I thought about the fathers this Juneteenth who celebrated with their children, black, white, brown, and telling their children about the meaning of this holiday in 2020. I think about the fathers who have already had the talk with their black daughters and sons about what to do if the police pull you over – where to place your hands, how to be as still as possible. I’ve thought about all the fathers that are missing today: murdered, overdosed, imprisoned. I think about those families that never mention fathers – where the term father is an open mystery, where the imagination runs wild. I think about the fathers who are very much alive, appreciated, and who we can talk with this Sunday.
I think part of the reason we want to know about our fathers, whether we knew them in life or not, is because we want to deeply know ourselves. We want to know that we are connected. We want to know we’ve come from somewhere. We want to know what it means to be a person. In Galveston, Texas, I think of all the fathers in 1865 who tried to tell their children what emancipation meant, and how they might have told their daughters and sons that they were free, and what that freedom meant. Maybe all that needed to be communicated was joy, a sense of celebration with their church communities or by bodies of water where they were less likely to be murdered by their white neighbors. I think about the ensuing years following which included legislation to put limits on this emancipation, including Jim Crow laws, all the way up to the modern day where we incarcerate large numbers of fathers all the while still celebrating emancipation.
I’m not telling you anything you do not already know. We all know, or at least many of us know the contradictions of celebrating emancipation hundreds of years ago with the reality we see today. There is a contradiction between the official laws and holidays, and the lived experience we feel acutely in this moment. It is for that reason, I feel incredibly hopeful. We are moving away from what Dr. King named as “a negative peace, which is the absence of tension” to a “positive peace,” which is the presence of truth telling and justice. It is this intensity, this move away from the illusion of peace, moving away from the absence of tension, that fills me with hope. As long as there is struggle, tension, a noticing of incompatible contradiction, there is hope. Tension is the first sign of real hope.
Tulsa has been in the news lately. I mentioned a little bit about Black Wall Street last Sunday, but there are details I am still learning. I was in Tulsa, Oklahoma in 2016 when Terrence Crutcher, an unarmed black man with his hands up in surrender was shot and killed by police. I was there when this happened in the Fall of 2016, when the videotape of the shooting was released and I was there in the summer of the same year when the police officer involved in the homicide was acquitted. What I didn’t know until a few days ago was this: Terrence Crutcher’s great-grandfather was killed during the race massacre on Black Wall Street in 1921. Three generations later he was also killed by the state, and there were no consequences. Terrence was a father, and his children are still alive now in 2020. It would be very tempting to think, given this three generation experience of systematic violence without any form of justice, that hope is never real. In fact, I remember writing a piece that year called “Post-hope,” where I followed this train of thought to its logical conclusion.
Four years later, I see all this differently. I see something now I did not have the awareness to see then. Freedom or emancipation is not something we struggle to get. The troops who arrived in Galveston, Texas did not free the slaves June 19, 1865. We are not trying to free our sisters and brothers right now from state sanctioned violence. As long as we have this view, despair is there lying in wait. We are not trying to free anyone, or help make anyone a first class citizen in this country. We are struggling and protesting because we see something obvious that has not been fully realized due to the state of our nation today, a nation yet to come of age: We see ourselves and others as already free. We see each other as first class citizens. Our struggle thus is an embodiment of this truth. This struggle is much bigger than our conception of success or failure, or whether this movement will last a few weeks or a few years. No matter what happens, this truth is inherent, inalienable, and in the end unavoidable. It can be covered up, it can be long ignored, it can fail to reach those who are desperate to hear this truth: but it is still true, even though it is not fully realized. The absence of tension is a form of civil violence that seeks to obscure this truth. Which is why this moment is so important. We are not making something true: we are rediscovering a truth that has been true before the slaves were freed in Galveston, and we are realizing and embodying the enduring power of this truth: freedom that is inherent.
The human spirit will not completely succumb to enslavement and oppression. It will rebel, and it will rebel in every generation, and it will continue to rebel until emancipation is fully realized.
Pride is an embodiment of this truth. Pride is the embodiment of love that knows it is inherent. After the Stonewall Riots, it would take decades for the state to recognize even a fraction of this truth. Even within the last few weeks, this sense of legal protection was under threat by our current administration. The supreme court upheld prior protections, but as we’ve learned the law does not mean that emancipation is fully realized or adequately enforced. It takes each generation to understand for itself that emancipation is written into our DNA, and it must be fully realized.
I wonder what my father would’ve thought of this time. Maybe some of you have wondered that too. My father died almost 15 years ago, and he grew up like all of us in very particular circumstances. He was born and raised a Jehovah’s Witness. The only stories he shared with me about his father were moments of cruelty – his father stealing his allowance money to buy alcohol, being physically and verbally abusive. My father was just about my height, and told me about the day he realized as a teenager he could physically overpower his father, so that he could stop the abuse of my grandmother. My father was white, grew up poor, in rural Oregon. Like many people in Youngstown, he did what he felt he had to do to survive. He dropped out of high school so he could work in construction, and support his mother and sisters. My mother encouraged me to become a lawyer, and my father always told me that the religious calling was the highest. To my own surprise, I’ve chosen my father’s path. I remember him telling me about Jehovah’s Witnesses during the holocaust who were given the opportunity to avoid going to a concentration camp if they would sign a document renouncing their faith. I remember him telling me that following what you hold to be true can be extremely costly, but to take comfort from those who came before and paid the price in their own way, in their own time. I remember him saying that freedom from pain was never freedom if it meant you had to give up who you are.
When I think of my father, I think of what it means to live with integrity in that gap between what is and what could be. I think of what it means for me to be a man, what it means to be a fully alive man, a free man.
I feel fortunate I never doubted my father’s love or commitment. I don’t know if I’m the only one, but when I think of my father, I feel a great sense of mystery, and this sense of only scratching the surface.
My father never voted, not even once. He never marched or attended rallies. I never heard him talk about the state of the world. He talked a lot about baseball.
Yet his life has opened a path for me, a path that is consistent and yet very different from the path he took. Without my father, I don’t think I would’ve become a minister. It’s one of the great joys of my life, and this time of year I feel a mix of gratitude and poignancy, a poignancy because he’s no longer alive, but also paradoxically incredibly alive in my life.
Coming of age is a particular process for all of us. I’ve had my own journey, and I’m sure you’ve had yours, in ways perhaps that are very different. I’m pained when I hear of youth who are shunned by their fathers because they come out as gay or trans, or they don’t seem to meet the spoken or unspoken expectation. I’ve also heard stories of those who were raised by their fathers as a single parent, and the ways their fathers stretched themselves to make sure they knew they were loved. But I think many of us at some point in our lives with our fathers and in other relationships confront that gap between what is and what could be, even if what is was more or less alright. We discover there is more to our fathers, more to the story, more to who we actually are. Again, realizing this gap, and living into this tension is a sign of hope.
The gift of a father is not that they make us who we are. They help us realize who we are. They don’t give us freedom to live in this world, they help us realize freedom that is inherent, that can’t be given or taken away. We all have the capacity for choice, even if we live in a system that works tirelessly to disavow us or those we love of that choice. It’s destined to fail, because freedom can’t be given or taken away. It’s inherent. The struggle is to fully realize it and share it, to embody it. We have great examples of ways of embodying this innate freedom, this innate emancipation of body and spirit: Marsha P. Johnson, Sylvia Rivera, Patrisse Cullors. Those are just a few of the well known embodiments. There are countless others: the fathers in Galveston, Texas June 19,1865, the fathers both deceased and survived June 1, 1921 in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and all the fathers, women, and non-binary folks who refuse to give up the struggle June 21, 2020 and beyond. Embodying and sharing in the reality of emancipation is a spiritual practice, it is a social justice practice, it is the practice of being who we really are. I hope you all enjoy this father’s day. I hope you are able to honor Juneteenth and this month of Pride. I hope you continue to seek out ways to express your love and help others to embody freedom personally and systemically. I hope you have the courage and patience to discover the freedom that exists in this moment, and for all moments going forward, a freedom that can’t be given, a freedom that can’t be taken away.
How has your father/father figures prepared you for this moment?
