A Private Thanksgiving

This is my Father’s world; there is nothing to fear with Him at the helm. Not that it’s all bright and cheery, but all those events that I can’t control are also not my problem. I’m committed to accepting what He desires for me and have found it increasingly sweet.

This is how we dismiss all the fears of childhood, including the childhood of a very primitive Western outlook. The Devil and his dominion of power is firmly constrained, so all that creative fear-mongering in horror fiction is preposterous on the face of it. Halloween stuff is just fairy tales from a lost tribal heritage of people who had no real deities. We have discarded that worthless background of silly fears and found the truth of the God who made all things.

I arrived some three hours early at the funeral home yesterday. There were no other funerals scheduled, so Dad’s body was already in the chapel. I think this is the first time in my memory of funeral services in which the body frankly did not resemble the living person. It really did look like an empty container, demonstrating how the life force can truly reshape mere meat. It was symbolic of how much power his soul carried, and it gave me comfort that in his declining days he must have caught onto the eternal truths.

How do you explain that splitting from my Mom made him a far better man? Not because there’s so very much wrong with her, but because they really didn’t belong together. Their union was immoral in the much deeper sense of discovering what God intended, not in the sense of some iron “Will of God,” but in the sense of His generous merciful blessings. Holding her as his wife kept him in bondage to those less pleasant manifestations of his character. Losing her forced him to stand alone and undistracted before God.

And as the living product of their union, I am a living paradox in my own eyes.

So I wasn’t the least bit spooked sitting in contemplation alone with Dad’s empty shell. As I prayed over my part in the service, seeking a vision of divine glory in how I would celebrate this man’s life as a conscious member of God’s Creation, what struck me was how garrulous I am compared to his reticence. He was more of action than words. So while he most certainly did try to teach me as fathers teach sons, what I really learned best was something he hardly knew he taught.

Simplicity, frankness and defiance of convention — that was the core of what he gave me. It becomes the visible manifestation of how I do religion. Perhaps you recognize that as a part of what defines the concept of “radical.” Dad conformed externally to social convention, but if you looked close enough, he was always boiling inside with a vast need to break out of this very false world in which we live. I’ll probably never know on this plane of existence what he imagined he was looking for because his spoken aspirations were highly contextual. But I remain convinced I have found what he taught me to seek.

Thanks Dad, and thank You, dear Father and Creator.