This Fathers’ Day I was thinking how this holiday is a bit of an embarrassment for most men. We don’t know quite know what to do or how to act. James Joyce says: “Paternity is a legal fiction,” and as the bitter Irish son of a bitter Irish father, Joyce’s one-liner is understandable. But is it helpful? And how do our religious traditions guide us in this matter?
At first glance, Christianity does not seem too helpful. For instance, Joseph is portrayed as a nice-enough older man who promises to fulfill his betrothal contract to a younger woman-even after discovering that she’s pregnant out of wedlock. Is Joseph Jesus’ father? Or foster father? Or step father? He plays an ambiguous role, and it’s not much help for those of us trying to be good fathers.
In patriarchal societies it’s not surprising that God would be portrayed as the ultimate Father Figure. But this old testament God sometimes seems irritable and capricious, putting favorite sons like Abraham through hell by-among other things-asking him to kill his own beloved son, Issac (Genesis 22:1-19). Saved at the last moment, Isaac goes on to father the people of Israel and Abraham is still considered the Patriarch of all the monotheisms. But the Hebrew scripture is littered with dysfunctional father-son relations: Solomon and David, David and Absalom, Nun and Joshua are just a few that come to mind. So is all this religious history proving James Joyce right?
Not quite.
In Islam, Abraham is considered the first one to submit (islam) to the One God. But Muhammad himself is an orphan who is taken under the patronage of one of his uncles and goes on to marry a wealthy, older business woman-always a good strategy for an orphan. He becomes her business partner as well as her husband. And it is here that we get a hint of the kind of ad hoc fathering or mentoring that we see in many religious traditions. For example, Joshua is mentored by the aging Moses, who is not his biological father. They were so important to each other that Jewish tradition says “the face of Moses was as the face of the sun, and the face of Joshua as the face of the moon.”
There are examples of this ad hoc fathering or mentoring from other religious traditions. The Buddha pardoned and ordained the serial killer known as Angulimala, whose name means “finger bone necklace,” referring to the rosary of human finger bones he wore around his neck. The other monks in the Order were furious at the Buddha for doing this. But Buddha went against their wishes, renaming Angulimala as Ahimsa (“Harmless”). But what’s interesting to me is that the Venerable Ahimsa was the only monk in the order that the Buddha addressed as “My Son”-even though his own biological son, Rahula, was also a monk.
In my own youth, which coincided with the early years of television, we had media fathers like Robert Young in Father Knows Best, Ozzie Nelson in Ozzie and Harriet or Ward Cleaver in Leave it to Beaver. All these media father figures were sensible, even-tempered and well dressed men who were kind to children and animals and who kept their hands to themselves by sleeping in separate beds from their lovely, even-tempered, well-dressed wives. But they little resembled the fathers who populated our block when I was young. These men got drunk quite often; they yelled at their wives and children, they chain smoked and watched boxing on the Friday nights.
My own father was nothing like Ozzie or Ward either. His own father and grandfather and great-grandfather had all been alcoholics. He was packed off to Episcopal boarding schools when he was very young. I don’t mean to be spilling all the family secrets, it’s just that I know I was not the only one in my generation who was not living under the gentle reign of Ward Cleaver.
The poet Robert Bly has written about what he calls the “male mother,” that is, a male figure in a young man’s life who can be nurturing and supportive, a male who the young man does not have to compete against or overthrow, as in the classical Oedipal paradigm. I can think of older men who did this for me: professors or work supervisors who encouraged me, appreciated me and showed me the ropes of the worlds of university and career. I loved some of these men as much, or more, than I did my biological father, and I would not have survived vocationally or spiritually without them.
We desperately need men to start acting as mentors and nurturing guides to the young men among us. As fathers some of us have not done so well with our biological children, but there is always grandparenthood and the spirit-infused role of male mother, a force that young men need in their lives if they are to become warriors in the deep spiritual sense of that word. Native American wisdom can have the last word on this: “A young man who can’t dance is a savage; an old man who can’t laugh is a fool.”
By Kobai Scott Whitney