I have had two fathers and I have been cast off by both of them.
From my perch, it seems as if both of them were easily able to cast me aside - one because of his own mental deficiencies, and the other because I manifested my failures in front of him.
Both had professed undying love and paternity. One was biological and God-given. The other was spiritual and also God-given.
My father, my Dad, has not lived in the same home with me since I was a teen. He was ejected from the family home in a horrifying evening of abuse and recompense. It was a few months after that when we began to heal the relationship. Over the next twenty years, there were periods of drought and periods of festal joy in our relationship. When the judgment for his state mandated quarantine was passed, I became his loving correspondent. When life’s happenstance returned us to within a driving distance, we visited each other more often. By that time, I was a daddy too. (My failure to those kids is a different essay.) He would make the 2 hour drive frequently enough to offer some normalcy to life. It was a life for which I had always yearned - happy home, Sunday dinners, large extended family - all while living on my tree lined cul de sac or well-played upon street.
Through the march of the horrors of life, my grandmother passed away, rather unexpectedly. Within a very short time, my father was hurting as only he could, and decided to heal in his way. This is as charitable as I can make it. He rang me up and said “I am moving back to Texas. There is nothing left for me up here anymore.”
“Then you are telling your grandkids.” What else was there to say? Nothing left in his life, so he had to flee to a different part of the country and find a new life? I wasn’t enough? My kids weren’t enough? I did not expect that he would be a neighbor - heaven forbid. But outside of my traveling capabilities, and with such an arrogant and dismissive pronouncement! He never called the kids.
He never told them. They never heard from him again - until the various enigmatic social media efforts.
He had contacted me twice since then, both on Fathers Day, and in successive years. The first time he told me that I was the priest that he respected the most and that my love was apparent. And the next year, he also called on Fathers Day. This call came during coffee hour, when he knew I would still be with the parishioners. It was vile, full of hatred. It was the inverse, the converse, the perverse, of the previous conversation. And it was full-throated hatred traded just outside the church walls, next to open windows.
For a while, the contact from my father was an occasional short hallmark greeting from his blocked social media presence.
He hung around as long as he could, in the way that he could. I think he did the best he thought he should, and it was never going to be right this side of the death which tramples down death.
And he has passed, gone to the grave, casting his tortured soul with random precision into the healing Bosom of Abraham. God forgive and heal him.
The second father is one that I was able to choose out of my needful hunger and spiritual thirst. He was there for me in every step of my entrance into the One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church. Not ever present in body, but his teachings abounded and hedged my life. His spiritual children were my professors and instructors. His legacy was passed to me in multitudinous ways.
In time, as I entered the clergy and he was elevated as well, he was my superior to whom I placed my nascent and frail allegiance. My lord and father, the one who fought and contended for me. In my educational career, he assisted with material needs on top of his professional duties. In my early career, he held my hand, guided me to wise decisions, and placed me in the profound care of the best professors in my region.
And my moral and personal failings called for an end to my clerical career. I, indeed failed, at upholding my mandate to return the sweet part of the flock to the Lord at the end of my days. And I repented and am living my penance. Ejection from the rolls of the clergy, painful distance from my own children. I accepted this. I also had hopes that the Lord would make something whole again out of my broken pieces. But first those pieces had to be treated to the mortar and pestle.
In the last meeting I had with my second father, there was an air, or impression, or hope, that after a period of time, the reconstructed bones would once again receive the life-giving breath of love.
More than three years have passed now, and the black spot of void emptiness enshrouds where a father used to stand. The second knew of the pain I retained from my first father, even suffered with me through the indignities of the rending. And yet nothing. Expelled from his heart, I now have given up waiting that either father would, could, or should return.
And I am a father, inflicting these same anxieties in the hearts of all of the children that God has entrusted to me. Heaven help me, heaven teach me, heaven provide the paternity that will heal me.
