KNOW YOUR FAMILY TREE

'Andy could not have understood his father until he had understood his grandfather.'

Wendell Berry, Marce Catlett, p.110.

THE FATHER LOVE OF GOD

'At the heart of the madness of the gospel is an almost unbelievable mystery that speaks to a deep human hunger only intensified by a generation of broken homes: to be seen and known and loved by a father. Maybe navigating the tragedy and heartbreak of this fallen world is realizing this hunger might not be met by the ones we expect or hope will come looking for us, but then meeting a Father who adopts you, who chooses you, who sees you a long way off and comes running and says "I've been waiting for you."' 

James KA Smith, On the Road with Saint Augustine, p.201. 

WHEN A FATHER CRIES

'It was the first time I saw my father cry. A childhood milestone, when another's tears are more unbearable than one's own.'

Philip Roth, The Plot Against America, p.113.

GOD AS FATHER

'Is the idea of God an infantile prolongation of our ideal father image, or is our receptivity to the child-father idea the result of our more profound and primary relationship with God? Indeed the basic criticism of Freud proposed by the German psychiatrist Binswanger is a reversal: God is not the prolongation of the child's relationship with his dad, but the child's feeling for his dad is a concretizing of an idea born of his more fundamental relation to his Creator. In others words, we couldn't love our father if God had not loved us first.'

Henri JM Nouwen, Intimacy, p.11. 

BEING A MAN TODAY

'...what men are for. Do they serve any useful function these days? They impregnate the woman. Later, they might occasionally send money over. What else could fathers be? It wasn't a question Dad had to ask himself. Being a father wasn't a question then. He was there to impose himself, to guide, to exert discipline, and enjoy his children. We had to appreciate who he was, and see things as he did. If we grew up to be like him, only better qualified, we would be lucky.' 

Hanif Kureishi, Intimacy, p.115. 

FATHER & SONS

"...Mighty hard to get a boy to come to it right under his daddy's hand. I don'y know why."...

"Well," Mat says, "I do know why. By the time a boy gets big enough to work, his daddy's already been his boss for a long time, and not always an easy one. They've already pretty well-tested each other, and know each other's weaknesses and flaws. There are a lot of old irritations all ready-made. And then a man teaching his own boy gets misled by pride. What he does wrong looks like your failure as much as it is his, and so you don't correct or punish for his sake, but yours. The way around it....is to let him work with somebody older than he is....that you know he admires.'

Wendell Berry, A Place on Earth, p.177.

DEATH OF A PARENT

'I have often thought that the death of a parent is the one misfortune for which there is no compensation. Even when circumstances don't compound it. Even when others who love the child move quickly and smoothly to guard it and care for it. There is not any wisdom to be gained from the death of a parent. There are no memories of the parent that are not rendered painful by the death, no event surrounding the death that is redeemed by a single happy thought.'  

Jane Smiley, A Thousand Acres, p.292. 

FORGIVENESS

'It was a truly a dreadful thing he was doing, leaving his father to die without him. It was the kind of thing only his father would forgive him for.' 

Marilynne Robinson, Gilead, p.274. 

LIFE

'He sat on the edge of his bed, already exhausted before the journey had even begun. What he would have liked, what he dreamed of, was some elixir, some magical, brightly colored pill that would put the spring back into his step, the gleam in his eye, the joy of life in his heart. He took quantities of pills, but they had made no difference in the way he felt. It seemed that he had been tired for years. "Before you go, dear," his wife called from downstairs, "would you see if you can do something about the kitchen drain?" This reasonable request reminded him of the variety of his responsibilities. He had taken them all on willingly, but his willingness had not produced, as he somehow had thought it might, corresponding stores of energy. Three children in college, the interest and amortization on a twenty-five-thousand-dollar mortgage, an insecure position in business, a loving and impractical wife, a balky heating plant, a leaky roof, a car that needed repairs, a lawn choked with quack grass, a driveway with weeds, and three dying elms on the front lawn seemed, along with the stopped drain, to excite his discouragement. He had taken care of himself for most of his life. He had supported his old parents and indigent relations, raised his family, greased the sump pump, balanced the checkbook, filed the income tax, assuming that an increase in responsibility would develop an increase in confidence, but what he seemed to have developed instead was some spiritual or emotional curvature, like a hod carrier's back. Sitting on the edge of his bed, he realized that what he wanted was someone who would take care of him.'

John Cheever, Journals, p.178.

FATHERHOOD

'...my father, my flesh and blood, my future and my doom. I knew that when I was grown I would be something like him; I would have to plan my campaigns within his limitations.'

John Cheever, 'Reunion' in Collected Stories, p.665.

FATHERHOOD

'When a father washes diapers and performs some other mean task for his child, and someone ridicules him as an effeminate fool, God with all his angels and creatures is smiling.'

Martin Luther in Nancy Pearcey, Total Truth, p.329.

FATHERHOOD

'And in that moment Sherman made the terrible discovery that men make about their fathers sooner or later. For the first time he realized that the man before him was not an aging father but a boy, a boy much like himself, a boy who grew up and had a child of his own and, as best he could, out of a sense of duty and, perhaps love, adopted a role called Being a Father so that his child would have something mythical and infinitely important: a Protector, who would keep a lid on all the chaotic and catastrophic possibilities of life. And now that boy, that good actor, had grown old and fragile and tired, wearier than ever at the thought of trying to hoist the Protector's armour back onto his shoulders, now, so far down the line.'

Tom Wolfe, The Bonfire of the Vanities, p.481.

BEAUTIFUL WORDS

'...the most beautiful words ever written or said: His Father, when he saw him coming, ran to meet him.'

Tobias Wolff, Old School, p.195.