my father's funeral oration
TRANSCRIPT
May the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart be
always acceptable in Thy sight, O Lord, my Strength and my
Redeemer. Amen.
Little boys like to discover how their bodies compare to their
fathers. They place small hands against large hands. Feel for
whiskers. See if the fingers of both their hands are able yet to
stretch around larger, gruffer, firmer arms. In his final days, I
felt very much like a little boy. Smoothing my fingers up and
down my father’s arms. Running my fingers across the scruff
of his face. Placing both of my hands around his, to help him
hold a small wooden cross, which he held his right hand.
Strength is probably the most universal of sons’ first
fascinations with their fathers. How they have so little. How
he has so much. “Let your hand be on the man of your right
hand, upon the Son of man whom you yourself made strong.” It
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is no accident that the history of infant Israel is so saturated
with spectacles of strength. Overthrowing Pharaohs.
Tumbling down walls. Slaying giants. But sons too grow
strong. And fathers forfeit strength. All according to time. And
character. Had my childish fascination with my father’s
strength persisted until the end, perhaps his feeble body,
suddenly vulnerable to the many cancers of a fallen world,
might have provoked my horror and anguish. Perhaps I would
have sought to shield him from all vulnerability, at any cost. Or
perhaps even shield myself from his vulnerability. But my
father dedicated his mature years to helping others, especially
men—whether as husbands or fathers or sons—to journey
into the heart of vulnerability, into disarmedness, into stillness.
My father knew of a strength and a courage far greater and far
stronger than that which fascinates a small child.
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My father died vulnerable, even to the point of touch.
Immobile. And robbed of language.
Over the 358 days of my father’s journey toward ultimate
stillness, my mother and sisters and I walked with him down a
path ever increasing submission. His arms withered. His gate
faltered. And the words of even his inner voice fell all but
silent. As a seemingly impervious existence continued ever on.
Just beyond his skin.
The day we told my father his prognosis, the sun was high and
warm, and a very gentle breeze failed to stir branches that
didn’t have any leaves. All that week the skies had been a cold
chalky gray, late snows fell, and for days the snows held on to
the north and south of everything. The nurse didn’t correct
him when he told her it was winter. It had only been spring a
week and from his window it hadn’t been very obvious what
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season it was. The skies cleared the day we told him. I was
angry the day was so beautiful.
For a year now I have been thinking much about the quiet of
the world. The everywhere quiet of hills, trees, stars, our
bodies. I am easily overcome. Sometimes while driving, I look
out at the quiet beauty of everything, and I want to stop the car
and walk out into the hills. Sometimes I do. My father was
always so amazed by stars and astronomy, how we can
perceive the light of stars that have long since passed. I haven’t
the foggiest, he’d always say.
My father had just that sort of strength that we see in the world
of our Creator’s creation. Over the years, downtrodden men
poured in and out of my father’s and mother’s home like blood
through a heart. My father employed them, loved them, often
provided for their material needs, well beyond wages, fathered
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them. Sometimes these men called my father The Captain.
When I came home from all of my many wherevers, these men
made me feel as though the prince of some great empire.
But I was a son who had very nearly grown into the stature of
his father. And the nearer I came to my father’s full form—in
strength, in knowledge—the more I searched elsewhere, for
other fathers, whom I felt far surpassed the great threshold
that, ever more narrowly, separated me from my father. There
were philosophers. Theologians. Novelists. Poets. Men whose
strength had little to do with the expanse of their bodies or the
gruffness of their faces. The more intently I sought after these
great men, for a time, the wider that grew a separation
between my father and me.
It is no accident that the first two Commandments of Moses
speak to the idolatrous eyes of self-fulfillment, that the first
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great sin of Adam and Eve was an act of self-nourishment, and
that the great sin of the Prodigal Son was not his wantonness
or his squandering, but his self-possession. When the Son
asked his Father for his share of inheritance, he asked his
father for his ousia, which not only means substance, but also
quite commonly means: Being. Ousia also means Being. The
Son desired to possess his own Being, to own himself, apart
from his Father, loosed of all relational bonds. But this, of
course, was not his nature. He was a Son. Of a Father. And
when husbands and wives share in the divine ecstasy of their
communion, never as individuals, but only ever as one, as a
Communion, life, Being, arises. We exist only in Communion.
Within the inescapable bonds of our mutuality.
This mutuality is the gift my father so generously bestowed.
On me. On many. And like a Prodigal, intent upon the
idolatries of my very many declarations of independence, and
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my likewise cries for ever new kings, to fight my wars, to
defend me from my enemies, I so often sought elsewhere.
Elsewhere than from whom I came. The gaze of my many
wishes fell upon many men, according to my many whims, and
in the flurry of such searching, each time, my gaze, ultimately,
turned upon itself. And I saw only: myself. My own desires.
But I did not know myself. Or my desires. Because I did not
know the person from whom I came.
St. Augustine once wrote: “And now regarding love, which the
apostle says is greater than the other two - that is, faith and
hope - for the more richly it dwells in a man, the better the man
in whom it dwells. For when we ask whether someone is a
good man, we are not asking what he believes, or hopes, but
what he loves.
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My father believed much. And, as evidenced by this Funeral
Mass, his beliefs changed through time. My father hoped much.
(I think for a time he hoped I’d really love air filters, and that
one day I’d take over his business. He saw half of this hope
come to fulfillment!) But my father loved me. He loved my
mother. He loved my sisters. He loved God. He loved justice.
Mercy. Compassion. Uprightness. Which only ever meant that
—actively—he loved justly, mercifully, compassionately, and
uprightly. In an age when so much of our talk is about ideals,
values, and beliefs, and goals, ambitions, and plans—THINGS—
my father was a prophetic example of the sublime quietude
and activity of Love. Which is the active manifestation of a
WHO. Not a WHAT. Show me the campaign of love. The
platform. The quarterly statement. The agenda. Love shows
itself. Love is it itself. Enacted. Incarnate.
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If Christ came not to be served but to serve, my father indeed
was a Christ to those who knew him. And he asked for no
reward. Sought no acclaim. He showed me, exemplified, the
meaning of servanthood, and compassion, and patience, and
gentleness; how justice in fact is mercy; how might, true might,
is love; how love is self-sacrifice, and how sacrifice is a gift not
to be spoken or conjectured, but shown. My father was my
image of the Incarnation. I came to Christ Incarnate through
the gentle shepherding, example, and love of my father.
My father once wrote: “Find the courage to face your personal
giants and you will find the Lord to be a kind and loving Father.
Be not afraid.”
Echoing St. Matthew, he also wrote: “Clean the inside of your
cup and the outside will be clean also.”
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I saw my father’s strength when he could no longer lift his
razor to his face and I asked him if he wanted me—whom he
had taught—to help him, and he said simply: Yes. The end of
my father’s life was the resounding Incarnate silence of a
Mother’s fiat. “Let it be done according to Your will.” He
avoided no trial. He left not a moment early. And through all
this he would kiss my lips upon all my comings and goings. He
would tell my mother to sit in front of him so that he could
massage her shoulders. He played with grandchildren as best
as his body and his mind allowed him. He fathered the sons in
whom my sisters saw his image. All the while giving over his
mind, his body, and eventually, his spirit.
When my father passed, I prepared two bowls of warm water,
a hot towel, a washcloth, a barber’s brush, and a razor. And I
gave him one final shave—perhaps the most iconic of skills a
son learns from a father. I gave him a closer shave than I had
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ever given him, or myself. I rubbed in a cool cream over
everywhere my razor had been. And then I sat a long while
beside him feeling his cooling skin. Sitting beside him,
recollecting his great loves, I saw, as Augustine said: a great
man. And the light of his soul shone even after his passing.
Like the celestial wonders that so captivated him.
I cried out for no king, sitting beside him, and no inheritance,
no image of another. Just him. And the Great Him welcoming
him home. And as my father showed me, as a man, as a son, the
Incarnate way to The Eternal Father, so, in my recollections of
my father’s lavish love, I see more clearly that Eternal Father
from whom Love’s lavishness always and ever is.
When I was an infant my father would lie down on the ground
and lay me upon his chest, listening to records of Cynthia
Clawson. I once did this with my sister’s son, James. We were
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down the hall, at Mercy Hospital, during my father’s rehab after
surgery. I didn’t have any vinyls of Cynthia so I sang to him
Twinkle, Twinkle, Litter Star over and over, until I finally was
whispering the words and James was sleeping. For nearly a
whole half hour he slept right there on my chest. That was a
first for me. I was very aware of my breathing, trying to make
sure that I didn’t make too much noise, and that the rise and
fall of my chest kept a constant rhythm. I did pretty well, but
after half an hour he woke up. He couldn’t see Rebekah
anywhere and so he cried out for her with that little cry of his.
That half hour was remarkable. So much vulnerability. And so
narrowly and particularly located. Between my belt and chin.
Just sleeping. Trusting.
The quiet acceptance of an infant receiving his father’s chest, of
a baby her mother’s breast, this is the stuff faith is made of.
Not rubrics and doctrines and history’s many and lovely
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eloquences. Just trusting nourishment. From the Giver of
one’s being. Of all Being. This is the justice my father showed
me. The truth. The hope he had inside him, of which he was
ever ready to make proclamation. Like the infant son he
himself once was, again he rests, alive, upon the breast of his
Eternal Father. Immortal. Invisible. And we, those whom my
father touched, nurtured, guided, befriended, we stand now
beholding the brilliance of a star that has passed, but whose
light still reaches our eyes. Is not consumed by darkness.
Behold. I saw a new heaven and a new earth. The former
heaven and the former earth had passed away, and the sea was
no more. I saw also the holy city, a new Jerusalem, coming
down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for
her husband. I heard a loud voice from the throne saying,
“Behold, God's dwelling is with Man. He will dwell with them
and they will be his people, and God himself, always, will be
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with them, as their God. He will wipe every tear from their
eyes, and there shall be no more death or mourning, wailing or
pain, for the old order has passed away.” “Behold, I make all
things new.” “IT. IS. ACCOMPLISHED. I AM. The Alpha and the
Omega. The beginning and the end. To the thirsty I will give a
gift from the spring of life-giving water. The victor will inherit
these gifts. And I shall be his God. And he will be my son.”
Amen.
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