Faith on the Diving Board

 He was there at the end of the diving board. He would tread water for hours watching while I practiced my dives. For years it was our Sunday afternoon ritual . I was 4 years old when we began.  Daddy was there in the deep water, waiting for me. On those Sunday afternoons I believed that if he was there at the end of the board I could do anything.

He would wait, treading water, off to one side. He would look around and give me the sign that it was OK to dive. And I would stroll to the end of the board, tugging my stretchy lavender swimsuit, and bounce in the air before I dove in.

I would rise to the surface sputtering, and look for his face. He would hesitate a moment to let me right myself. I would cough and beam. He would grab the back of my suit and give me a push toward the side. “Swim to the ladder,” he would say. And he would stay out at the end of the board waiting.

I remember the feeling as I paddled to the ladder. The world was perfect: I was diving in the deep end of the pool; there was no pain, and no evil in the world. There was no need or want in my life.  I was a perfect, grinning, sunburned, waterlogged four-year-old, in love with the world, herself and her daddy.

He died when I was 18. In the intervening years life happened to me and to Daddy.  By the time I was 13, he was traveling a lot, and when we did spend the occasional weekend together we did not speak of personal things. There were no talks about plans or dreams. As a teen-ager I felt awkward with my father so I would interview him about his job.  I know a lot about industrial engineering. It filled our time. By then my addictions had begun.

On a July evening, when he was 56, my father had a stroke and died.

Has it affected me? Of course. To have had that closeness and to loss it; to have had those timeless moments of being safe and special and then to lose him when I still needed to ask what happened.

It took years of my life, of other relationships, addictions and even years in recovery for me to wrestle with those two men--the daddy who waited in the deep water and the man who left suddenly, without a word, when I was 18.

Somewhere inside, that four-year-old still wears her lavender bathing suit. She is at the end of a diving board and leaning forward to hear someone say, “You are so special.” There is a deep hunger for those words.  Can I ever get enough?

I’ve learned a lot from listening to that little girl. I know that in romance we get some of that need met, but romance has its own path and after a while no one wants to admire us every day.  Another way to meet this need is with an affair.  Having an affair is a way a four-year-old can twirl in a 40 year-old body and hear again, “You are the only one.”  

In the first five years of recovery I practiced healthier solutions.  I practice in the mirror: “Diane, You are very special.” But all the praise and promises in the present cannot fill a hole that exists in the past.

Later I learned to meet this need in a spiritual way. In the rooms I began to meet people who had a connection with their God or higher power that helped them to live believing that God smiles warmly on them.

So what is the gift from a father who left when we were both too young? It’s this: For a long time I resented the missing memories; no father-daughter chats, no drives to college, no adult conversations. But I have this other thing--a picture in my brain and in my heart of my father still there at the end of the board, smiling and waiting.

Today I believe in a God who looks around my life and says, “Hold on a minute. We don’t want anyone to get hurt; then, “OK, go for it, I’m here.” I have a God at the end of my daily diving board who says to me, “Okay now, catch your breath. I’m here.”                                            

Father's Day Time

One of the central attractions in the city of Prague is the clock tower in the main square. There is a certain irony that vacationers, supposedly freed from clock watching, are drawn to this tower clock. They arrive five minutes before each hour to stare upward at the moving hands and the parade of carved wooden puppets that mark each changing hour. Tours guides offer stern warnings that the area near the tower is notorious for petty crime. While tourists are transfixed by the clock and its puppets, pickpockets help themselves to money, passports and yes, watches.

The tradition of village clock towers evolved from the practice of having a man stand guard to keep watch and periodically ring a bell to mark the hour. The name of that profession is the origin of the watch we now wear on our wrist. Timepieces gradually moved from the public clocks of the middle ages, to clocks inside the home, to pocket watches, to ones now strapped on our arm, getting closer to us all the time. While convenience has advantages, we no longer enjoy the communal reminder of passing time.

Time is an important topic for Father’s Day. This week’s newspaper ads show this deep connection. From Timex to Rolex, wristwatches are the number one gift for Dad. It may be the perfect gift too. Fatherhood is a short season and it flies by.

My father died when he was 56 and I was 18. His death was sudden and unexpected. It wasn’t until I crossed the 50 threshold that I understood that my father had died young. I knew, of course, that I was young when he died, but now I know that he was young too. Age, like time, is relative.

Time was an important part of my father’s life. He was an industrial engineer, a “time and motion study man”. His work was about efficiency and calculation. He carried a clipboard and wore an elegant gold Hamilton watch.

Whether due to nature or nurture, I too have an overly developed sense of time. I multi-task, write daily to-do lists, and I lust after organizing systems. But I also resist being tethered to time. Maybe it’s because I watched my father save so much time, which he never got a chance to use, that I have a love/hate relationship with “time management”.

My own calendar shocks people. It’s an oversized month-at-a-glance book in which I track tasks by scribbling through the borders and across the lines intended to demarcate the days. Each month’s page becomes an abstract work of scribbles and swirls and then it’s torn away. I don’t look back.

Death isn’t the only way that dads go missing from their kid’s lives. Divorce or drinking can do it too, but most often it’s work. That’s not new. Fathers of the 1950’s didn’t come to school plays or Girl Scout ceremonies; Mom came and told Dad about it at dinner.

Are today’s Dads wiser? It seems so. Last year fathers reported spending four hours a day with their kids, compared with just 2.7 hours in 1965. But I wonder, are those hours together real leisure and pleasure or are we multi-tasking the homework and the errands with the quality time? It’s a cliché to say how fast childhood goes and how fast fatherhood disappears too, but it’s true.

With our lists and calendars-- and even our watches—we can pick our own pockets. In trying to better organize them our lives can be stolen away.

Next week summer begins. Will the livin’ be easy? Or will we tick it off and time it out?  Keep watch. Just look at the time.

The Ides of March

When I was  little I had breakfast with my father on Sundays. It was a special time and part of that was the menu: we ate donuts. In our sugar-free house this indulgence was permitted only on Sundays for efficiency’s sake. My father hated to be late, and so, in theory, this simple breakfast was a way to get us to church on time. But as my father was prompt, my mother was not, and so I was alone at the table with my Dad on Sundays.

Part of this special time was a joke we shared every Sunday--and it was every Sunday for many years. My father loved the classics and he tried to teach his children Latin. So on Sundays as I would take my first powdered sugar donut from the white bakery box, he would say, “Did you know that Caesar liked donuts?”

And every week I’d say, “No, did he really?” And my Dad would say, “Yes, Caesar and Brutus had donuts for breakfast every day. But one day Brutus was late for breakfast and the donuts were all gone, so Brutus turned to Caesar and asked, “Hey, how many donuts did you eat? And Caesar replied,

“et tu Brute”.

Forgiving Dad

In the book, Alcoholics Anonymous, Bill Wilson wrote, “Resentment is the number one offender.” To those outside the program this might seem a bit of a surprise. You might expect the founder of AA to say that booze or too much drinking was the big problem. But no, Bill W. wrote: “From resentment flows all forms of spiritual disease.

Most of us know that, but it’s hard to get unstuck when a good, juicy resentment takes hold of you, so I like this pithier saying: “Holding a resentment is like setting yourself on fire and hoping the other person dies of smoke inhalation.”

Resentment as a topic on Father’s Day? But of course!

All of us had fathers. And with today’s social changes---divorce and remarriage-- some of us have two or more, so there’s plenty of fuel for those fires. Our parents disappoint us and we, in our turn, disappoint our children. In some families the injuries are bad: fathers may abuse, abandon, deprive or neglect. What do you do when you smell the smoke?

The antidote to resentment is, of course, forgiveness. Surely there will be a forgiveness story  on the Hallmark Channel today. But life is not a made-for-TV movie so how do you save yourself from the heat of resentment?

I had to extinguish a fiery resentment that I carried for years about my Father. When I was young my Dad worked many hours, travelled a lot, left his kids with a woman who was ill and then he died young. I had a big box of matches and I struck them all over myself. I had this idea that I just didn’t get what I needed from my father. More than one therapist agreed that my “issues” did indeed come from that deprivation. That intellectual understanding helped me to a certain degree but it also functioned as dry tinder for my favorite fire.

Then a few years ago on a Matt Talbot retreat I was telling my story and the retreat leader gave me a surprising bit of redirection. I was talking about how my Dad had maybe given me maybe 40% of what I needed as a kid and, well, poor me and bad him. “Well, yes,” the retreat leader said, “He may have only given you 40% percent of what you needed but what if 40% was all he had?” (He was after all a man whose parents died when he was young, he had grown up in poverty and he’d never been given a minute of emotional resource he could rely on). “So, she continued, “When your Dad gave you that 40% he was really giving you 100% of what he had.”

It was like a bucket of cold water poured on my head.

To forgive does not mean to pardon, it means to let go. When Jesus said, “Forgive them for they know not what they do"< he was using his language, Aramaic, and he used the word "shaw" for forgive; shaw means “to untie”.

So if you have tied yourself down or you have set yourself on fire with victim-approved matches --untie yourself . Forgiveness makes a great Father’s day gift; You give it to yourself.