Never before have there been so many fatherless families in society. Some 37 percent of the children in the United States don't live with their fathers. One observation is that what is being lost is the very ideal of fatherhood. ^{See David Blankenhorn, Fatherless America: Confronting Our Most Urgent Social Problem (New York: BasicBooks, 1995).} As sobering as this observation is, it also points to finding an answer: a more spiritual understanding of fatherhood—a spiritual ideal that can never be lost. In this second part of a series on this topic, the Sentinel offers comments from three fathers in varied situations, who talk frankly about their reliance on God in fathering. Part one, "Fatherhood and standing up to the false male image," can be found in the June 19 Sentinel.

"Being there" ...

From an interview with Channing Walker of Glendora, California, a father of three children, seven, ten, and twelve years old.

Five or six years ago I was doing some speaking tours for my church. My oldest son was then about six. And each time I'd go on the road for a few days, I'd have a talk with him. It always went pretty much the same.

"I have to go away for a few days to talk to some people."

"Oh really, Dad? Well, what are you going to talk about?"

"God."

"OK, I'll see you when you get back, Dad."

The next time I went on the road, we had the same conversation. And the next. And the next. And after three or four or five times, he finally blew up. He said, "You already talked to the people about God! How many times do you have to talk to them about God?!" When he put it that way, I had to stop and listen. From his point of view, Dad was going away too much.

A primary demand in fathering is to be there. And the spiritual truth that underpins this demand is the ever-presence of Father-Mother God, divine Love. As we understand something of this unwavering presence of God, we can better express it for our kids. So in my case, expressing divine Love's ever-presence meant reordering my days so I was around more often. Having taken that stand, I saw that it couldn't possibly result in any penalty to me or to the people that I would have talked to. Good simply does not conflict with good. The desire to be a good dad and the desire to do a good job in one's other responsibilities don't really conflict. I think we make a big mistake when we believe that there has to be a loser in an equation like that.

I was thinking of something Christ Jesus once said, right before he raised Lazarus from the dead: "Father, I thank thee that thou hast heard me. And I knew that thou hearest me always" (John 11:41, 42). Well, why would the Father hear him always? Because the Father was always there for him. That spiritual oneness of our Father, God, and His Son is our model.

I know it sounds amazingly naive now, but when I first became a dad, I was a bit surprised to find out that kids don't simply fit into the open spaces in your life, that a total overhaul of your approach to life has to take place. But God's law supports this. I sometimes go back to that line in the hymn that says, "Love's work and Love must fit" (Christian Science Hymnal, No. 51).

Look at the Ten Commandments. We can remind ourselves, this is God's own law, and then look at how much it relates to family—to the children honoring the parents, and to parents being true to one another, and to not coveting anything outside the marriage. This wonderful law is a firm foundation on which to build strong relationships with our spouse and kids.

I think maybe we need to do some rethinking about what roles are the most important to play in society. For instance, just as in churches we need more "pillars," in families it's shepherds that are so essential. I think if we're willing to break down resistance to these kinds of roles in the areas of society that we inhabit, maybe that will in some way make it easier for a young man in the inner city to break through the resistance he may feel to shepherding his children, to being there for them in a steady way. The spiritual fact is that steadiness is divinely natural to all of us.

Recently our church held a dinner for runaway teens in connection with a Salvation Army drop-in center. After dinner, I was talking to a teenage dad whose girlfriend had taken his daughter away from him. He was someone who'd come up through the school of hard knocks, in the Bronx in New York. ... But I was so impressed by what a deep desire there was in him to be reunited with his daughter. This desire to be responsible and caring was just a glimmer of something authentic to his nature as a child of God. In talking with him, I realized that maybe the need is not so much to instill in dads the desire to be with their kids, as it is for dads to understand how they can lift that desire up to the level of prayer—and then, lift it up to the level of scientific realization. Mary Baker Eddy says that desire is prayer (see Science and Health, p. 1). And if, as a father, your prayer can go beyond asking God for help, to the scientific realization that there is an unbreakable connection between God and man, you're going to feel your Father's divine Love's, presence and see how to demonstrate that same spiritual connection with your kids.

Staying connected...

From an interview with Monty Hoyt of Bernardsville, New Jersey, a father who became divorced ten years ago when his children were nine and twelve.

One of the things that helped me as a father, first as a very involved parent in a family network and then as a distant parent after an unwanted divorce, is from Science and Health where Mrs. Eddy says, "The intercommunication is always from God to His idea, man" (p. 284). Whatever is most needed for a parent or for a child to know is always coming to them from God.

I had to handle a great deal of fear that I would be cut off from my children, as I had been from my dad. My mother remarried when I was five years old, and I didn't know my own father for more than thirty years. I prayed to see that the love I felt for my children couldn't be cut off from their receiving it. There is no force, no act, no judicial decision, or anything else that can separate you from God. So I took that universal, spiritual law and applied it to my specific situation, and I saw that because I am the reflection of God, that spiritual connectedness also had to be true about my relationship with my children. A hymn says, "I know no life divided, / O Lord of life, from Thee ..." And that tribulation "makes no separation / Between my Lord and me ..." (Christian Science Hymnal, No. 135). Even though it appeared that we were a triangle at that point, the kids were in one direction and the parents were in two other directions, the connectedness of divine Love, in which we all live, could never be dissolved or broken—not by changing human feelings or by anything else.

I took some basic steps. I set up a home not too far away from my kids. I attended as many of their activities as possible. I was involved with their homework and other things in small ways, and they came to live with me on weekends. I constantly prayed to see that I wasn't just a divorce statistic, that God's law was governing our lives.

Two years later, my family wanted to move away, which had been my greatest fear. It was for educational reasons. And I saw that I had a choice, either insisting on being humanly close to them, or letting them go, knowing that, yes, there were going to be major events in their lives that I would be forced to miss. But because of our spiritual connectedness, the love I expressed toward them could not be lost, undervalued, or in any way buried.

One statement from an article called "Obedience" in Miscellaneous Writings by Mrs. Eddy meant a lot to me: "A progressive life is the reality of Life that unfolds its immortal Principle" (p. 117). If you really can see that there is a continuity to spiritual man in God's image and likeness and that we can expect a progressive life for ourselves and for our children, then human events don't need to be destructive or carry along with them any of the trappings that reports and surveys indicate they have to.

When I go back to the core of my belief in God, the part I always get to that I can't get beyond—that I totally accept—is that God is Love. In divorce, there can be a lot expressed that isn't the best in mankind or womankind, but it can't stop the love that is coming to us from God. Even though your prayers may seem tenuous at first, you have to start with faith that divine Love really is in control of your life. And the Father-Mother Love you have always had access to is continuing to bless you and your children.

I've found over the years that the most important thing men can do for their children is to take the time to communicate love. It's easy to forget this in the treadmill of work, which seems to be going faster and faster, fostering a society of workaholics. Busyness sometimes seems like the devil of this century. In my case, I had to insist on finding ways of expressing love to my kids—maybe letters, maybe calls, maybe helping them in some way—and to do it regularly. And when I went back to the spiritual basis that I reflect the Father-Mother Love, I saw I couldn't help but do that.

Ten years later, with two kids in college, I consider my children my best friends, people I love being around. A lot of the things studies point out that children have to go through in divorce experiences just never materialized. With both their mother and their father continuing to express that sense of love to them, they rose above those challenges.

Learning grace. ..

From an interview with Glenn Felch of Alton, Illinois, who has two adopted children, now in elementary school.

We met our son's biological father when he had to sign some papers. He asked to meet with us so he could tell us what he expected a father to provide for his child. He was a young fellow who lives in a ghetto environment. Both my wife and I were impressed that he had all the fathering qualities down pat in his mind—he knew what a good father should be—but as he freely admitted, "It's too much work; I don't have the time, but you do it." It was both amusing and disheartening at the same time. It made me realize that there are a lot of fathers out there who know what they should express, but are waiting for some nudge of reassurance that it's worth doing and that there's strength and joy in the moral code of so doing.

I've come to the blunt realization that parenthood is hard work. I think it's actually been made harder in recent years because children are being exposed to so much cultural materiality. For many parents in society, it's just easier to survive with less direct input.

For me, the answer is recognizing that the qualities fathers need to express are within them as God's creation, that those qualities can be immediately recognized in consciousness. I think of it as a turning to God for grace—grace for each day. For instance, the thing that's most challenging to me on a day-to-day basis is working through any sense that I don't have enough patience to be a good father at any given moment. It's the common claims ... lack of time, the endless energies and demands of youngsters, all the things that pop up in raising a child, sometimes more in a day than you know how to respond to. But all the answers are present when I take the time to say, What is the grace that I need to express right now? And how can I express it so that my child can feel that there is a divine Principle in his life? So that if discipline is the need, they're not feeling discipline from me but from their connectedness to Principle. Or if love is the need, they're not feeling the presence of a person so much as the reflection of God's warmth and love.

I think of grace as that which is adaptable to meeting every human need. In a way, it's a collection of all of God's qualities. If I'm feeling pressed to express enough patience or insight, that is the belief of lack or deprivation. And that's certainly not the grace of God. Then I think, I actually have the dominion to express what I need to express, because God created me in His image—and that's God's grace bestowed.

Our real goal as parents, whether or not our children are ours by birth, ultimately should be to help them to recognize their relationship to a nonbiological parent—to their Maker—God, Spirit.

The premise that a biological father's presence in the home will determine a child's success and happiness is so anchored in the realm of genetic belief. It's a faulty premise to begin with. Having adopted biracial children, a step brother and sister who have different fathers, we've had to be very quick to decide in our own thought what theories we accept as true. We've had to deal with so-called inherited traits. But we've been consistent in tracing our children's roots back directly to their divine Parent. His entirely good spiritual law governs them, not material, genetic laws.

I've worked hard not to ignore Mrs. Eddy's definition of children in Science and Health. The first part is so lovely—"The spiritual thoughts and representatives of Life, Truth, and Love." But the second part really hits hard in exposing the false sense of children. It says: "Sensual and mortal beliefs; counterfeits of creation, whose better originals are God's thoughts, not in embryo, but in maturity ..." (pp. 582–583). This has helped me see that willfulness, for instance, is no part of my children's true nature.

When we say grace at dinner with the children, I love to pause and ask them what kind of grace they may have discovered in their experience that day—and really, it's a way to ask ourselves as parents, "Well, did I experience some of that today?" If there's this giant silence, well, here is an opportunity just quietly to look for ways in which we are all learning commonly recognizing that we are all children, and that we are all learning from our Father-Mother.

From the Editor: If you are a father who would like to share the spiritual concept that has most helped you deal with specific fathering or family issues, feel free to send in a brief contribution.