessed Friendships

I want to share a story with you about friendship:

In the distant past, there was once a young and wealthy statesman who was on a diplomatic mission. Pausing by a river at night, he heard the haunting sounds of a lute. A passionate musician himself, he took up his own lute and eventually found a goatherd sitting on an old ruin. In those days, an aristocrat would not associate with a commoner, but the two men struck up a friendship through their music. Their playing was as smooth and natural as flowing water.

Once a year, the ambassador and the goatherd would renew their friendship. Though they had the chance to play their music with others during the rest of the year, each man declared that he had found his true counterpart.

The ambassador tried for many years to lift the goatherd out of his poverty, but his friend steadfastly refused. He did not want to pollute their friendship with money.

Years later, when the ambassador was gray haired, he went to the appointed spot, but his friend was not there. He tried to play alone, but his melody was forlorn. Finally someone came to tell him that his friend had starved to death during a recent famine. This news made the ambassador despondent. He was caught in the irony of knowing that he had the money to save his friend, and yet he understood the man's values as well. In sorrow, the ambassador broke his lute. "With my friend gone from the world, who[m] will I play my music for?"

True friendship is a rare harmony.

You know the saying: There are friends, and then there are friends. We understand that to mean that we may have many people who are acquaintances, work associates, contacts with whom we have friendly relations, and so on; then there are the people in our lives with whom we are as close or closer than members of our own families. These are very special people; they are our kindred spirits. We share a special understanding with these friends, and these friendships do not die, indeed really cannot die, even if we are separated by many years and circumstances. We are bound to these special people who are our "best" friends, and often grieve their loss more than anyone else who is a part of our lives. Sometimes these friends are not human, but the life-forces, the sure love and support we call our "pets". Which is why we have a Blessing of the Animals in this congregation almost every year. I know that our pets, our animal friends, speak the language of love just as surely as our people friends, and I see in the lives of members of this congregation that many of us will and do mourn the loss of our pets just a surely as we mourn the loss of our human friends, for the essence of friendship is that we are beautiful, wonderful, and even virtuous in the eyes of our friends, but the animal friends are not so inclined to be critical of our shortcomings.

Friends are so valuable to us of the human variety that it is often said that if we come to our final days and can claim three good friends in the course of even a long life, then we have been fortunate indeed, and to have even one good friend in a lifetime is enough.

Over the years people have come to counsel with me who worry that they have so few friends, or if they are new to the area, they are concerned with the lack of friendships, and are likely to be mourning the loss of good friends they left behind in the move. I sympathize with this very deeply. I remember how excited I was to come to Delaware back in late August of 1995, and the initial busy-ness of finding a new house, arranging school for my son, moving, and all that goes into the huge affair that leaving one state and moving to another will always be, that in that busy-ness I was not so aware of what it would mean to leave my dear friends in Massachusetts. Perhaps it is some mental device of self-protection that we suppress some of these concerns for a while. But over the course of the next year, I found that the hardest part of coming here was not the work of ministry in a small, homeless congregation, but the loneliness I began to feel quite acutely. I learned something about being a minister that they don’t teach you at Harvard Divinity School, or probably any other place, and that being the distance one’s calling can put between we ministers and "other" people. In my past life, when my family moved, I joined newcomer’s groups, met the neighbors, and often had a group of friends—not the "best" type, you understand—fairly soon. But, here, I learned that lesson quickly. When I was invited to the neighborhood get-acquainted gathering, we were getting on terrifically, had a good many things in common, all that had in those prior moves indicated a nice group of women friends in the area. Then—then someone asked me what work I did, or did I work outside the home (to be more appreciative of our work at home), and out it came: "Yes, I am a minister." I saw the straightening of the backs, the stiffening of the conversation happening right before my eyes. The apology for using "hell" or "damn." Someone gathered up her courage enough to ask which church, and I proudly stated, "I’m the new minister for the Unitarian Society of Mill Creek here in Hockessin." They all were Catholics or Presbyterians, it turned out. I was never again invited to anything, even though I saw those women on my daily walks; and, while they were outwardly friendly, they did not want to be friends with me. I won’t give you the joy of the belly laugh at what happens on a date that someone sets you up for and doesn’t tell the victim you are a minister and you have to relay that news for yourself.

All that to say, I had all of you, but I had no friendships outside my ministry, which often felt very lonely during the first couple of years here. But, your friendship sustained me, for which I thank you. That is the essence of what we gain from friendship: sustenance. Sustenance, that which is nourishment to the soul as food is to the body. We need both.

Friends allow us to be who we are, who we are authentically without the mask, without the worry for whether we are we smart, or pretty, or good enough every waking moment. They know us as we know ourselves, sometimes even better than we know ourselves. Some of the best stories about friendship come from Jews who know better than most who valuable friendship is, how it sustains life. This one is one of my favorites:

Rosenbaum met his old friend Levy, and said to him, "Levy, during all the years I have known you, you never ask me how things are with me."

"All right," said Levy, "I’ll ask you now: How are you my friend?"

"Don’t ask!" cried Rosenbaum.

As good friend will understand that contradiction, will be accepting of our needs, and encouraging. Which reminds me of another story:

A man called on a friend of his in the clothing business to buy a suit. The clothier picked out a suit, had the man put it on and examine himself in a mirror. "It is so beautiful," exulted the clothier, "that even your best friends wouldn’t recognize you in it. It does thing o you. Step outside and look at this incredible fabric in the daylight."

When the clothier’s friend came back into the store only a moment later, the clothier walked up to him with a smile and said, "How do you do, stranger. What can I do for you?"

The issue of friendship is not just what we gain from our friends, but what our friends also allow us to give. I often tell couples I counsel before weddings (and some I counsel afterwards!), that the old notion that a good marriage or partnership is 50-50, is not really true, a good marriage is really 75-75, meaning that each partner in the relationship goes a bit farther when necessary, so that each sometimes gets more than s/he gives, but overall they both get a great deal more. This is true in all friendships of any depth; each knows that at times s/he have to stretch, give a little more, and that this is reciprocal, for the friend will have to do the same when we are not at our best. This is just as true for our animal friends, our pets. We, of the Dean/Riley family, have a cat-house. Really! When we married four years ago, Tom Riley had two cats, I had one, then my son had to have his own, then my pregnant daughter begged me to have mercy on her and take her cat, so we now have five cats. Our cats are loving, usually well-behaved cats, and they would say that I am the same. We are good friends. Sometimes I accidentally step on their tails, or forget to put their food out on time, but they keep coming to get on my lap (maybe there will be a short period for pouting after a tail episode), and they forgive me my errors as their caretaker.

Friends, as the Yeats poem said so eloquently, do not need "winning wiles" or "lavish praises," and they are not afraid to be truth-tellers or truth-hearers. They accept us through the highs and the lows; we will come to appreciate the phrase "fair-weather friends" when we find ourselves abandoned in our difficulties. But friendships are always circular, in that we give and we receive. It is a mistake to think that friendship is only in getting and not giving, which is often the problem for people who complain about a dearth of friends. What are we giving in friendship? must be the question that comes to our lips when we are feeling cut off.

I have often heard people talk of the dear friends that have sustained them long after family connections have broken or are no more. And, the older we get, the more we understand the deep meaning that our friendships hold for us. To have had even one good friend will always make us more aware of what it means to be cared about for just who we are, and that is more valuable than words can say.

For all that I could say about friendship, the one thing that I cannot leave unsaid, is that which comes from the Hebrew scripture and tells us that a friend is a person (or pet) "who is as your own soul." This is what I meant by kindred spirit, to feel as one for much if not most of the stuff of life. It is a rare and precious thing.

No matter what you do or leave undone in life, let this be your goal: to make friends, to nurture friendships, and to value them deeply. In that I can guarantee you will have a good life, no matter what happens in your life. There is nothing more we could ask of life.

June 17, 2001 Sermon

Rev. Nancy D. Dean

June 17, 2001

Fatherhood and the Church: Those Who Dare to Care

First, let me wish a very happy Father’s Day to the dads. Typically, I do not do an annual Mother’s Day or Father’s Day sermon, in part, because we all tend to have such different experiences of our mothers and fathers, and I run the risk of doing a Pollyanna-ish take on What makes a Great Mom? or Great Dad?--and, that is not what I think is most important about these tremendously challenging parent roles. Some of us had fathers as rough as old corncobs, but who still managed to convey that they cared about us, even if they never played a game of catch or read us a bedtime story. Others have had fathers who could be the angels’ delight for short intervals, but had no staying power. In other words, we each have a very particular experience of our parents, if we had them for any time at all. Some single parents do a great job of rearing their children without benefit of spouse, be it due to death or abandonment, while a good many two-parent households do a lousy job. Whatever we say about mothers and fathers, there are guaranteed to be exceptions; so, I usually find it more meaningful, or so I believe, to come at these fairly new "recognition" days (rather than holidays) for what we find deeper within ourselves as we understand what it means to be a father or mother. The most important facets of this understanding, that cannot be ignored in cultures of the West, come out of the Judeo-Christian-Islamic traditions that have been the prime moving force for our way of thinking about parental roles.

Perhaps the most important story of all comes from the Hebrew scripture with the story of Abraham and Isaac, his first-born son. In the story, Abraham is getting up in years, and has yet to produce an heir, for it is the first-born son to whom the wealth of the family is passed. We read in Genesis, Chapters 20-22, that Abraham’s wife, Sarah, prays to God, pleads with God that they might have a son, and God eventually looks with favor on them. This is a story both about how the nation of Israel will come into being, but also a story about transition within a culture, or so the Biblical scholar-archeologists tell us. Most people hear this story in the synagogue or church as a story about faith, how Abraham loves God so much that when he hears God tell him to take his only son and tie him to the altar to make of him a sacrifice, Abraham does so without seeming to flinch, though we somehow know he would have had to. But, we are told, when God calls him, Abraham replies, "Here I am."

Dr. William Pollack, a clinical psychologist with the Harvard Medical School, writes of this story: [P]erhaps today, in quite a similar way, most fathers are trying to let their sons [and daughters] know that they are there, ready to love, comfort, and protect them.

Now, for the Biblical scholar-archeologists, there is also a transition from the common practice of human sacrifice that was practiced in the time that the founders of the nation of Israel are at work, to the practice of using animals, which according to the story is what God did in the test of Abraham's faith by sending an angel to stay Abraham’s hand as he takes up the knife, and a ram is presented as a substitution for the sacrifice. Then God blesses Abraham and tells him that because of his faithfulness, he will make his "offspring as numerous as the stars of heaven and as the sand that is on the seashore." But, the model of fatherhood is being set in place as well as a story of how a nation is born.

God is also a model of father, or for father, or both, depending on where we stand in history, but certainly by the time of the writings about Jesus, the view of God as Father is well-established, and continues these two-thousand-plus-years later.

Yet another chicken and egg problem for those scholars we call Biblical-anthropologists, for they tell us, in consonance with the archeologists, that our earliest forms of human worship were of mother goddesses, but in the transitions that are occurring at the time the people of Israel are founding their nation, a shift is being made away from the female divinity to the male. Indeed, one of the chief features of much of the Pentateuch, or the first five books of the Hebrew Bible is the effort to destroy the altars to the Asherahs, or Astarte, as the female divine of that region of Canaan was usually called. So, does God become a father-figure because of this change in culture or was it because the nation of Israel was patriarchal, or something else altogether?

Add to all this that anthropological-psychologists have suggested that all our deities will be mother or father precisely because we have these extremely dependent relationships with our parents as human beings. That is, because our parents are as gods/goddesses to us for our earliest years, we humans have never moved far from these understandings of "absolute reality" or God.

Well, however it came to be that the view of God was as Father, the Church completely supported the idea, and even today in the Catholic and Anglican churches, the priests are referred to as Father. So that all leadership is connected with the absolute fatherhood seen as God, and the church is referred to as the Mother.

My research tells me that :

"During the first three centuries of Christian history, only bishops were called Fathers of the Church."

Later the designation arose of the Apostolic Fathers, who were the "authors of non-biblical church writings of the 1st and early 2d centuries. These works are important because their authors presumably knew the Apostles or their associates. [Comprised of] Clement I, Hermas, Ignatius of Antioch, Polycarp, and the author of the Epistle of Barnabas. Later, other writers such as Papias of Hierapolis and the authors of the Epistle to Diognetus and of the Didache were also considered Apostolic Fathers. Expressing pastoral concern, their writings are similar in style to the New Testament. Some of their writings, in fact, were venerated as Scripture before the official canon was decided.

Later, the use of term "father" was attached to the entirety of the priesthood, so that the fatherhood of God was transferred first to the Pope (a term which means papa/father), and through the pope down through the levels of the priest hierarchy.

Most Protestants, while rejecting this notion of human intervention between humanity and God, nonetheless continued to support the notion of God as father, or as "the ethical side of Christian belief and practice: the fatherhood of God as the basis for the brotherhood of man."

So God continues to be the ultimate father of humanity, and we, then, look to the human father as head of the family. Or at least that was pretty much how things worked until the last third of the 20th Century. But there is every indication that real transition is yet again underway, for while we have plenty of evidence that men are still seen as the head of household on most joint income tax forms, men and women in the west are taking a different view than that the church has so successfully inculcated over the past two-thousand years. Obviously, there is a lot more to be said about patriarchy and the changing western/modern world, but what is the most telling comes from men who are fathers now. According to a large Newsweek poll of 1996, "55 percent of men interviewed felt that parenting was more significant to them than it had been to their own fathers; and while over 60 percent felt they did it better than their dads….’ Seventy percent said they spend more time with their children than their fathers did with them; and 86 percent of the mothers who shared parenting responsibilities with these men rated them as doing a ‘good’ or ‘very good’ job at parenting."

William Pollack writes of fathers today: " Fathers also seem to feel more confident about these emotional bonds and have the support of their wives in making them. My research shows that now more than ever before, contemporary fathers are putting aside old ways of passive fathering . . . ."

Of course, transitions are never easy, and like Abraham, fathers today need a lot of faith and courage to trust that they are responding to a higher calling. I know two men at this time who are stay-at-home fathers. Only two. Yet, I know dozens of stay-at-home mothers. Neither of the stay-at-home fathers started out to be that, but found their calling after losing their jobs, and discovering a happy mode of being for their families that works for them--but not without a personal cost. (I don’t have time to go into the changing status for women who leave the work force to stay at home with the children, for there is undoubtedly a cost there that is part of this transition period.)

Those fathers who dare to care enough to stay at home with their children while the mothers go off and work, are not considered role models for the majority, nor are they likely to become as common as stay-at-home mothers in our lifetimes. These transitions come about very slowly. But what is gratifying to witness is the greater part most men I see take in the daily lives of their children. The men of this congregation are clearly at the leading edge of this cultural change. Men who take care of infants, who make dinner for the family, who help in all aspects of their children’s school and home life. I can tell you, I did not see this when I was growing up. I have noticed the most dramatic changes since my daughter was born in the late 1960s. Then you never saw a dad out by himself pushing a baby stroller, or alone with a baby or small child; now, it is quite common to see both. Fathers in the market with children; it just was not happening when my daughter was a baby. So many changes, and most of them good, but none of them have been painless. Men have had to dare to care enough to get beyond the pain. Undoubtedly, there is a class issue at work as well, for it is still far less common to see fathers in the lower socio-economic strata as well-integrated into the whole life of the family.

Bill Cosby wrote a book in the late 1980s titled appropriately Fatherhood, where he examines the changing role of father as he sees it through the clear-sightedness of the comedian, saying, for example, about the notion of fathers as the source of all knowledge:

Fathers are the geniuses of the house because only a person as intelligent as we could fake such stupidity. Think about your father: He doesn't know where anything is. You ask him to do something, he messes it up, and your mother sends you: "Go down and see what your father's doing before he blows up the house." He's a genius at work because he doesn't want to do it, and knows someone will be coming soon to stop him.

Or the comic Jerry Seinfeld’s view of the serious nature of fathers:

Something happens when a man reaches a certain age, that The News becomes the most important thing in his life. All fathers think one day they're going to get a call from the State Department. "Listen, we've completely lost track of the situation in the Middle East. You've been watching the news. What do you think we should do about it?"

 

We are not past our relationship with our fathers as the head honcho or big guy or all- knowing source of wisdom, partly because we want to have those strong images, those icons of virtue, to look up to, to be reassured by ourselves. It takes a pretty brave man to say, "I’m just a man, trying to do the best I can, today." Especially when they know we are looking for so much more to help compensate for our own shortcomings, or at least reassure us that we will be safe in spite of them.

All of us are challenged by what the role of Father has come to mean for us as a people, a nation—we call George Washington the Father of our Country, and certainly within our own family units. It seems to me that the most spiritual approach for both mothers and fathers is to be as loving as we can within the boundaries that we each need, especially for the children. The models of the historic church fathers, or indeed of traditional God the Father, are not the ones to guide fathers today. Men need more to work with than "an eye for an eye" or "spare the rod and spoil the child." But the understanding of Abraham that said to God and to his son, when Isaac called to him, "Here I am," is the most touching, the most loving response a father today can make. To be here for your sons and daughters, to have faith in your ability to love and share in the lives of your children, that is the "Here I am," statement that your/our children will either remember or have missed, and it only comes from those fathers (and mothers) who do have the faith, the spiritual wisdom to dare to care. amen

 
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