Gift for a father—forgiveness and love

Father’s Day is celebrated in a variety of ways in 70-plus countries around the world, including the United States, China, Cuba, Palestine, Nigeria, Zimbabwe, and Syria. Many countries designate the third Sunday of June to honor fathers, but for others the day is set aside in February, March, May, or any time between July and December! You might say honoring fathers is a continuous celebration around the world every year. 

Many of us have not had what would be called a “picture perfect dad”—a dad who was always there for us, expressing tender love and care, giving us wise counsel and helpful discipline; someone we could go to with our big and little troubles; someone who would wipe away our tears or set us on a right path again. Our dads may have been very much the opposite. So in that case, what’s there to “honor”?

I’ll share with you what I discovered.

The Fifth Commandment in the Bible reminds us to “Honour thy father and thy mother” (Exodus 20:12 ). More than one day of celebration on Father’s Day or Mother’s Day, this God-given directive requires a love and understanding that we need to plumb to the depths if we’re to experience its promise: “that thy days may be long upon the land which the Lord thy God giveth thee.”

Although I always gave my dad a cheerful card and a special family meal on Father’s Day, Dad was at best a distant and sometimes difficult character in my life. I never thought of him as an alcoholic, but for much of my childhood he was a heavy, regular drinker, which caused a lot of disturbance and distress in our home. He was not a happy man. And to me, he was a bit of a scary presence, though he never physically harmed any of our family, or anyone else for that matter. Rather than being angry or hurt by his attitude, I was mostly ambivalent in my feelings toward him.

One Christmas Eve, as my mother and sister and I prepared to go to the midnight Christmas Eve service at our local First Congregational Church, Dad came home drunk and disorderly. My mother was angry and in tears. Dad went to bed drunk; we went off to church soberly. We returned home to discover he had tossed out the fixings for our Christmas dinner and the little Christmas tree I had decorated and placed with great joy on my bureau. That Christmas I cried and cried until I could cry no more. Somehow we got through that Christmas Day and life kept moving forward.

Several years later, shortly after I had been introduced to Christian Science and had begun reading Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures by Mary Baker Eddy, my dad passed on suddenly, and at a relatively young age.

As I thought about my dad’s life, I did have a sense of “honoring” him at that time. I recalled that in spite of his drinking problem, he never missed a day of work. In spite of what he must have spent on alcohol, we always had what we needed and the bills were always paid. Yet my ambivalent attitude toward him remained—that is, until I had a major wake-up call one Christmas Day.

That day I had willfully attempted to drive through a major snowstorm to get presents to a grown son who couldn’t come home for Christmas that year. After driving for several hours and praying earnestly to be doing the right thing, I turned back before I reached my destination. 

When I arrived home, my gentle husband made one small remark that he had told me before I left how bad the driving was, and I suddenly found myself uncontrollably angry. My husband, who always felt that the best way to end even a slight argument was to remove himself from the scene, went to bed. I, on the other hand, began angrily taking down the Christmas tree. Yet, at the same time, I was earnestly striving to turn my thought to God. I knew I was out of control. But I also knew that God was absolutely present and in perfect control, and that I could make every effort to get my thought in line with God, with right thinking and action.

I loved my dad in that moment as I never had before.

As I yanked the now undecorated tree down the stairs to the basement, I was suddenly stopped at the foot of the stairs with a clear, calm thought: “This is why your father drank.” In that moment of what I think of as revelation, I realized with clarity that at least one of the reasons my father drank was because he did not know how to deal with animal magnetism, the term Mary Baker Eddy uses to describe the carnal mind and its evil, erroneous suggestions. I realized that while I, as a Christian Scientist, knew to turn to God and His pure angel messages and to strive to refuse angry, willful, negative thinking, my dad had turned to a bottle to attempt to be free of it.

In those few moments of revelation, an overwhelming sense of love for my dad, an affection for him and a pure sense of forgiveness, came over me. While not excusing his wrong behavior, I saw that behavior as completely separate from his spiritual identity as an expression of God, untouched by the evil he had not known how to counteract through prayer.

I loved my dad in that moment as I never had before. I am no longer ambivalent toward him. Years later, whenever I think of him, that same pure love comes tenderly to thought. I’ve since seen this as not only a perfect sense of forgiveness that no longer attaches evil of any kind to someone, but also as a true way of honoring my father. I feel this love must be blessing him as well as blessing me as we both continue on our spiritual journeys. 

And might not this honoring of my father with this precious sense of forgiveness be in some modest way forwarding humanity so that everyone’s “days may be long upon the land which the Lord [their] God giveth [them]”?

That may have been Christmas Day according to the calendar. For me it was truly the best Father’s Day I have ever known.