A Father's Day Conversation

Last year was my first Father's Day after my father passed away. Later that week, a friend delicately asked how my Father's Day had been. An awkward pause ensued as I considered how best to answer her question.

You see, my first Father's Day without my dad was, to be entirely and brutally honest, a lot like every other day except that I realized that I didn't have anyone to call. I wondered how my mom was holding up - and how my Wise and Wonderful Sister was holding up our mother as they spent the day together, but I didn't experience the feelings expressed by friends on Facebook who posted poems and tributes to deceased fathers expressing an intense longing to hug them again or an eager anticipation of reuniting in Heaven.

The thing about my dad is that over the years, he read a lot, he talked a lot, he philosophized a lot, he quoted theologians and writers a lot. He didn't gush or pamper a lot. He lived ten hours away and for health reasons, rarely visited. We had great phone conversations every now and then, if my mom didn't get to the phone first.  Our conversations, however, were few and far between. So as shameful as it seems to admit, Father's Day ran pretty much like any other Sunday. My eyes remained dry, my greatest turmoil the realization that I didn't feel like a daughter ought to feel on her first fatherless Father's Day.

My sister has said that our dad raised us to grow up and do our thing. (Something like that, but more eloquent). The point was, he taught us to function as adults. More than that, he taught us to see beyond the visible; to cherish the invisible; in essence, to be the creatures of eternity of which C.S. Lewis speaks when he says, "Humans are amphibians - half spirit and half animal. As spirits they belong to the eternal world, but as animals they inhabit time."

My father surrounded us with books and immersed us in Lewis and Tolkien and other writers of epic tales. He quoted Calvin, Wesley, and countless theologians as if he were intimate friends with them.  Somewhere along the way, he pulled his children into the Great Conversation and passed on to us a vision of the eternal, a vision that understands that Death is not the end, but simply the doorway through which we enter a deeper conversation. I'm especially thankful for that today.

I'm not sure how biblical the idea is, but it would not surprise me to learn that my father is sitting up in heaven engaged in contemplative discussion with a few of his theological mentors. I expect, in one way or another, he is carrying on the Great Conversation with other enlightened souls. 

My dad raised us on epic stories and visions of eternity. When I think of him introducing Aslan and contemplating Calvin... when I think that he carries on just as he always did, but better, wiser, and purer...  when I see him and myself and every single one of us as characters in an epic tale of redemption, then I feel most keenly the conflict between Time and Eternity, and well, that can be a matter worth tears.

Yet as I remember on this Father's Day both my father and others who have left us to struggle here in Time, I turn to a beautiful quote from one of my father's favorite authors, J.R.R. Tolkien:

"I will not say, do not weep, for not all tears are an evil."