c. 2004 Religion News Service

(Tom Ehrich is a writer and computer consultant, managing large-scale database implementations. An Episcopal priest, he lives in Durham, N.C. Visit his Web site at http://www.onajourney.org.)

(UNDATED) A friend’s father died today, a week before Father’s Day.

Now he must make his own way. I don’t mean holding a job, raising a family or making major decisions. My friend has been doing that work for years. I mean standing alone at the head of the table and carving the Thanksgiving turkey, not as a kindness to aging Dad but as the one left to do it.

I mean looking ahead without a father’s interest or assurances. Now my friend will know for sure what he is made of.

Knowing himself will happen differently. Some fathers are ideal role models, which one spends a lifetime trying to follow. That is my blessed state as a son. My friend’s, too. Other fathers are everything the child doesn’t want to be _ aloof, harsh, controlling, absent _ and becoming oneself starts in standing over against.

When the father is gone, we must deal with ourselves. Sons have to examine how they are doing as husbands and fathers. Daughters have to examine how their relationships, self-understanding and views of men now have a life of their own, for which Dad is no longer responsible.

Whether one’s dad has been larger than life or too small for dreams, a hero or a disappointment _ there being nothing neutral about fathers _ a dad’s departure turns a lens into a mirror, and imagining what might have been no longer masks what is. One’s kindness or harshness, serenity or torment, giving or taking are fully one’s own, not a continuation of someone else.

Scrapbooks and memoirs won’t be much help. They signal a childhood ended. They kindle recollection and stir the stew of remorse and grief, delight and gratitude. But at some point, one has to close the scrapbook, look around the room, and see today as it is. That can be hard and lonely work.

If we don’t do that work, however, how will we ever grow up? If we try to remain children, blaming others for our mistakes and frustrations, how can we stand on our own feet, acknowledge failure, celebrate progress, understand uniqueness, ask forgiveness and give generously of who we are?

When Jesus was preparing to depart, he tried to turn lens into mirror. He asked who the crowds thought he was and who the disciples thought he was. But then Jesus went on, looking ahead to the time when the disciples would be on their own. You must take up your cross, he told them, not just remember how the Son of Man took up his cross. You must die to your selves, not just debate the details of Jesus’ sacrifice.

It wouldn’t be enough to perfect their understanding of his identity. They would need to examine their own self-sacrifice, their own courage, their own glory and shame. It wouldn’t be enough to document his dying _ even in Technicolor. They would need to stand at their own tables and ask what meal they were serving lost humanity.

They would have to grow up. But they didn’t. Early Christians turned arguing about Jesus’ identity into an art form, a complete intellectual exercise, the perfect escape. They debated his identity at the macro level _ was he fully human, fully divine, some combination? They debated at the micro level _ what were his words, what did he do? They debated at a small and finicky level where grand passion could be devoted to angel-counting and liturgy-defining, and nothing substantial or life-changing was at stake. And when they ran out of shards to examine, they imagined what Jesus might have said.

Now we inherit their escape and their tendency to define, to debate our definitions, and to deflect accountability. The question before us is the same: Will we grow up?

Burying our parents might be among the holiest things we do, and also among the hardest. No less holy, and perhaps even harder, is living on without them. Instead of spending holidays arguing about the past and who hurt whom, who was Father’s favorite, and who correctly remembers a long-ago family event, it is time we grew up and accepted responsibility for the lives and world we are creating.

DEA/PH END EHRICH