I read the story recently of a young woman who had never met her father. He had been only a boyfriend to, her mother and a bad one at that, having abandoned her when she became pregnant. Still, the daughter’s desire to, meet her father was constant throughout her childhood and young adulthood. In her twenties she went through great effort and expense to track him down. He was living somewhere in Alaska when they finally met. The story didn’t say whether the experience was all she had thought it would be, but that’s not the point. The longing to know our fathers, whether in a deeper way than we do now-or in the young woman’s case to know him at all-is an earthly reflection of the innate desire to know our true Father.
That we fathers imprint ourselves on our children is inevitable. They are bruised by our distraction, buffeted by our impatience, scarred by our lack of faith. But they are also comforted by our love. As a child, whenever I hunched over the toilet in sickness, my father was always there — murmuring soothing words, holding my hot forehead in his cool hand, supporting me with his other arm under my ribs so that I could surrender to the next paroxysm of nausea. My mother was usually the one who nursed me back to, health, but the quiet strength of my dad’s touch was fatherly in quintessence, irreplaceable by even an endless supply of love from my mother.
One night last week my six-year-old daughter was ill. Instinctively I was there, holding up her head in my right hand, supporting her slender body with my left, repeating words of comfort at each wave of sickness. Suddenly, as if watching myself in a movie, I was aware of the great unconscious legacy passed from father to son.
But it is not only earthly love we fathers model. We have the awesome task of representing to our children God himself. They hear the word “father” in the context of the Trinity, and they color in the lines with the attributes of the only father they really know. They will likely overlook our occasional distraction or impatience if they see us struggling each day toward holiness.
In his 1996 book, Gift and Mystery, John Paul II gives witness to the legacy of earthly fathers: “My preparation for the priesthood in the seminary was in a certain sense preceded by the preparation I received in my family, thanks to the life and example of my parents. Above all I am grateful to my father, who became a widower at an early age. I had not yet made my First Communion when I lost my mother: I was barely nine years old. So, I do not have a clear awareness of her contribution, which must have been great, to my religious training.
“After her death and, later, the death of my older brother, I was left alone with my father, a deeply religious man. Day after day I was able to observe the austere way in which he lived. By profession he was a soldier, and, after my mother’s death, his life became one of constant prayer. Sometimes I would wake up during the night and find my father on his knees, just as I would always see him kneeling in the parish church. We never spoke about a vocation to the priesthood, but his example was in a way my first seminary, a kind of domestic seminary.”