Fatherlove

Community sermon (6.14.2026)

Photo by C.J. Dirago

Years ago a friend of mine was telling me about becoming a new dad. His son was about the age my son is now, a year and a half or so, and he said to me, “I can’t imagine anything worse than for my son to grow up and hate me. Nothing would be worse than that.”

I was in my late twenties and I had, as far as I could tell, finally stopped hating my own dad. After the wounding of that summer our family broke apart, and the many years of hurt and heartache we all went through—after wishing him dead, and then wishing he would be more alive with me, go deeper in healing together, really talk about it, cry about it, feel it with me, Dad, feel it with me—after all this, I was, at last, happy, truly happy, to just talk to him on the phone every once in a while and see him two or three times a year. Was it forgiveness? Had I achieved some kind of spiritual transcendence? I think mostly I was just too exhausted to be angry anymore, almost bored with the futile task of trying to change him.

I’d started saying “I love you” again on the phone when we said goodbye. During those hard years, he’d say “I love you” and I would take vicious delight in leaving him hanging. “I love you,” he’d say. “Cool,” I might say. Or, “Yeah.” I’d reached a place now where I could say “I love you, too.” Every time I did that, he would say, “Thank you.” “Thank you,” like he knew it was a gift that might or might not be given.

We go through it with our dads, huh? Our moms, too. This sacred contract of incarnating through them, this holy arrangement of the wounding that comes, and of the healing follows (even if it has to wait till the next lifetime perhaps, it does follow), this spiritual work of setting ourselves free right here in these everyday lives we share with our parents.

Dad shared with me once that he never heard his dad say the words, “I love you.” His dad wrote those words a few times, but never said them. My dad’s mom would tell him, “Your dad loves you, you know,” but that’s not quite the same. It hits different when it comes straight from dad.

What is it that keeps fathers from feeling and giving their precious, priceless fatherlove? Maybe my grandpa was tired—he worked three jobs to support his six kids. Maybe he didn’t have the opportunities that would have helped him open his heart. Maybe he just never knew what was possible between fathers and sons, between men, because maybe his dad never showed him.

I called my dad after that conversation with my friend about how terrible it would be if his son ever hated him. Me and Dad chatted for a few minutes and then I just stumbled into it: “I think you already know this,” I said, “but, I don’t hate you anymore. I know you know I love you, because I say that now, but I also want you to hear me say: I don’t hate you.”

“Thank you,” he said, and then he surprised me. “I’m so glad to hear that. For me, of course, but even more so, for you. Because for you to carry around that hate, it’s hurting you most of all.”

He visited me not long after that, and I got it into my head that there needed to be some climactic moment of catharsis. Some undeniable validation that would confirm beyond the shadow of a doubt that the war was indeed over, that I really was free. So I thought, maybe something will happen if he holds me. Like, physically holds me. Maybe we’ll get some kind of somatic release. Maybe our bodies will unlock a final boss level of spiritual medicine from this old, holy wound. When men hold each other in a sacred way, something powerful awakens. I’d held men like this, on retreats, in ceremonies, and I’d been held like this. I wanted that with dad.

So we’re drinking beers in my apartment, and I just kind of pop the question, “Dad, would you be down to, like, hold me? Like, I don’t know, on the couch or something?”

“Uhh, sure,” he goes, my man, my Dad. And so, God bless us, we get on the couch, and my 28 year old full-grown man body finds a way to lay down in his lap. And I wait for it. “This is it, any second now, the great catharsis will come, the final awakening,” but actually it’s just kind of awkward, and about as cringey as maybe you’re feeling right now, and he starts to sorta stroke my hair like I’m Mr. Argus Possumpuss, his pet cat. We lasted about a minute. Got back to our beers. Never spoke of it again. Another small, strange step in our healing as father and son; one giant, awkward leap toward the awakening of fatherlove on the planet.

I wonder how I will wound my son. Just after I wrote those words, I heard him waking up from his nap. I went in to check on him and he was sitting up, smiling, still kind of sleeping, and I got into the king bed with my little king, and took him in my arms and he drifted back to sleep. I’ll keep holding him as long as he’ll let me, and maybe someday he’ll be holding me.

Photo by C.J. Dirago