Today is the first post this weekend that I would like to devote to Father’s Day. As my thoughts about the subject of Father’s Day are somewhat gloomy and often deeply conflicted, I cannot imagine my posts on the subject will be short. Today, after finishing reading a book about sports rivalries (sports, along with battlefields, were an interest I happened to share with my father), I started reading a book for Father’s Day reading on the subject of godly masculinity (review forthcoming) and so far I am about halfway through it. Reading the book reminded me of a few of the reasons why Father’s Day, and the memory of my own father, are so complicated. So, without any futher ado, let us begin with one aspect of Father’s Day that I find particularly troublesome.

A lot of my friends on Facebook are putting up photos of their fathers, or of them with their fathers. I don’t happen to have any digital photos of my father (who died more than seven years ago), so I cannot share them with my friends. I really don’t need to, though, because I see my father every time that I look in the mirror. True, my father was more heavyset than I am, and I have more freckles than he does and nerdier glasses, and a slightly better fashion sense (no polyester leisure suits for me), but between the generally pale skin, ruddy complexion, and balding blond hair, I’m the spitting image of my father, and that’s not something I really like. Although this fact greatly avoided any ugly disputes about my paternity (there was never any doubt that I was my father’s child), I don’t really like looking like my father and being reminded of him every time I look in the mirror.

Nor am I the only person who sees the image of my father in me. In 2007, the year after my father died, I went to Pennsylvania for the funeral of my paternal grandmother, who happened to outlive all of her ill-starred children, and while I was sitting in the front row at the memorial service, I heard a total stranger behind me call out, “That’s Johnny’s boy.” Yes, she was right. A total stranger, who had never seen me before in her life, could recognize whose son I was. There’s no running or hiding from that kind of family resemblance, as anyone who knew my father would be able to see the father in the son, and even if some children would greatly enjoy the fact that the image of their father lived on in their own lives, I must say that it brings me a great deal of discomfort and frustration.

After all, the similarities between my father and I go more than skin deep. In describing my father, the three things that come to mind the most about him is that he was a dutiful and responsible person who sought to do the right thing, even when it really hurt, that he was an immensely sociable person with a loud voice and biting sense of humor that was nonetheless a difficult person to know well because of the third thing, that he was an immensely emotionally distant person who was not open or candid about matters of the heart at all. And, of course, it is even worse that people think that I am describing myself, which is precisely the point. Despite the fact that my father and I were never particularly close, because of our shared pain of childhood and our immensely awkward natures, our similarities were so immense it was impossible for us to avoid recognize the fact that we were kindred spirits in a combination of shared commitment to virtue as well as deep and immense scars and immense frustrations with relationships.

And that is why the book on godly masculinity has proven to be so painful. My father, at the age of eighteen, knew already that he was ill-equipped to handle the emotional needs of women, and preferred the company of sweet and undemanding animals like the cattle on the family dairy farm. During his mid-30’s, he was particularly pressured by others to marry and start a family, despite being ill-suited and not particularly emotionally well-developed. It did not turn out well. I figured for myself, that being a person of more openness and sensitivity to the feelings and concerns of others, as well as more powerful and more obvious longing for love and relationships, that it would not be a difficult matter for me to have found marriage before my father did, as well as find more success in the state, but the first does not appear particularly likely, and the second may be equally uncertain. Even though my own pressure comes mostly from within, from my own longings, and my the pressure for my father came outside with people saying that he was not doing his duty as a single man, the pressure and frustration is the same, and I feel like an immense failure to resemble my father in any way that involves relationships and marriage.

Now, I am not an impartial witness when it comes to judging the extent to which I demonstrate the image and likeness of my Heavenly Father in my own life, but I will say that the aspects of His Nature that I can relate to the most obviously are the most painful aspects, like the longsuffering and the love and desire for well-being of those who are hurtful and who reject me. Perhaps someday, even though I am not a particularly sanguine soul, I can see the more pleasant and enjoyable aspects of that nature in my own life. For the moment, though, I cannot think about fatherhood, whether my own solitude and isolation from the state or from my reflections on my own father, with any sense of pleasure. That is not to say that I would wish to be exactly the opposite of my father, if that were even possible given my own awkwardness and profound sense of duty and responsibility, but rather that even with the good, and even with the knowledge of my duty, as painful as it is, to honor my father (a task I feel woefully unprepared for, and one that I am not sure that I manage to do well at all), I still cannot think anything about Father’s Day or my father without feeling a great sense of sorrow, loss, and frustration. I mourn for my father, and for the life he lived, and mourn for myself in that I can relate to it all too well, and for all the other people I know who can mourn for themselves as well.