This is my homily for today, the 12th Sunday in Ordinary Time, Cycle B. The readings for today are here. I gave this homily at the Saturday evening mass - that is why I mentioned Juneteenth at the beginning.
Happy Juneteenth, everyone, and happy Father’s Day, dads.
I saw my dad last weekend. I'm so fortunate that both my dad and my mom are still living. They're both in their 80s. They went to North Carolina this weekend to visit my sister and her husband, so I won’t see my dad on Father’s Day. But I got to spend some time with him last weekend. It’s interesting: there’s been a bit of the turning of the tables. When my wife Therese and I were a young married couple, my dad and mom would come visit us, and we’d often draft him to do household handy jobs which we were too dopey to know how to do, like hanging pictures. He’s 85 now, and it seems that hanging a picture is just a bit too much for him now. So we hung a couple of pictures for him. I’d like to report that, as the years have passed, I’ve grown much handier, but as a matter of fact, I started that chore by watching Youtube “how-to” videos for 45 minutes. And I still had to put the nails in the drywall three times to get the picture level.
My dad has spent his entire life giving gifts to us, giving of himself to us, so it seems the least we can do now that he’s reached this fine, ripe age is give back a little bit.
The element of that Gospel story we just heard which rings a bell for me is that, while the chaos of storm, wind, waves and panic are churning around him, Jesus is taking a nap. How could he manage to sleep through all that? Well, my dad could answer that question. When I was a young child, my dad was a great napper. Every Saturday and Sunday afternoon, he’d put a ball game or an old black-and-white movie on the television, stretch out on the couch, and he’d nap the afternoon away. The chaos of a house full of children would be swirling about, but he’d sleep right through it. I don’t mean to imply he was lazy: I’ll say more about that in a moment.
Here’s the thing about my dad in those early days of my life: his life hadn’t gone exactly according to his plan. He’s very smart and did well in school when he was a kid. When he graduated from high school in the mid 1950s, he was accepted to Notre Dame. For an Irish Catholic kid at that time, Notre Dame may not have been precisely the same as heaven, but it was as close to it as one could get in this life. My dad had a life plan: he’d get his college degree, then get hired by Merrill Lynch or one of the other big financial firms, and he’d proceed to make a pile of money. So my dad went off to South Bend as an 18 year old to execute the first leg of that plan.
But he didn’t do well that fall. He was away from his close, extended family for the first time. He was well out of his comfort zone. He ended up coming back home after that freshman fall semester. He stopped going to school for a while and worked in his dad’s factory. In those years he met my mom, got married and then got drafted.
When my dad’s military hitch ended, they came back home. And my dad, a young man still in his 20s, took stock of his life. He was a college drop-out with a wife and a child, and more children soon on the way. By the time he was 29, he and my mom had five children. My dad needed to work to support the family; my mom needed to be home with the kids. But he thought he couldn’t get where he wanted to be in life without a college degree, so he started taking night classes, too. He’d work all day, then go to school all evening, and then come home to do his homework. In addition, he needed to tend to his marriage, and help to rear the children. And do the yardwork, and keep the house in repair, and all the thousand and one other things a dad has to do. No wonder he needed to nap on the weekends. My dad spent my formative years dealing with chronic sleep deprivation. Also, he was a smoker with a weight problem. He was a young man who walked around bearing a huge load of stress, every day.
I once worked for a guy who instructed us that, when it came to hiring people, we should have a bias toward bright people who worked hard. This guy had nothing against education or experience. But the two most important qualifications, in his book, was that the candidate be bright and be a hard worker. That was my dad, to a tee. Nobody worked harder than he did. He thought the way to get ahead was to work harder than everyone else. For him, it was a good strategy. He got that college degree. He quit smoking. He lost weight – which is a pretty good trick for someone who has quit smoking. He got promotions, and job offers from other companies. By the time I was in high school, he was a senior executive, with a company car and a country club membership. By then, he and my mom had seven children. He told me once, a little ruefully, that having seven kids was no way for a man to get rich. The path of his life had taken some unplanned twists and turns. But he wouldn’t have had it turn out any other way than it did. Because he recognized God’s hand in his life, and he sensed that what he was doing is what God wanted him to do.
Jesus exhorted his disciples in the boat to have a little faith. I haven’t mentioned yet the most important gift my dad gave me, but I will now. It’s the gift of faith. My dad took seriously what the church tells young parents when they get their infants baptized. In the Catholic church, we baptize infants because we want our children to get the fruits of the sacrament – the grace which comes from that encounter with God. But we baptize infants only if the parents promise to pass their faith along to the children as the children get older.
My dad has kept that promise. Nothing was more important in his household than that we be a family of faith. He made sure we made it to church every Sunday. We prayed grace before every meal. Every Sunday afternoon we’d kneel down in the family room and pray the rosary together. He sent us to Catholic schools. He did everything he could think of to try to immerse us in Catholic faith. For my dad, his faith has been the single most important thing in his life. It was more important than material comfort and getting rich. My dad has his head on straight. He gets it.
My dad has given me a lot of wonderful gifts over the course of our lives together. Some of those gifts weren’t actually intended: I inherited some of his genes. However bright I am, whatever capacity for hard work I have, I’ve probably inherited from him. Almost certainly, I’ve inherited other traits as well. Depression and anxiety run in his family – he got them from his parents, and they’ve been passed along to me and my siblings as well. It’s possible my own children have inherited them from me, too. We don’t get to choose our parents, nor the genes and chromosomes we get from them. For his part, my dad certainly wouldn’t have chosen to pass depression and anxiety on to me – he loves me too much for that. But that’s not how the parenting game works – there are some things we don’t get to choose. Being a dad, like most other important things in life, can be a mystery. We’re not fully in control. We need to turn to God to help us, like the disciples turned to Jesus when their boat was foundering. My dad’s been doing that his whole life. And Jesus has helped him, just as he helped the disciples in his boat. God has calmed the storms surrounding my dad, and has calmed the storms within him, too.
There are some other things my dad did choose to pass on to me, and for those, I am immensely grateful: many pearls of wisdom, and many good habits. But the greatest gift he has given me is the gift of his faith.
Dads and grandpas, if I could ask one thing of you on this Father’s Day weekend, it would be to pass along to your children and grandchildren what Jesus tried to pass along to his disciples, and what I’ve been blessed to receive from my father: the gift of faith. Please, please share your faith with your children!
Thanks for sharing your homily, Jim. Even though my father died back in 1968 from cancer of the stomach when I was twenty, Father's Day is still a time for reflection. I don't think my father's story or mine was typically a Catholic one for the time. Catholics didn't get divorced that much back then. Neither did mine. They separated when I was one and never divorced, but remained apart. I guess it was attributable to the OCD that exploded when he returned from his Marine stint in the Pacific Theater which included Iwo Jima. Whether that's the whole story, I don't know. But my memories of my father are benign. My parents would go out on "dates" and take me along. I remember concerts at the Philadelphia Academy of Music. Sometimes there would be a short stay in Atlantic City. Due to his problem, the only time he touched me, lifting me up in the air, was in the purifying waters of the Atlantic. Thankfully, the symbolic value of real water gave him more respite from his illness than psychiatry, at that time, could. I didn't understand at the time but learned of it later, when I had had a couple small bouts with it myself and understood. My relationship with my father was intermittent but not without gifts. He gave me an abbreviated text of "War and Peace" when I was ten which opened up a world of better literature to me. Also a book on geometry which I devoured. Somehow, I knew my father supported civil rights and did not have any prejudice in him. All this, while being a patriotic American, the good old variety that didn't attack the Capitol. And there was faith, too. His faith was central to him as it is to me, in spite of all his problems. He managed to hold a job throughout his life and that may have been an accomplishment, given his problems. What could hold things together under those conditions except faith? I wish I could say he attained some feeling of peace in his lifetime on earth, but I doubt it, but hopefully small moments of it. Maybe if he had lived longer. I am 72 now, 24 years older than my father was when he died. It's a strange thing, now that I think about it.
ReplyDeleteThis is not a sob story. Life is a good thing, despite everything. I know that because Jesus told me so.
Good Homily!
ReplyDeleteOn a retreat when I was a member of the mostly voluntary pastoral staff back in the 1980, we asked ourselves where we had gotten our faith.
My faith had not come from Catholic schools, I went to public grade and high schools. I hated Catechism classes. There were no positive priests or sisters in my life; as an altar boy I was very aware of the human failings of my pastors although they were good men. They certainly did not inspire me to enter the Jesuit novitiate. I had not known any Jesuit priests. In retrospect I wonder why I had expected Jesuit priests to be any different.
I had discovered the Divine Office in the form of the Short Breviary when I was in eighth grade. That certainly became the primary source of my Catholic faith formation for the rest of my life. As an intellectually talented person, I probably knew more about the Catholic faith, especially the liturgy, by the time I was in tenth grade than my parents ever knew.
However if you ask about my Christian formation, my parents were the source of my virtues. Their faith, their hope, their love became my faith, my hope, my love. More specifically their practical virtues became my practical virtues. My mom was the great model of care and listening with which she supported both her and my father’s extended families. My father became the great model of professional work as well as affirmation of other people especially in the work environment.
Dad was a millwright in a steel mill. In Greek he would have been a techne which is what Joseph was, and what Jesus did for a living. A techne could work in stone and metal, as well as in wood. While there are many jobs in steel mills, my father was in “lay out” department which was where the mill manufactured things out of steel for its own benefit.
Dad had a great capacity to quietly affirm other people, especially other men. Time and again I saw this around our neighborhood. Dad would go over to talk to a neighbor about that guy’s remodeling project. Dad never said anything like. “You are doing it the wrong way; it never going to work that way.” Rather through patient conversation Dad would get the guy to discover the better way of doing things. In the end the guy would never become aware of how dumb he was but rather conclude that he was a genius who deserved my father’s help!
In the steel mill my father never corrected his bosses or co-workers. In fact he usually said “OK, if you say so.” I soon learned that when my Dad said that to me it meant that he was going to let me discover for myself the error of my thinking. The people of the mill likely came to the same conclusion. When the millwrights were wrestling with a difficult problem, my dad whose name was John simply said “Never fear JR is here.” That is he would help them discover the solution.
There was a spiritual quality to the way that he worked. Dad would get up in the morning and quietly and patiently sip a cup of coffee. He was actually preparing himself for the days job. Anytime I am working on a project I always find in the middle of the project that there are all sorts of materials and tools that I need. That never happened to Dad. He always assembled everything beforehand.
Dad never led a rushed work life either at home or at the mill. I never saw him exhausted or over worked. At the mill he was so confident of his own skills that when a job was done for the day, he went to wash up and put on his clothes and waited for the whistle to blow. (TO BE CONTINUED SINCE I REACHED THE COMMENT LIMIT)
My father was an amateur photographer in his youth. However there are few pictures of him. But there is one of him holding me, but not inward in a cuddly fashion like a mother would. Rather Dad is holding me up presenting me to the world as if to say “This is my beloved son, pay attention to him.” He passed on to me his quiet confidence.
ReplyDeleteI cannot say that he was totally successful in passing on his ability to deal with the work world. Yes he did give me a quiet confidence within which to display my intellectual talents. While I rarely criticize anyone personally (everyone has appreciated I stick to the facts and never praise or blame anyone), I have been told often that I should stop my explanation of how the world works so that people can join and take part of the credit for understanding things. On the other hand since I am lazy, after I have laid out the vision I do let everyone else do the work, confident that they will do it much better than I would. I was perfectly happy to let them take all the credit. In fact I became very good at the game of being a quiet catalyst, creatively finding how much change I could initiate without much work or visibility.
However, the one place where my Dad's influence was totally successful was with the mentally ill. I have this sense of what to say and do to make them feel affirmed. I have a hard time understanding it, it just happens. Virtues really come from God we just share them.
Dad’s virtues like my Mom’s virtues have become my virtues except in a different key.
My father was not a church goer. He grew up on the dairy farm which did not allow time for church going. My grandmother was lucky to get to church on Christmas and Easter. Steel mills were also inhospitable for church going. The mill worked 24/7 and steel workers had to accommodate themselves to its demands.
Dads situation was not helped by the Church. When my mother and father went to get married the pastor demanded more money that they had available for a nuptial Mass. Eventually he agreed to let the assistant pastor marry them without a Mass for an affordable fee. This did not go down well with my father. However Dad did not become hostile toward the church.
Dad was a meat and potatoes man. Yes he would eat dessert but he did not center his life on desserts. Deserts were mainly for mom and me. Dad was the same way in life. The meat of his life was his work. The potatoes of his life were the people in his life. He loved them all. Church was like a dessert. He well understood why mom and l liked it. He had nothing against it. He would have been disappointed if mom and I decided we no longer liked dessert.
(I do not think we understand the house church. For dad and many men at many times and places, the women and children have represent the house church in the big Church.)
From college days when I first learned about them I have had a great admiration for the desert solitaires. They were not great church goers. In some cases they were near enough to a village or community of monks that they could come in on weekends for Mass. Otherwise many of them did not have the Eucharist for months, years or even decades. Two things dominated their lives. Their work of gardening or basket weaving and charity to visitors who were usually other monks. They were exquisitely sensitive in their dealings with others, leading them ever so gently and indirectly to discover the truth. They were very humble about themselves and their relationship to God.
Dad outlived mom by ten years. During that time it became apparent how similar he was to the desert solitaries in the simplicity of his life. In his eighties after living alone for ten years he developed lung cancer. Although they offered a lung operation he eventually decided to say no. When he announced his decision to me he said very simply. “Every night for the past ten years I have prayed to mom; I am now ready to join her.” An extremely simple life of prayer. Mom was his connection to Church after her death as she had been when she lived.
Thanks for sharing your homily, Jim. Sounds like your dad is a good guy.
ReplyDeleteMine is, too. Nowadays he is pretty much homebound. Thank goodness he can still read, because he can't do much else. He has always been a voracious reader, even though he never went to college. His working life was spent as a rancher/farmer. He loved animals, which is a good thing, because he had to deal with them every day. It was hard for him and Mom to take a vacation because someone always had to be home to feed the cattle and do the chores. He has a good sense of humor, and I can think of a lot of pithy and funny Dad sayings, some of which are a little blunt and earthy. He was an only child, but he and Mom had five living children, one son died shortly after birth.
As far as faith, he is an old fashioned Catholic who loves the Rosary. If any of us tells him of a problem or someone who is ill, he always says he'll add them to his rosary list.
But the thing I most give him credit for is how he always loved our mom. The got married when she was 20 and he was 22. I never heard him say a harsh word to her, or treat her with anything but respect. They were married 49 years. Almost made it to 50, but she got cancer in 1998 and died early in 1999. She spent three months at University Medical Center in Omaha, but it didn't do any good. He stayed in Omaha the whole time, with one of my sisters who lived there, and being with Mom every day. In the end Mom decided to go home and quit treatment. Dad cared for her at home with the help of visiting nurses until the last week when she was in a coma and was in the local hospital. People talk of 2020 being their worst year, but for us it didn't hold a candle to 1998.
Now Dad is a grandfather of 12. They were all born during Mom's lifetime. But he is also a great-grandfather of 18 and counting. For an only child, he is a patriarch.
All of you were fortunate in having good fathers. I did not. He was not abusive, but he was cold, distant and unloving. He traveled a lot on business when I was young, and had no interest in his five children when he was home. He had never wanted any children, but my mother refused to use birth control because of the church and he ended up with five kids. I think he resented the church for that forever, and the issue contributed to the death of the marriage. My parents finally separated when I was ten so I saw even less of him.p, which was a good thing from my point of view. The house was always more tense when he was around. They divorced when I was 18 ( I am the youngest of the five). My older siblings tell me that he did come to my high school graduation ( at which I spoke as salutatorian) but I have no memory of him being there. He did not attend either my wedding or the wedding of one of my older sisters and one of my brothers. He was raised Catholic but religion meant nothing to him. So I am very grateful that the man I married almost 49 years ago is a wonderful father and grandfather. I am also very grateful that my sons are all also wonderful fathers.
ReplyDelete