How Do I Honor a Father I Don’t Know?
“I was a tiny boy, shuffling down the hall at the end of the line. He hadn’t come, and now I felt silly for crying, for letting everyone see my feelings. And then, when I rounded the last corner before the cafeteria, I saw something I’ll never forget: Him.
He stood there in front of the cafeteria doors, waiting, so tall, so big. I looked up at him, wiped my face, sucked back any evidence of feelings.
His greatest lesson was the one he never said out loud, the thing a father should do, which is this: Be there. Always be there. And never stop being there, until you can’t be there anymore.”
Harrison Scott Key, The World’s Largest Man
I’m adopted and always thought my biological father was a non-issue. Or maybe even just a non-entity. For all I know, a stork put me in my biological mother’s womb.*
But like those other non-entities—ghosts—he haunts me. My best friend recently called my son my clone. Do I look like my father? All I know about him is that he was a musician and was on tour with a band in Europe when I was born. I play music too. I’ve always used humor to evade sincerity, so I used to joke that I’m Ringo Starr’s long-lost son.**
Over the past year or so, my counselor has been like a ghost hunter guiding me through the parts of my soul that feel like an abandoned house that someone died in.*** But it turns out there is more life there than I thought.
Around the same time I started counseling, I read Harrison Scott Key’s book The World’s Largest Man. It’s a memoir exploring his relationship with his father. I take it as a personal offense when people have not read it; it’s that good. I remember reading the excerpt above and crying in a way that I haven’t in a long time. Coincidentally enough, the last time I cried like that was probably one of the many, many times I cried when my parents dropped me off at school as a child.
As I’ve turned on the lights in that old house and dusted it off, a question kept following me around: what was I crying about? My dad (adoptive) was great. He loved me and was always there, even when I know he probably didn’t want to be.**** I know this seems like the kind of existential leap that someone who has been in counseling will make, but trust me about it: those tears were for the ghost.
This is my very strange way of inviting you to join us for our Saturday Seminar on November 23rd. It’s based on the fifth commandment to honor our parents, and we’re asking how we do that well as adults. I can promise you it won’t be as existentially-fraught as this blog post, but I won’t promise you that it will be free from exploring. One of the things I love about our church is that God has helped us to cultivate a culture in which we can help each other clean out our soul’s closets and turn on lights in the dark rooms. The 23rd will be an exploratory mission and I hope you’ll join us.
Since conceiving of this seminar, I’ve wrestled with the question of how I honor this father I’ve never known. The easiest answer would be that I don’t have to—I’m off the hook. But I think that would be going against God’s providence of having me be born from him. If God’s will is always good and right, it is no accident I am haunted.
I’ve figured out at least three ways that I can honor my biological father. The first is to long for him without caveat because the longing in and of itself is holy. The second is to ask God to use this longing to reveal more of His fatherly presence. And presence itself is the third way. When I walk into my son’s room, his face lights up and I see that his inner house is full. I can take Key’s advice. I can be there, until I can’t be there anymore.
*This feels far less heretical than saying that I just showed up in her womb. Especially since I just preached about the birth of Jesus and we’re within spitting distance of Advent.
** Let’s be honest, he’s the Beatle you would most want to be your father.
*** My 16-year-old emo self would be THRILLED with this sentence.
**** Again…emo-band phase.