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Two Letters and a Phone Call

 

My understanding of “father” is threefold: my heavenly Father, my social father(s) and my biological father. Each sense of “father” is different and my relationship to them varies accordingly.
I found out about my heavenly Father at an early age. As heavenly Father, God called me to faithfully live up to and obey His commands. To do this, I was not alone: Jesus Christ was both immanently possible—in the heart of faith—and transcendently real—in heaven with our Father, and ready to help. Praying to him was a means whereby problems could be solved and through which an “answer” would always be given to my questions.
As a child, I asked my heavenly Father for intervention in situations that ranged from the trivial (helping find a lost marble) to life crises (helping me to not wet my bed). If “answers” to my prayers were favourable, I knew that my heavenly Father and I were on good terms; when they were not, I thought that maybe I was to blame. When I grew up, I eventually heard my heavenly Father say, “Relax, rest. Don’t torture yourself—I’m not looking over your shoulder to condemn you; I’m here to help you because I love you.”

My social fathers fulfilled a quite different function. Where my heavenly Father lived in my faith-imagination and beyond the limits of the universe, my social fathers were as real and as proximate as my next-door neighbour. They were father figures, who modelled heavenly values, such as the need to stay the course even when things go wrong, to stand up for what I believed in, and to support rugby!
Social fathers were there to take me to church picnics, concerts and sport spectacles; for playing, for sharing a joke and getting through life’s rituals. My grandfather was one such social father; he was capable of doing anything and everything. He could build homes and boats, take engines apart (and put them together again). I looked to him for strength, for protection, for wisdom. My Uncle Dave was another social father who helped me make sense of the world, who explained the deep mysteries of ancient cultures, modern politics, art and music. His facility at the latter opened my imagination and changed my life. My friend, Peter, was a social father who made anything seem possible and who gave me such self-belief that I have never recovered!

But I know my biological father only through two letters and a single phone call. We have never met; I have never seen him in a photo or in the flesh. When and where was he born? I don’t know. What are his favourite colours, authors and hobbies? I have no clue.Is he still alive? I wouldn’t know. He lives in me only by the sound of his voice at the end of a phone line—“How are you, son?”—and in between the lines of two short letters addressed to “My dear Son” (the first in 1970, the second in 1996). These are slim threads upon which to make the claim: I know my biological father. But they’re enough. I suppose I could just as well make the claim that I don’t know him at all; both would be true. But it doesn’t matter. My life has been lived without a full relationship with him, and I have had to grin and bear it. Like millions of others, it’s my lot to have a little hole in my heart where “Dad” should be.

And father-less-ness is probably increasing as the ravages of poverty, war, disease, separation and divorce throw families into the chaos of erecting new and different lives in hostile camps. Statistics for single-mother households do not tell how many of the world’s children are actually fatherless. And then there are many who live in the presence of their biological fathers, but who feel orphaned by a lack of knowledge and intimacy. Violence, anger, abuse, betrayal and bitterness have destroyed their relationship.

Whatever your circumstance, if you share father-less-ness with me, thank God—your heavenly Father—that you can still be a social father to the fatherless. Comfort them in their moments of isolation when, like Jesus on the cross, they cry out, “My God, why have you forsaken me?”

But also teach them, like the apostle Paul, to call “Abba [Daddy] Father, if he is for me, who can stand against me?” And encourage them to read two letters—the Old and New Testaments—and to listen to His voice on that phone line from heaven we call prayer.

 

 

Extract from Signs of the Times, October 2004.

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