Believe it or not, Father’s Day has only been an “official”
holiday in the United States since 1972.
Like, in my lifetime.
That’s not to say that a day to honor fathers’ didn’t exist
before then. The explanation I hear most often is that Hallmark created it to
make billions on Father’s Day cards. (Poor Hallmark; they always get blamed.)
The history of it all is too ho-hum to warrant much fanfare, but it basically
played out like this: In 1910, a woman named Sonora Smart Dodson wanted to
honor her father, as he had raised six children on his own. So she initiated a
celebration of fathers at the Spokane, Washington YMCA. In the 30’s, trade
groups started supporting her promotion of the “holiday,” including the newly
formed Father’s Day Council, which was founded by the New York Associated Men’s
Wear Retailers. [It actually wasn’t Hallmark!]
A bunch of nondescript stuff happened over the next 30+ years, but in 1966
LBJ issued a proclamation, and then Richard Nixon signed it in to law in 1972. I’m
pretty sure that’s when the Hallmark folks popped a bottle of champagne to
celebrate.
I’m all for honoring fathers and mothers and grandparents.
And I don’t even mind buying cards now and then. But there’s no getting around
the fact that this day makes a whole lot of folks want to go hide under a rock.
And I’ve found that there are varying levels of discomfort among them. Some
people wander up and down the card aisle looking for something, anything, that
would be even remotely apropos. There are no cards that say, “Don’t worry that
you weren’t ever around; I turned out okay anyway” or “You beat me and harshly
criticized me as a child, but now you’re pretty alright.” These are the folks
that still have enough of a relationship with their father to be buying him a
card, but can’t find one that doesn’t gush about him. If you ask me, Hallmark
is supremely biased toward the “good father” crowd (which in my estimation has
been shrinking for a very long time.) Of course a Father’s Day card isn’t going
to adequately express everything you have in your heart about dear old dad, so
even if they had cards that offered a little more truth-telling, they probably
wouldn’t sell.
One of my biggest “a-ha” moments about tricky relationships
came when I was working on my bachelor’s degree a few years ago. My favorite
history professor assigned a lot of reading from primary sources, and I found
myself studying a document entitled, “On The Jews and Their Lies.” It’s an anti-Semitic treatise that disturbed
and shocked me so much, I made an appointment with my prof to talk about it. Of
course anti-Semitism isn’t new, and so reading historical texts that document
that prejudice is something you might expect in a Western Civilization class.
But what threw me for a loop was its author:
Martin Luther.
The father of the protestant reformation. The guy who’s
practically considered a saint in evangelical Christendom (if Evangelicalism
even had saints.) I was so taken aback by the vile and hateful content of the text,
I had a hard time reconciling it with all of the things Luther did to introduce
an alternative to the Catholic Church. Is
this even true, I wondered, or did
Luther just somehow get framed as the document’s author? Surely he didn’t
really say that the Jews are "full of the devil's feces ... which they
wallow in like swine," and that the
synagogue is an "incorrigible whore and an evil slut." Surely he didn’t recommend that Jewish synagogues
and schools be burned to the ground, and that Jews should be forced into
slavery.
But I found out that, yes. Yes, he did.
“How in the world can we trust anything that came out of
this guy’s mouth if he spewed so much hate?” I asked my professor, when we
finally met up in her office.
“Why would millions of Protestants hold him up as reliable
source of spiritual guidance?”
“The short answer is that people are a mixed bag,” she
replied. “No one is all good or all bad.”
“Yes, but this is extreme!”
I argued. “If he were to write something like that today, he’d be put in the
same category as Westboro Baptist Church!”
“Probably. But that was then, this is now,” she patiently replied.
“We’ve come a long way. And Luther was known for taking extreme stands.”
We sat in silence for a minute. I had a narrative of “But,
but, but, but…” playing in my head. She had clearly accepted that he was an
extremely complicated individual. And I couldn’t swallow that. On account of
this document I wanted to discount everything I’d ever respected about Luther’s
teaching. And truth be told I’ve still not been able to reconcile it at all.
I’m grateful that he liberated scores of oppressed Catholics, but this whole
scenario makes me want to trash him altogether.
The point is, of course, that things aren’t always black and
white. I can certainly, categorically, say that “On The Jews and Their Lies” is
an evil treatise. To me, that’s black and white. What I can’t, say, however, is
that Martin Luther—as a person—was 100% evil. Though he was clearly an extreme
racist, he did a lot of good for a lot of people. And quite honestly, that
pisses me off.
You probably know where this is going, but the same is true
about all of us. Yes, there are varying degrees of discrepancy in our
character, but at the end of the day everyone is a mixed bag. I have friends
that had extremely wicked fathers, men who sexually abused their daughters and
battered their wives. I would imagine that those adult kids don’t wander the
card aisle on Father’s Day. They just wander through another 24 hours of
collective dad worship trying to find some shred of peace about their past.
There are those who had physically or emotionally abusive
dads who are now the kindest, sweetest grandpas to their grandchildren. These
men are drastically different people than they were back when they were raging
around and verbally decapitating their own children. But to the new generation,
they’re the picture of paternal love.
And then of course there’s the multitude of kids who were
abandoned by their fathers and never got the chance to go card shopping.
Obviously I’ve left out one demographic, those people who
have (or had) amazing fathers. These folks enjoyed persistent love,
advocacy, protection and presence from their dads, and love the
opportunity to honor them with a special day. To those folks, I say, “We’re
happy for you.” Envious, maybe, but then somebody’s gotta win the lottery. To
those who have lost beloved dads, I say, “Grieve, but cherish your memories.
You don’t know how fortunate you are to have them.” And to those for whom this
day brings up the dad-shaped cavern in your soul, I’d recommend staying off of
Facebook and doing something really, really nice for yourself. Something you
wish your dad had done for you. And the truth is he might’ve, if he hadn’t been
such a mixed bag.
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