April 6, 2018 at 1:53 p.m.
U.S. SOCIETY
America needs a father
To be human is to be insecure. The struggles of everyday life prove it, from ordinary annoyances to the gnawing ache caused by profound hurts.
In the best of all worlds, the word "father" means protector, provider, just but merciful leader, moral guide, educator, confidant and wise counselor, a secure passage to adulthood. Think of a toddler sleeping on his father's shoulder.
Even the best fathers will in some way disappoint us -- and that's not counting the self-absorbed, abusive and absentee fathers. We as fathers are also bound to disappoint, despite our best intentions. To be human is to be incomplete and flawed. Wounded and wounding, we can't be father to ourselves.
"Fatherlessness is the most harmful demographic trend of this generation," writes David Blankenhorn in his 1995 book, "Fatherless America." Even then, as he noted, 40 percent of children went to bed without their father living with them.
Fatherlessness "is the leading cause of declining child well-being in our society," the author wrote. "It is the engine driving our most urgent social problems, from crime to adolescent pregnancy to child abuse to domestic violence against women."
If personal fatherlessness weren't bad enough, I believe we as a people are feeling fatherless. Our faith in the father figures of our society is often shaky. Our economy is tottering. We are uncertain about our nation's future.
We have put our trust -- often naively -- in government to provide for us, to make us safe from anything bad. Politicians oblige: They run us deeper in debt, mortgage our future, write laws to protect us from bad things.
Bad things keep happening so fast that regulations can't be written quickly enough to keep up. But if we continue to pile up laws to cover every possible danger, won't we wake up one day in a gulag?
"Bad news makes good press" is an old dictum in the news business, and we get plenty of bad news. Sex scandals, poor performance and swindles besmirch so many in public life. There's a chorus of voices offering conflicting solutions. Who or what can one trust?
Many of us have worked hard for employers, enduring stress and extra hours, sometimes at the expense of family life -- and then have been let go. We realize that employment is just an economic arrangement, but we still feel like jilted lovers -- and we're jobless.
Sometimes the nexus of personal and societal anguish can be so great that we can suffer deep down what American novelist Thomas Wolfe wrote about: "America has a thousand lights and weathers, and we walk, we walk the streets, we walk the streets of life alone."
Mircea Eliade, a historian and student of religion, noted that in primitive polytheistic religions, the father god, the creator, often faded into the background before lesser gods that were supplicated to meet practical, everyday needs. But when the community was in peril, it again beseeched the father.
False fathers may arise when a nation is in great distress -- such as Germany's Adolf Hitler and Russia's Vladimir Lenin and his successor, Joseph Stalin -- causing millions to perish.
I am convinced that our nation's present sorrows will lift when we learn from Jesus' parable of the prodigal son (Luke 15:11-32), a story about God, us and forgiveness. The prodigal son returned home broken in spirit, having looked for happiness in all the wrong places. He was now willing to be a mere servant in his father's house.
You can imagine how he felt when this happened: "But while he [the son] was still a long way off, his father saw him and was filled with compassion for him; he ran to his son, threw his arms around him and kissed him.
"The father said to his servants, 'Quick! Bring the best robe and put it on him. Put a ring on his finger and sandals on his feet. Bring the fattened calf and kill it. Let's have a feast and celebrate. For this son of mine was dead and is alive again; he was lost and is found.'"
(A former journalist and publicist, Mr. Retzlaff attends Our Lady Queen of Peace parish in Schenectady.)[[In-content Ad]]
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