In Memoriam

Time worn stairs to an amusement park ride at Oaks Park. Winter, 2003

There is an old black and white photograph I keep that shows me and my brother, six and five years old respectively, wrestling with my father on the kitchen floor. My father smiles up at the camera (and undoubtedly his wife), and he looks happy. My brother and I are also smiling. Though Dad has twisted us into pretzel shapes, he simultaneously cradles us protectively in his powerful arms (a stealth hug).

Some twelve years later, I wrestle Dad again. Somewhere over the years, it has become a contest. Time after time I try my puny muscles against his, and learn new ways to be beaten. But this time, I have spent a season wrestling for the high school team. I have worked long sweaty hours in the weight room. On the mats, I have practiced a small set of wrestling moves until they are habits.

This time, I catch my Dad in a head-and-arm and miraculously – inexorably – I slowly inch him onto his back and pin him. He struggles mightily. He can’t escape.

I don’t know what I thought was going to happen after all of those years of trying to beat my father. Perhaps I thought I would do a victory dance. Maybe I thought I would tease him and gloat. Maybe I thought he would be proud and congratulate me. But when it is over, when our eyes meet, I see an expression of puzzlement and resignation. It is almost as if he had briefly glanced into the face of death and reluctantly made an appointment for the future. Something changes forever. I almost cry. We never wrestle again.

In retrospect, I understand this event as the ebb and flow of seasons. There is a season of growth, a season of fruitfulness, and eventually a season of decline. By necessity, our parents blaze a trail ahead of us in time – a twenty year offset – that teaches us about the coming winter.

The Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost reach consensus. It is par for the course.

The mound of dirt under which my father’s body rests has long been settled and covered with grass. If nature is God’s handiwork, we hope the repeating pattern of the seasons is a characteristic signature - a metaphor for what lies in store for everything that dies. Despite our common sense, we trust that Spring will follow Winter (It always does).

The gospels report that Jesus might have suggested that one good way to think about God is as a father (presumably a good father). Granted, a personified God as a father-figure-archetype is psychologically suspicious, but suspending disbelief temporarily and pondering a God that might cherish my father and wrestle with him on the kitchen floor - cradling him protectively in his powerful arms - is not a bad way to spend a few moments.

It seems beyond belief that a God would care about individual humans – specific meat-beings and their respective bundles of experience and memory – and remember them beyond their physical existence. Yet somehow every human culture seemingly comes up with a version of this story.

Which story is true? Unfortunately, despite all the glowing rhetoric, there is still only one way to find out for sure.

In the meantime, I admire the sentiment contained in a saying my mother found on the occasion of my father’s death. It goes, “Friendship divides our sorrow, and multiplies our joy.”

Someday, when it is comfortable, let’s gather together and tell stories of our fathers and mothers and remember them.

Holy Ground

In the short, cold, dismal gray days of winter, I can drive to work before the sun comes up, drive home after it goes down, and never see it or feel its radiation for weeks at a time. So Friday night I strapped the canoe to the top of the truck and headed out to Smith and Bybee lakes before sunrise.

At the east edge of Smith Lake, I pushed the canoe off the ice rimmed shoreline into the cold dark water and headed west. An icy whisper of wind stirred up a train of wavelets that gently splashed against the bow and retarded my progress, but the paddling kept me warm. In those moments of transition, as the sky lightened, and the trees began to murmur, I recalled the words from the creation myth that my particular culture endorses.


“The earth was without form and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep; and the Spirit of God was moving over the face of the waters. And God said, “Let there be light””

I turned the canoe around and stopped paddling. I floated in the middle of the lake and watched the sunrise. I thought I could hear the earth turning.

The wind scribbles patterns in the lake as if it were a finger-painting. In the space of minutes, the water’s character goes from spastic to languid. I wonder if the author of the creation myth ever had a canoe.


Turning back around, I see the sun has painted the barren trees with fire. As I draw closer, I am reminded of yet another mythic story.

“And the angel of the LORD appeared to him in a flame of fire out of the midst of a bush; and he looked, and lo, the bush was burning, yet it was not consumed.”

I know about myths and metaphors. I marvel at the complexity of life as accomplished by the cumulative effects of natural selection. I am sensitive to the beauty of patterns elicited by speeding photons striking the back of my eyes. I even convince myself that I recognize the difference between fiction and truth, that I know the difference between narrative stories and objective news. Yet some stubborn superstitious, story-telling part of me wants to tell you that in the magic hours of Saturday morning, I saw a bush that burned without being consumed.