I never saw my divorced father’s last house. It was an apartment in a hotel in downtown Detroit where he lived alone. Neighbors discovered Harvey’s body in 1975, when his smoking and drinking caught up with him. I have a few memories, fading snapshots, of his earlier apartments. I didn’t visit a lot. His books, stacks of newspapers, and bachelor pad furniture. He had a pair of hairbrushes that fused together at the bristles. They smelled like him.
Since dad and I weren’t good at being in touch, I have a lot of regrets about things left unsaid and undone. These flooded black in church today, during the opening Holy Eucharist service at the House of Bishops spring meeting at Camp McDowell, Alabama. I can’t remember the last time I heard the readings in a service. From 2 Samuel, the great house of God, both temple and dynasty, that God calls King David to build. His sins, cut from the same cloth as some of Harvey’s, meant Solomon would end up doing the bricks and mortar. But the house of David endured until Joseph and Jesus and beyond, sheltering all who are in Christ.
Then from Luke’s gospel, 12-year-old Jesus staying behind in Jerusalem, feeling right at home questioning the priests in his father’s house, even as his folks started the journey back to Nazareth without him. My father’s house-holding failures helped put my mom Jean and her 12-year-old son on the road in 1967, from Detroit to her new newspaper job in Phoenix.
She compensated as best she could. But maybe you know how it is, or was once supposed to be, between a dad and his boy. We now have many models for families, creative, nurturing ways people have to share parenting, or do it by themselves. But I’m a creature of that old-time notion. I love when my friends talk proudly about their dads and feel a little sad at the same time. Playing catch and teaching me to ride a bike eluded Harvey, not to mention teaching by word and example. I’ve spent decades tinkering with my operating system by filling in some of those crucial lines of code.
This is why the church hasn’t taken to Fathers’ and Mothers’ days. It’s dangerous to preach the ideal in case someone in the congregation missed out. But then came Joseph, sneaking up on me this morning. Our preacher, Presiding Bishop Sean Rowe, avoided the father-son stories. He was frying bigger tilapia, proclaiming that the church models Jesus’s father’s house by putting the marginalized and forsaken in the master bedroom while the privileged settle for cots in the garage. In our Father’s house, there are many rooms, and plenty of room for everyone whom God has made, however God has made them.
Whereas Trump, cruel and incompetent, takes medicine and food from African children. His elite Christian apologists blaspheme by justifying or ignoring it. After the service, I called my half-sister, living outside Detroit, my last link to Harvey, as I am hers. Our father was also a journalist. Maggie and I agreed that if he were alive, he would take off his cufflinks, roll up the sleeves of his starched white dress shirt, and go up to Washington, where the house of blasphemy they are building will surely fall. The inheritors of my parents’ trade will help tear it down. And our little church will do its best to model a better way to live and love, for justice and mercy’s sake, as Christ requires us to do.
(Photo: My parents in Detroit, during their brief moment)