My Father’s Faith
Occasionally, I’ll share portions of Crazy: Reclaiming Life from the Shadow of Traumatic Memory that didn’t make the cut. My editor, Sarah Chauncey, taught me that authors have to learn to “kill their darlings,” which means a good piece of writing may just not belong in this spot or in that piece of work. “Save it,” she told me, “and use it some where else.” This blog post about my father’s faith was in the first draft of my memoir. I share it with you and hope it holds some meaning for you. ~ Lyn
My Daddy and me at about 2 years old.
“Hi, Dad, this is your daughter Lyn,” I said tentatively as I entered my 96-year-old father’s nursing home room. I hadn’t seen or spoken to him in years. To my disgrace, I had ignored the previous medical emergencies and kept moving forward, never sure of what kind of power he still had over me. This last time, though, was different. I was in my second year of seminary and my brother had called to tell me that my father had woken in the middle of the night screaming, yelling, fighting off the staff, terrified, and babbling about a fire.
The Dream
“Don’t put me in the fire,” he had cried over and over again. They gave him a sedative to calm him down and settle him back to sleep. It was disconcerting for everyone. I don’t believe in hell fire but it’s an archetypal image in our culture. I thought, maybe I should go.
“Oh, it’s Popup,” he said, eyeing me carefully. Popup had been the nickname he gave me as a small child because I used to “pop up” in my bassinette. I sat down beside him and took his hand. Just as my brother had said, his mind was still sharp but his body was withering away. I asked him about the incident the night before and he dismissed it away.
“The doctors said it was an hallucination.” When I pushed him a little on the details, he said,
“I was in a dark place and there was a big coal fire furnace. Two black guys were shoveling coal into it. I started falling into a deep, dark hole that was in the middle of the fire, and I couldn’t get out. I kept trying to get away from the fire, but I couldn’t. I was sinking into the darkness, I was sinking into the fire.”
I listened intently, then allowed the conversation to veer away from that trauma, never touching on our long estrangement. I asked him how he was and engaged in the usual sort of conversation a pastor has with someone in a nursing home, trying to find some connections between his reduced life and the world outside his sphere. I told him about myself. I told him I was in seminary. He was very interested.
The Rabid Atheist
When I say my father didn’t believe in God, it was not a default setting or an unattached, intellectual argument alone, but an impassioned hatred of all things religious. On the other hand, his mother, my grandmother, was very religious. For a short time, she and I shared a bedroom and she would read her Bible every night. One night, she told me, “Your father is a good man except for ‘you know what’,” meaning that he didn’t believe in God. I do not know if my father was made to go to church or Sunday School as a child, or what his experiences with religion may have been but I wondered where his hatred of it came from.
I was told that, as a small child, my father was very rebellious. He had difficulty with authority and dropped out of school in the sixth grade. He was very smart, though, and read voraciously, carrying his interest in politics and science into our family life. He was hyper-responsible, so much so that he set up my grandparents in the small grocery store when my grandfather couldn’t or wouldn’t support them, supported his nuclear family on his meager electrician’s salary, and exerted control over our finances and almost every other aspect of our family life with an iron fist. He didn’t like my grandfather much but he loved my grandmother, his mother. His interest in politics led him to a liberal, Democratic perspective and, of course, he hated the church. He loved very young children and showed it by tickling them and bouncing them on his knee. Older children, not so much. He was gruff and scared many of my neighborhood friends away, but had a warm side when he was in the right mood. He was clearly emotionally and verbally abusive to my mother. He left scars on each of his children in profoundly different ways. He was filled with rage. He was an anomaly, a contradiction, and a very controlling person.
“Yes, I’m interested in the apostle Paul,” my father said, surprising me by his knowledge when I talked about my New Testament class. In his crusade against religion, he had read much and apparently accumulated more insight than I was aware of. Sitting in his nursing home bed, he seemed genuinely interested in some of the things I was talking about in terms of my seminary studies.
“Well, I’m working on an assignment about a passage in Ephesians,” I began. “It’s attributed to Paul but actually written by a later Christian author. Would you like me to read the passage to you?”
“Yes, I would.” He was calm and pleasant, even eager to hear all that I was saying.
The Reading
“The passage is Ephesians 6: 10-20 and it’s called The Whole Armor of God.” I began to read.
“Finally, be strong in the Lord and in the strength of his power. Put on the whole armor of God, so that you may be able to stand against the wiles of the devil. For our struggle is not against enemies of blood and flesh, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers of this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places. Therefore, take up the whole armor of God, so that you may be able to withstand on that evil day, and having done everything, to stand firm. Stand therefore, and fasten the belt of truth around your waist, and put on the breastplate of righteousness. As shoes for your feet put on whatever will make you ready to proclaim the gospel of peace. With all of these, take the shield of faith, with which you will be able to quench all the flaming arrows of the evil one. Take the helmet of salvation, and the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God.”
The Final Switch
I was not able to finish reading the passage. His calm demeanor quickly transformed. He glowered at me. He did not look like the same person I had greeted when I entered his room. He was angry and agitated. He was breathing hard and his body was shaking.
“Stop it. Stop it,” he demanded. “I don’t want to hear that. I don’t want to hear that.” I closed my Bible and looked at this poor, weak man who seemed triggered by this scriptural passage. I took his hand again and just sat in silence while he regained his composure. In a few minutes, I leaned over and kissed him.
“I’m glad I came to see you. I hope you feel better soon. Good bye, Daddy.”
I am not a clinician capable of diagnosis, but I left his nursing home room quite sure I had watched my father switch from one personality to another. He died a month later. And I wonder, what was done to him to make him who he was?
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Put on the whole armor of God, so that you may be able to stand against the wiles of the devil.
~ Ephesians 6:11