Broken Gifts
SERMON GIVEN BY REV LINDA HART AT RICHMOND & PUTNEY UNITARIAN CHURCH
While serving in my last parish, a member of the congregation – a man – came up to me and in conversation noted that he had never attended or even heard tell of a service that was devoted to fathers. In previous settlements, I had arranged for services on Father’s Day, asking men in the congregation to reflect upon their own experiences as fathers or sons, and celebrating the joys and sorrows of those life stories.
I realized in that conversation that it has been a challenge for me to speak to fathers and fathering because none of my stories about my father seem to have anything resembling a happy ending. Instead, the stories that I tell are stories of estrangement and failed hopes and lost love. The stories I tell are stories about a father who couldn’t find a way to be present to his children, and who became so lost in his own pain that he could not reach out without that pain spreading and growing.
I spent most of my adolescence and early adulthood blaming my father for what was wrong in my life. It didn’t much matter what was wrong, it was my father’s fault.
Now I have come to see that the gift my father gave me was the gift of his brokenness. It is a gift that continues to offer me forgiveness and hope, and which deepens my sense of compassion.
Let me tell you some about my father, and my journey toward love.
I’ll begin with his story. I want to acknowledge that this is my telling of his story and that others in my family, and my father might tell it wholly differently. However, as I look at my father, and especially the gifts he gave me, there are two factors that limited and wounded him, and were to profoundly shape my relationship with him.
The first was his alcoholism. It was typical in our home for the adults to come home at night, make a pre-dinner drink and then to continue to drink throughout the evening. Overall, it didn’t have much impact upon me as a young child, because we would go to bed early in the evening, and my parents would usually drink their way to bedtime with little or no trouble. There were, however, those nights when they wouldn’t find their way to bed happily. A fight would erupt and the two of them would yell and sometimes my mother would throw things. Twice their arguments went from a fight of words to physical violence. The first time my mother with a bloody nose, bundled my brother and I up in blankets, put us in the car, and drove away to her sister’s house where we stayed for a few weeks until she and Dad worked it out. The second time he came toward her eye with a lit cigarette and we packed up again and never went back until he had moved out and to Florida.
The limitations became even more severe. Several years after my parents divorced, he was driving and drunk and was in a serious accident. It was only ever spoken of in hushed tones, and even though I was a teen at the time, I never heard the details. I only knew that someone – not my father – nearly died. And the accident was his fault.
My father at that time made a decision, it’s clear to me. He chose to stop driving, and for the last 30 some years of his life he was never again behind the wheel of a car. For the all the backward reasoning that went into making that decision, I have to say that I admire that he made a decision. He chose to drink rather than to drive, and while many people choose other ways of resolving that dilemma, he made a choice, and never again endangered others lives by that behavior.
That choice limited him enormously. A professional writer by trade, by choice he worked only at temporary positions. As he moved from job to job, sometimes a few times a year, he could only take jobs that were on mass transit lines. When he came to visit us in the Washington, DC area, it would require that we ferry him around to most everywhere he needed to be. Someone else always needed to be on call to take care of Dad.
The alcohol bounded him, too, in all the ways you would expect. It put him in touch with his pain too much sometimes, and he would weep for the losses in his life after only a few drinks. Two marriages that failed, a child who died too young, my brother Patrick, and distance from his three surviving children who knew little about him and his life, who were far away from him in so many ways. Alcohol was also a barrier around him so that what love was available he could not receive.
It is a cautionary tale for me to think of the boundaries that his drinking put on his life. It speaks of his brokenness: the pain that I believe he sought to diminish with numbing alcohol. It speaks to his strength as well, that he made a choice, and stood strong with what was, in the end, a moral choice.
The second facet that limited him is more difficult to talk about. My father had what I gather was a lifelong love of women’s clothes. He was not gay, so far as I could learn, but he loved to dress in women’s clothing. I knew this about my father from a young age when I saw him dressed – with makeup and heels and a wig – when I was no more than 5. It was confirmed for me later when my brother and I read Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Sex. Our mother, who had given us the book and recommended that we read it, sat us down one day and asked if we had any questions. My brother asked if Dad was a transvestite, finally having language and opportunity to ask the question. Mom acknowledged that Dad cross dressed in what was for the times the most non-judgemental way she could have. Having spoken about it then, we spoke of it rarely, and only when absolutely necessary.
When my brothers and I cleared out our father’s apartment before his move into a nursing home, Mike opened the closet in Dad’s bedroom and gasped. It was half filled with dresses and skirts, his dresser revealed panty hose and various other tools of the trade for looking like a woman. Neither of my brothers could be there in that room, and so I was the one who cleaned it all out, threw away what couldn’t be given to Goodwill, and bagged up what could be used by someone else.
It was my father’s dark, dark secret. It was something that he kept hidden, though it was obvious from his closet that it was a large part of his life. It was dark with good reason. No one, it seemed could love that in my father: not his parents, nor his sister, none of the women in his life, and I’m sure he believed that none of his children could. Even today his story would have been fodder for the likes of Jerry Springer, for talk shows that astound and disgust. My father, who died in 1996, would have been 93 on his next birthday. For his generation and in most of his life, there was even less tolerance, less acceptance, less space for him.
It was a dark secret that led him to an isolated life. And it was a shameful, unspoken part of his life, a silence that we shared with him. My colleague Charlie Kast has said that the opposite of loneliness is telling the truth, and I believe it to be deeply true for my father, that the truth of his life he believed could not be spoken, thus he remained alone and unloved in a facet of his life that gave him pleasure.
I lost my shame around that part of him with the help of friends who delight in the play of gender roles, that is to say, men I know who share that love of women’s clothes. In conversation one day about the movie “Priscilla, Queen of the Desert”, an Austrailian film about a couple of drag queens traveling across the outback with one character’s son, I commented that I was somewhat uncomfortable with it all because of my father’s dark secret. One friend sought to help me with my issue. He talked at some length about how important it was for people to be able to express themselves, and that he understood that children especially need to be around people – no matter who they are – who are clear about who they are, who love themselves and their lives.
“Oh, no,” I told him quickly. “My father was always deeply ashamed of his dressing.”
“Linda,” he said, looking me kindly and directly in the eye, “that’s not your shame. You don’t need to carry it.” At that moment I was freed from my father’s secret shame, and in the weeks and months and now years that have followed, I have been able to welcome and love that part of my father, the brokenness and all.
For me, part of the religious quest has to be learning how to accept and love that which is placed before us, all the stories of love and loss, to learn to find peace with what we don’t understand, and to be opened to others in the bonds of compassion and care. My father’s brokenness was deep and obvious to me: the pain of his life shuttered him away from his children, from friends, from the world. It took me a long time to see the other truths about it: he had his satisfactions and there was much he was content about in his life, as my brother reminds me. And his gifts to me were not only those of his brokenness. In my early 30's I became convinced that both he and my mother loved me deeply and unconditionally at a very early time in my life, and that love has strengthened and supported me through the traumas and tragedies that have come into my life. I do remember his laughter and joy when I pranced around in my oh-so-very-special white go-go boots that I wore nonstop for nearly a year of my life.
There are many stories to tell about fathers. The one I tell about my father is indeed a love story, for while there was so much that went wrong, there was such pain and too much estrangement, still his life and my life were held together by love that we could not escape. His brokenness helps me to see my own, and to love it, too. And though there may be greater gifts to give, this is a precious one. One to be held in the heart, savored and praised.