Fathers and Sons

Some time back a friend and I canoed a portion of the Buffalo in the Boston Mountains of Arkansas. One of the few remaining rivers in the lower 48 without dams, it snakes its way through the wilderness, buffeted on its sides by massive vertical limestone bluffs.  Riding atop its waters is like something out of an epic tale – The Mission, maybe, or Lord of the Rings, with its strong currents, its green-and-blue glass-water pools, its quick turns and deep forests flanking its beaches.  It’s a compelling beauty.

Usually.

We chose to go on this particular day because the waters were up, and the trip promised to be more demanding of us.  We would barter leisure for the adventure of stronger currents and swifter waters – an opportunity for us to roll up our sleeves and be challenged a bit against the claim the Buffalo has on this land.  Sometimes we need to be overtaken by beauty, to let it reach us and fill us with wonder and awe.  And there are other times when we need to struggle and subdue physically as a way, perhaps, to wrestle with and prevail over something within.  Passivity.  Comfort. Safety.  Ennui.  Indifference. Dispassion.

We had checked the weather before we left.  It would not be a hot day, or a sunny one, but overcast.  A front was moving in, but was still far enough away that we felt like we could beat the thunderstorm coming on its heels.

We were wrong.

Very wrong.

In fact, we were barely a mile into our 9-mile excursion when the rain came.  It was at first almost nice, refreshing.  But within the hour the heavens opened and we found ourselves in a monsoon, at times so thick we could barely see in front of us.  The blast of thunder reverberated and replied against the bluffs and cliffs.  Other canoers had beached and were waiting it out under canopies and cliffs, but we continued on.  Paddling hard, strategizing our way on the rougher waters as well as we could in limited visibility, we finished the course in just over two hours, cold and soaked to the bone, battered by the wind and rain, racked with aching and tired muscles, and feeling very much alive. We couldn’t have been happier with our journey.  Something in us felt… stronger.  I think you could say we felt honored, even, to have had the chance to battle with the wilds of the river and weather.  And to be defeated by it.

And I knew that this is so much what God is up to in our lives.   This is what He had planned for us that day, to be tested and called out of our safety and comfort into the wilds of His passion and life.  To come alive as men.

Robert W. Service in his poem Law of the Yukon gave voice to the Canadian wilderness, to its demand of those who would brave its earth and rock.

This is the law of the Yukon, and ever she makes it plain:
“Send not your foolish and feeble; send me your strong and your sane —
Strong for the red rage of battle; sane for I harry them sore;
Send me men girt for the combat, men who are grit to the core;
Swift as the panther in triumph, fierce as the bear in defeat,
Sired of a bulldog parent, steeled in the furnace heat…

Them will I take to my bosom, them will I call my sons;
Them will I gild with my treasure, them will I glut with my meat…

The same could be said of the Father’s intention for his sons and for his daughters. When Job speaks of this in 23:10, he says “when he has tested me, I will come forth as gold.”  In other words, God will prove him true.  It was what God was about in Job’s life, and it is what He is doing in our own: giving us the dignity and honor of a place with Him.  He knows who we are, and who we are to become, and He is ruthless in bringing that out in us.  We will, indeed, come forth as gold.

It was over soda the evening of the trip that I asked another friend, “What would you do if men that you loved and respected showed up at your door one day and said, ‘Get your clothes packed and come with us.  We have something planned for you,’ and then they just turned and waited for you. You had no idea where you were going, but you trusted these men.  You went with them to find out that they had planned something very specific for your training and for your initiation.  You didn’t pay for it; it wasn’t like going to a retreat where others were receiving the same thing.  It was for you.  You knew for certain that their only motive was one of belief and anticipation and gut-level courage; believe in who you are and are to become, anticipation to see it fulfilled, and the guts to pursue your heart and speak into your life with theirs to make it happen.  What would you do with that?”

Because, you see, that is a picture of fathering, of invitation into manhood, of a fellowship born not only out of nurturing friendships as brothers, but also look-you-in-the-eyes recognition of your truer name and identity by those in some way gifted with the wisdom and sacrificial love to help take you there, by fathers.

We live so much in a fatherless culture, and so this sounds foreign to our ears, strange even.¹ The mystery of initiation is something the systems of this world, in cooperation with and under the influence of the Evil One, has all but destroyed.  But it is needed… at any age.  10. 14.  25.  36.  49.  62.  77.  91.  We need to be fathered like this, and we need to know what this means.  How, if we do not experience fathering, can we know who a father is to be, and if we do not know who a father is to be – our Father – then how are we to know who we are to be as sons and daughters?  The entire rich tradition of father-son language and expression in the entire Bible becomes, then, cute, cuddly, nice, a happy illustration in a Sunday sermon.  It remains only a metaphor, but never becomes reality.

Nothing that Jesus ever said was or is to remain a metaphor.  “Heal the lame,” he preached – and then He did it.  “I am the Son of God,” he proclaimed – and he was born of his Father’s life into a woman.  “Seek me, and I will show you great and unsearchable things that you do not know.” And then He does.  In Him, all things exist, as rock-hard reality.

I think the Father is up to this more than we may realize in our lives, this very intentional and pseudo-self-destroying, poser-shattering pursuit, this look-you-in-the-eye engagement in which He refuses to treat us as anything less than His sons and daughters– children that are less and less still suckling the breast and more and more tearing the meat off the bone, who less and less crawl and wriggle and more and more stand tall, walk upright, and run without growing weary, who less and less demand and pout but more and more gather our growing strength to work alongside our Father and enjoy with Him the fruits of our labor.  Men and women girt for combat and grit to the core. We are growing to inherit this Kingdom, where all is ordered by Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, and where life to the full – the lush greens of the field, our lungs bursting with free air and the fresh fruits bursting from the vine, and the laughter and joy of shared intimacy and the adventure of it all beyond our wildest imaginings – is ours not by right but by spoils, by victory, and the winning of this life by battle has made it all the more glorious because now we know beyond any and all shadow of doubt how great is the love the Father has lavished on us, that we should be called sons and daughters of God (1 John 3:1).

And I think that as we grow up in Him we are to turn toward one another and offer the same invitation – not an invitation to simply repeat a prayer or to walk the aisle and confess your sin through shameful tears, but an invitation to become, to become the men and women we have been destined to become, won for us through Jesus.  Beyond solely repentance (important though that is) into genuine, steady growth by the disciplines of a loving Father (Prov 3:12) and by others maturing in their journeys to the point that they can offer to the less mature something of wisdom and counsel and, believing enough in the treasure that Jesus came to rescue and free, able to recognize the weight of love and desire and delight the Father has for His sons and daughters (Prov 6:20) and go after others’ hearts in this way – seek them out, pursue them, give themselves for others as Jesus does and lead them into.

I think the Father is raising us up into that – fathering us and teaching us to naturally father others. We are not alone, for certainly He is our teacher in it all.  And He is also our example.  This is what it means to love, because He loved us this way (1 John 4:19).  And this is how we know what it is to be brothers as well as fathers, brothers who stand shoulder-to-shoulder on the journey and back-to-back in the battle (Heb. 2:17).

“Religion that God our Father accepts as pure and faultless,” says James, is “to look after orphans and widows” (1:27), those left after fathers and husbands have gone. Those remaining after fathers and husbands have been taken out through war and disease and the cancers of this world. My friends, that describes us all. We are all in need of those who can lead us to become fathers and husbands again.  If we are to practice the “pure religion” that God recognizes as right and if we are to grow to become men and women ourselves, friends of God for whom He can entrust the keys of the Kingdom, we need to be led there.

It is for hope of this that we remain authentic with and true before God (1 John 3:3).

In The Man Watching, Russian poet Rainer Maria Rilke wrote,

What we choose to fight is so tiny!
What fights us is so great!
If only we would let ourselves be dominated
as things do by some immense storm,
we would become strong too, and not need names…

When we win it’s with small things,
and the triumph itself makes us small.
What is extraordinary and eternal
does not want to be bent by us…

This is how he grows: by being defeated, decisively,
by constantly greater beings.

That day on the river God was out to decisively defeat us, and we came away “proud and strengthened and great from that harsh hand,” as Rilke goes on to say.

The Father is raising us as sons.  “Endure hardship as discipline; God is treating you as sons… Therefore, strengthen your feeble arms and weak knees. ‘Make level paths for your feet,’ so that the lame may not be disabled, but rather healed.” -Hebrews 12:7, 12-13

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¹In “Healing the Masculine Soul,” Gordon Dalbey tells the story of a common initiation rite for a boy living in Nigeria.  To our mostly Western ears it sounds uncivilized, something our advanced culture has moved beyond.  But notice the efforts of nearly every religious group to in some way offer what was missed through initiation – the process of growing up.  Learning from a father what it means to be a father has been replaced by books full of parenting tips.  How we “do” the spiritual life, too, has largely been cataloged and chronicled as a set of steps and procedures, mainly because we have so few who can leadus by experience, example, and wisdom. We have few fathers.  Biblical stories will only make sense if we see them as one generation passing down something crucial to the next, an older to a younger, even (and especially) God to his friends, to those He wants to relate to face-to-face.

Here is the account from Dalbey:

“In the rural village where the son lived, the father, who often has several wives, lives by himself in his own hut, while his wives each have their own hut nearby. A boy lives with his mother until he reaches the proper age, usually about eleven. Then, one evening the village elders and the boy’s father appear outside the mother’s hut, together with a drummer and a man wearing a large mask over his head. The word for ‘mask’ is the same as that for ‘spirit”; so as the masked man steps out first from among the men both to call the boy out and to usher him from the mother to the men, the spiritual dimension of manhood is understood from the outset as primary and essential.

At the signal of a sharp drumbeat, the mask/spirit approaches the mother’s door, dancing and shouting, “Come out! Come out! After several retreats and then thrusting forth to announce his presence and intention, the mask/spirit rushes the mother’s door and beats upon it loudly: Bam! Bam! Bam! “Come out! Son of our people, come out!”

Eventually – perhaps after two or three such “approaches” by the mask/spirit – the mother opens the door tentatively, shielding her son behind her. At this the elders and the father join in the chant: “Come out, son of our people, come out!” Significantly, the mask/spirit does not enter the mother’s hut to seize the boy, but rather waits for him to step out on his own from behind his mother. Louder the elders chant, sharper the drum beats sound, more feverishly the mask/spirit dances, and more firmly the mother protests – until finally, she steps aside. It is the moment of truth for every boy in the village.

Standing there before the threshold of his mothers’ house, he hesitates. Beside and behind him holds all that is tender and reassuring and known and secure. Before him, and within him, cries out all that is mysterious and sharp, and true. “Come out!” the men shout. Hesitantly, wanting but not daring to look at his mother, the boy steps forth from the dark womb of his mother’s hut into the outside – born again, this time the child of the father. At once the mask/spirit seizes his wrist and rushes him over to the father and the elders – lest in his fear he have second thoughts – where he is joined with the other boys called out for that year’s initiation. Behind him, a wail of mourning breaks forth from his mother; the men around him burst into a victory shout. The drummer picks up the sharp and decisive beat, and the group moves on to the next boy’s hut. Once gathered, the group of boys is led out of the village to a special place in the forest, where they are instructed for the next two weeks. Manly skills from thatch roof construction to hunting are taught first. Then the boy enters into a period of fasting for several days, thus turning the focus from physical satisfaction to spiritual discipline. During this time, the boy is circumcised and while he is healing, taught clan history. Upon returning from the wilderness ordeal, the boy is regarded as a young man; when he enters the village, his mother is not permitted to greet him. He proceeds directly to his own house, separate from his mother’s; that evening he receives from his father a gun, a piece of farmland, and a hoe – his stake with which to establish his manhood in the clan” (p 51-52)