The Father Gives the Gift of Work to His Son
A single clear idea, well fed, moves like a contagious disease: “Physical work is wrong.” Many people besides [D.H. Lawrence] took up that idea, and in the next generation that split between fathers and sons deepened. A man takes up desk work in an office, becomes a father himself, but has no work to share with his son and cannot explain to the son what he’s doing. Lawrence’s father was able to take his son down in to the mines, just as my own father, who was a farmer, could take me out on the tractor, and show me around. I knew what he was doing all day and in all seasons of the year.
When the office work and the “information revolution” begin to dominate, the father-son bond disintegrates. If the father inhabits the house only for an hour or two in the evenings, then women’s values, marvelous as they are, will be the only values in the house. One could say that the father now loses is son five minutes after birth.
…the son does not actually see what his father does during the day and through all seasons of the year, a hole will appear in the son’s psyche, and the hole will fill with demons who tell him that his father’s work is evil and that the father is evil.
-Robert Bly, Iron John, p.20
I stole the quote from Carpe Cakem….I struggle incessantly with the feeling that my work (in an office) alienates me from my son. This is the first time I’ve seen it written out.
Backtalk and authentic prayer
It seems the sweetest of children eventually hit a stage when they mouth off about everything. Parents call this “backtalk” and generally think it is to be suppressed as much as possible, or maybe just endured. Should it be — suppressed, endured, punished? No, the child is exposing his heart and mind. I can’t imagine why we would not want to know what he really thinks and feels. Backtalk is a treasure. It is the pathway to friendship. If suppressed, it breaks the child’s ability to pray authentically.
Christian parents see backtalk as just simple rebellion, and they fear rebellion more than anything else, because they tend to carry on their piety in a universe that has more of an Islamic flavor than a Christian one. Not thast rebellion is ok — it isn’t. But if you want a biblical sense of what kind of verbal honesty God can accept in a relationship, read the Psalms. David was a backtalker.
Pyramid Religion and Parenting
In Islam, God is the Ruler. He sits atop the pyramid of the cosmos and watches everything down below to keep them all in their right place. In this type of religion, the problem of our world is disorder and the solution is His will. Force. Dominion. Obediance or rebellion. All that matters is His will. You don’t matter a damn, except as an agent of compliance.
Oh, sure, in this cosmos, God is “merciful” — which means that occasionally He doesn’t kill you when you deserve it. But His mercy is a mystery in the bad sense of the term; it emerges from a black box, nobody can predict it or count on it. So we are like the man in the familiar parable who has inexplicably been saved from the firing squad by a last-minute message from the unseen emperor. Except…add to this parable the little detail that THE FIRING SQUAD RE-CONVENES EVERY MORNING.
In the Old Testament, God also sits at the top of the pyramid, but the story is a love story. He at least tries to find ways to reach the bottom in a search for teh heart of His beloved people. In this cosmos, “love” or “mercy” are not emerging from an utter black box, because it is rooted in His personality. He is lonely in His core. Think of it: He says He needs us — or, Israel, at least. So His love is not an occasional add-on to the inner core of His personality. He made us, not as a hobby, but because He is Social, social in His core. It’s either the Trinity or a pyramid.
But there is enough of “God at the top of the pyramid” verses in the Old Testament that the West imbibed it as a moral vision. After all, it is the order of the political world, so it is nice and neat that it should be the order of the spiritual world.
The New Testament is a radical document because the Incarnation turns the pyramid upside down. No other religious assertion sets out frankly to flip the cosmos over and over like a child turning handstands.
Christians like their pyramid religion. Christian preaching and apologetics is not supposed to be an argument over what is the name of the guy at the top of the heap. It’s amazing how many Christians think of their universe as a traditional religious pyramid, with Jesus in the seat of Allah. Well, Jehovah would hardly have needed that whole crucifixion drama accomplish that.
So Christians have Jesus at the top of the pyramid and that is how the universe works. Sure, it is “by faith”, which is the best of all the edicts to issue from the apex of the universe.
So, they parent from the top of the pyramid. And then, consistent with that vision of the universe, their children rebel. We observe that the Western world has seen the emergence of a distinct stage of life marked by inexorable rebellion, because we parent like Islam but can’t quite stomach the necessary level of enforcement to carry it off. What’s our solution? Easy: it’s a feature, not a bug. Baptize it and call it normal.
Many Christian parents, along with all the rest of the non-Islamic world, have recognized that imperious parenting is not good, they themselves rebelled against it, and so they react by being permissive parents. And then their friends — or they themselves after they suffer that typical mid-life return to their childhood religion – they react to the Western secular permissiveness by re-ascending the old pyramid and imposing their will on their children. And evangelical pastors preach sermons on how children should obey their parents (instead of on how to love like God). And the cycle goes on forever.
No, the opposite of fundamentalist strictness is not worldly liberalism, but Christian agape. In the New Testament, God found a way to the bottom: become the bottom. Now, all fathers are givers, or they are not fathers. Father, now, is not that person who sits at the top but that person who comes to find the son in the garden every day.
Now, both permissive parents and strict parents are revealed to be: lazy. Truth is, it is actually easier to rule the pyramid than it is to enter the flesh of the beloved. Infinitely easier to rail and rant and throw lightening bolts from the depth of the storm than to be a baby in a manger. Nothing is harder, and more nourishing of the child, than love.
Oh, I hear the concern of those who think I’m destroying the authority of God. Relax: the pyramid is not gone. God still sits on the top, and is still to be feared. It’s just that He also plays at the bottom, and is available to be loved. So the bottom has become the top, and the top the bottom, in a ceaseless dance up and down the steps. And — the key point — His presence at the bottom makes His seat at the top an object of devotion, transforming an alienating fear into an integrating piety.
Don’t be a Christian who mouths Christian sentiments but teaches your child the universe is Islam.
Fatherlessness
This generation of evangelicals really is fatherless and adrift. They know that, they ache over it, they cannot pretend not to know it, but they have no intention of turning back to their fathers. And that means repentance has not yet been given.
– Douglas Wilson, reviewing The Shack.
Evangelicals have lost fatherhood, because they lost husband-hood, because they denied gender. You can have “parents” all day without gender, but not “fathers” and “mothers”. The fact is that evangelicals are EMBARRASSED by Paul’s clear assumption that men and women have different functions, within marriage, in parenting, and in general. Evangelicals are MORTIFIED by Paul on gender.
You can’t have fathers when the two spouses cannot be differentiated in their gifts. And we can’t have such differentiation because it leads inexorably to functional hierarchy, which we cannot have, because we know it is not true (it does not match our EXPERIENCE). So, evangelical exegetes routinely tell us that any NT text which seems to reflect marital hierarchy actually means… the opposite.
We actually still have motherhood, but fatherhood has been re-defined…as the same thing as motherhood. So fathers are nothing more in the life of the child than stand-in and second-rate mothers.
Evangelical women have been relieved to hear their secular sisters have been right — and previous generations of believers wrong — about the misogyny of the New Testament. They get the salvation part but none of those pesky careless moments where the writers lose touch with God and lapse into telling us how to live — er, “law” and / or “cultural prejudice”.
So when men and women live together as married people they submit to each other, which is harmless, because there is no female or male role — just a common vague practicum we can regularly confess together our mutual and equal failure at.
The generation gap is because of weak parents. All parenting is weak which includes no distinctively MALE parenting. Weak fathers were first weak men. And we are weak because we threw away biblical authority, because it said some practical things we thought insulted our dignity.
Congratulations, evangelical women. You have your dignity. Use it to solve your befuddlement that your children laugh at your authority, and see how far you can define normalcy down.
see also this.
Kill the father
The world will make the most absurd fictions in the service of what it wants. Among these fictions is that a female parent is interchangeable with a male parent, and that the only difference between one parent and two is a quantity of one. This is decadence, rationalized. More specifically, it is promiscuity, rationalized (which happens to be behind modernity in all its forms, but that’s another subject.)
Promiscuity, rationalized. Men kill fatherhood so they can have sex without the cost of time or money. Women kill fatherhood so they can have human pets without the bothersome superstructure of a relationship with the pet’s sire.
The Essence of Fatherhood Is The Giving Of Gifts
What is the activity of the father toward the son? He gives his son gifts. And Giving is not an incidental activity, nor even some chosen discipline extrinsic to the father’s core — the giving of good things to the son ”is” the father. God is love.
This giving is not for any purpose. The father has no particular end in sight, except the blessedness of the son. And the greatest the son can receive is to receive the father. They love each other, and will, forever.
What is a gift? An ability. A power. A skill, knowledge, sensitivity, perception. There is no limit to the list, for the sum of all the gifts is the father’s character, which, insofar is the father is a father, is infinite.
Since all gifts are abilities, and that means a personal ability which the father possessed before he could give it, then all true gifts are personal and to recieve a gift is to participate in the personhood of the giver. Yet each gift frees the son ever more to be himself, since his own personhood is bigger now, and not at all a reduplication of the father, but rather a variation on the father, subsuming all that the father is, and then more, because the gift in the son is now the father/son in the son.
Sex and Violence
I think it’s pretty clear that God made us to 1) enjoy our own spouses’ nakedness (but no-one else’s), and 2) be non-violent. The closer we can come to these primal conditions, the better. They are not unconnected, as it first appears, since both fidelity and peace are simply aspects of love. When Jesus changes the heart these expressions of love become more nearly natural to us. Otherwise, like all standards of behavior which do not carry grace, they make us despair.
Yes, sex and violence are connected in the all-embracing law of love but talk about them tends quickly to confusion, so let’s talk about them separately.
Sex: God draws bright lines. Inside marriage there is no restraint on full visual eros, but outside the nuptial bower He gives the gift of modesty, just as full. There is no biblical visual depiction of sex from the spectator’s point of view. (Contrast this with violence: there are many descriptions of violent acts, both just and unjust.) There are one phrase descriptions: “rape”, or “Adam knew his wife”. So sex was not made to be seen, from the outside. At all. (We might add that if you’re only watching, you’re falling short of the glory of God.)
In Orthodox iconography the the profile is the beginning of absence. The icon assumes a personal I-Thou relation between the viewer and the person(s) on the board. Likewise, God made the naked human form for an I-Thou moment. The female form is for the husband to look at. So in God’s visual vocabulary there are agnostic lacunae, and here is one of them. Sex is to be un-picturable. The two lovers look at each other, but no-one else looks at THEM. Why? For the same reason that hearing God’s voice is un-describable: the love is so pure the subject-object distinction breaks down — this is ecstacy — and in the midst of the act the perception of the beloved’s form is no longer distinguishable as a separate complex.
The Law of Moral Entropy
Secularist parents have an insufficient base for a theory of goodness so they tend to produce amoral but socially competent adults, who feel little guilt. (Whenever anyone offers the seemingly pregnant observation that religious people are plagued by guilt, my secret response is something like “duh.” Of course they do.)
By “amoral” I don’t mean they don’t act morally, but that they have no explicit moral theory. The best of these secular parents have only “kindness” as an organizing moral value for their children. They may call it other, more profound-seeming names, like “love”, but this kindness is just a residual glow of an ancient but dead Christian Agape. It comes out in practice something like “be nice when you can.”
My critic would wonder why this is not actually enough. Millions and millions of “good” people live their whole lives with no moral theory any more explicit than this, and they stay out of jail, get rich, and win Pulitzer Prizes.
Other than the obvious retort, that you can win a Pultizer Prize and be a horrendous person, there is a wider cultural reason it matters.
Virtues will live on in cultures long after their tap-roots have died. The Time Gap between the death of the root ideology and the virtue it engendered is another source of great deception.
Embarassment
Embarrassment is the sign that the Holy has been transgressed by an outsider. It is not something to be grown out of, but rather is a gift to the conscience, worth the whole world.
We must work to guard the child’s instinctual and congenital capacity to be embarrassed. In our television culture the damage starts before school age.
Why do we accept on a screen what we would be morally offended by in person? What if your neighbor came to your door and invited your child over to watch him and his wife have sex? Would you not call the police? Yet you think nothing if the television screen flashes an image of a man and woman in bed, as long their private parts are covered. Small children will naturally express embarrassment at even flirtatious banter between a man and woman, before the child even knows why he is embarrassed.
He does not know why he feels what he feels. How would he?
Let’s be honest: when a child is embarrassed (it’s usually over sex or even sexual tension) it is the manifestation of damage being done. The parent has a responsibility to act; the wise parent will regard that moment as a sign, not just as a moment having no particular meaning other than that the child is, well, easily embarrassed. Something is being touched that ought not be touched.
By the time most children are pubescent they are embarrassed to be embarrassed. This is horrendous. Embarrassment at embarrassment, and the adoption of the goal of overcoming embarrassment, is “cool”. Well, “cool” is synonymous with “dead”.
The more egregious thing is that parents are not bothered by this. They are not bothered because they themselves have lost all sense of what it was like to have this sacred personal realm, the realm of the PRECIOUS. The Precious Place is that place known only to you and to your lover. It is your bower, your holy of holies. Virginity is the traditional term for the physically normal state; “precious” is our term for the inner correlative to virginity.
The far side of the loss of embarrassment is the loss of the ability to experience love. As the promiscuous person moves from lover to lover the ability to feel love callouses over, which makes the person lonely, which leads to more promiscuity, and so on.
It is hard to miss what you’ve never experienced. If you don’t protect your child from sexual embarassment, you will rob him of precious things and he will never know it. Perhaps you are not aware of the precious realm, yourself.
The Narrative Arc of Fatherhood
The shape of the Bible’s narrative is the shape of the father’s job; the history of salvation is the natural history of the soul. The Word of God is descriptive meta-psychology as well as prescriptive Sacred Text. The soul is not a tabula rasa born into a random vortex of spinning particles. The individual recapitulates the race. We are Adam.
Each child will therefore recapitulate the stages of the race: Creation, Paradise, The Law of Creation, Temptation by the Image, Fall into the World, Privacy, Alienation, and Exile. The Propositional Law, the Good News, Charmed by Jesus, the Descent of the Spirit– and others I’m sure I haven’t thought of. There is a Plot.
This is the plot of every child’s life no matter whether he is born into a religious family or not. This plot has a descriptive, empirical validity for universal humanity. (One assumes the secular mind will rebel at this notion, of course. But the secular mind has no better alternative, and not for lack of trying. There are countless schemas in print for developmental child psychology. They are studied by academics and ignored by parents.)
The earthly father can therefore, on any given day, locate his child in this Plot and thus understand his job for that day. The tasks of fatherhood follow a clear pattern. They are not random.
This plot, like in any narrative, is cumulative. You cannot enter a play in act 2 and understand why the characters are doing what they are doing (well, no good play, that is.) So also, the child who misses the lesson of act 1 in his version of the Biblical Plot will suffer unnecessarily in act 2, because he will be missing the ground for act 2.
This is not to say that children are all the same. They are very different, but they are not SO different that they do not follow the Biblical Plot in their own idiosyncratic way. The father will adjust his tactics to the individual child, but the strategic outline is what it is.
The father is also not simply imposing a recipe on his child. The child is the one following the Plot, not the father. The father needs to listen and watch his child with the eyes and ears of agape to percieve each day where the child is in the Plot. The father is more like a gardener than a general, more like a director than a writer.
