Conjunction Junction, Extreme Unction.

Dear Friend,

Another friend recently casually out my life in its strange context in the timeline. I am, and have been, for soon to be four years, a part of the club no man desires to join, but which all men must enter. I know. It sounds like a riddle about death. Perhaps it would be, unless you had sat at the bedside of many brave men who begged to leave this world, some praying to 'go home' to their God, others longing to finally 'be one' with their Beloved, and still others, still equally brave, seeking to 'leave behind' the terrible pain. They are not outliers, but rather standard stories for fragile frames. Some fear dying. Others fear death. Few fear both.

No, the club of which I'm a part is The Adult Orphanage. You've probably heard me say that during 2020, that strange year when most of us lived but few of us existed, that I lost my Mother, my gold fish, and my Father; I mourned two of three. I know how that sounds. I also know that it is true. It's not about bitterness or hate or a lack of forgiveness. It's not about pain that remains. It's simply a recognition that during those days, two of those relations had become incredibly life giving and Grace filled and peace centered. One was, to be terse, an emotional and spiritual black whole of pretend politeness. There , friend. Now I am on record, and I am certainly the outlier. Any truth you need to breathe and embrace and understand about a person in your life, whether yoked by blood or by circumstance, will now be easier to entertain.

The reason I have, and will continue to mourn my father is this: I did not know him. All the time I am in proximity to people who grew up fatherless. Or with fathers who wounded. Or with fathers who later left. Or with fathers who did not father. My father was none of those things. My father was a Dad. And even a Daddy. Early on, he was often a rage fueled, chain smoking borderline personality that might explode at any moment, over anything. Then he met a man named Jerry, who reintroduced him to a man named Jesus. And from that moment it was game on. The father who couldn't wait to get to the bottom of the carton of cigarettes so he could leave the house to go get more suddenly couldn't wait to get to the bottom of the bucket of Grace so he could run to the Altar of God for more.

An aside here, Friend. You are not a part of the club. There is, perhaps, something you need to know about the journey ahead.

Even though my father had met Jesus, the one he would testify was the Author and Creator of all things-- when it came to his personality-- my father's was still all his. Much of that took years to change. Some of it never did. But little by little, the sweet erosion of Grace wiped away stubborn and angry and rage and hate and a hard heart. And the rising Son brought patience and peach and joy and love and grace. So much so, that anyone who knew him, right up until his last days, would say, "I never knew a more gracious man." In the end, a lot of who he had been, prior to the days when Jesus first took his hand, came back. Cancer has a way of mining pain that is unfathomable. They have drugs for the body. They have not yet figured a way to drug the spirit and the soul. Extreme pain, evidently, is most likely to put our minds back in that place of our least resistance to extreme Grace-- even the Good Father has, in fact, never let go, and holds us like a terrified infant in middle of a raging storm, we cry and scream and are completely inconsolable. A Good Father knows the clear signs of exhaustion and still holds on in Grace. A Good Father recognizes that when sleep comes, Peace will come; even if the infant has no such knowledge, and cannot quit giving into the terror at the time.

Part of being in the male wing of the Adult Orphanage is that we suddenly find ourselves locked in on the singular goodness of our fathers, and we act as if the bad had never occurred. And because of it, we never unpack our luggage. It is simply hefted into storage, something that those who come after us will deal with some day. "Sin passed down, even to the third and fourth generations"? It is simply the story of the power of extreme dysfunction.

This is all to set the stage, friend, for what I have to tell you next. Not because it's important for you to know me. But because I want you to know you more almost as much as I long for you to know our God more. Strangely, knowing ourselves more as men involves so much understanding our fathers for who they were and how they were. And there, I continue to mourn my father. Because as I get to know more and more about myself, I understand so much more about him. And I realize I had so much wrong. He is, in so many ways, the father I never knew.

I once sat in a room with a father, a groom, and several groomsmen. When fathers of the groom are present,they strangely find any silence uncomfortable, and want to fill it with wisdom. This father said,

Son, there is something you should know. Marriage is where one completely dysfunctional company sends out a representative to meet a representative from an equally dysfunctional company to affect a merger they both seem to need.

OK. Dad. Props for relational honesty. But, a couple of things. Truth is about timing. This might cast a real shadow over the service and ensuing honeymoon if your son was actually listening and the gravity of what you were saying actually sank in. Also, if it did, it's going to make the next several family functions really weird. Because the two of you have been married for two decades. And your boy is seriously going to be wondering what you were saying without saying it.

But he does have a point. I grew up in an extremely dysfunctional household. I had a parent who was completely invested in my seeing and perceiving and understanding everything through the eyes of that particular parent, including how I understood myself, and how I understood the other parent. That parent was not my father. R.I.P Chaucer. You were a beautiful fish.

Imagine waking up one day, more than three and a half years after your father had been dead, and finally realizing that you'd had his personality all wrong. See, what I was told, and what I was shown, and what i coached to understand, and what over time cemented, was that my father was an incredible analytical personality. What that meant was that his greatest need was that he needed to be right. And so, because this is what six year old me had been led to believe, I still believed it at twelve. And at 22. And at 52. And we would battle back and forth over what was right and wrong until my father would withdraw from the scene. In the early days, it was for a smoke or six. Then migraines in the basement. Then Jim Beam in the Garage. And yes, there were a few bottles of Southern Comfort at the last. I think he wanted to connect with another member of the club. It made sense, right? What do analytical types do under stress? Their first reaction is to withdraw. I know this stuff like the back of my hand.

Except. What I never noticed. Because I never looked. And yes, a lot of that is on adult me. Is how quickly my dad would end up in withdrawal. And how he never actually started. there. No. He started in something quite different under stress with me. He'd quickly explode, then give in, then try harder-- this actually, often, for quite a length of time, and then, and only then, at the height of stress, would he withdraw. For my whole life, I had been taught that my father was "all about the facts" and "only wanted to argue" and cared more about being right than he did about people" None of which was being true. I was told, and I believed, and I came to tell myself, and I kept on believing, that my father had such a great need to be right that it nearly led the family to the precipice of fracture time and time and time again.

All of this was completely and totally false. What my Dad wanted and what he needed was to be noticed. It was his deepest human need. And it was also his second love language. The conjunction of those two things, in his house of origin, were met by being right. His father, a fallen away Methodist boy, and been sent north to live with relatives in the midst of the Dust Bowl. His mother, a school teacher, loved Robert Burns, Elizabeth Barret Browning, and the writings of James Steinbeck, among which she'd found surely found in his Grapes of Wrath, a piece of the story of her own Okie still on the run from his sending storms. My father grew up knowing that in order to be noticed, one had to be right. If one was wrong, it was the shadows of the stage, and not it's spotlight. It is no wonder, now, why he clung, in his core, to the smallest battles over the dumbest things. It was not, it turns out, the need to be right, a battle which constantly pissed me off-- at twelve and twenty-two and fifty-two. No, when he battled, he did so, because he needed to be known. And when he argued, he needed to be loved.

The father in the vestibule prior to the wedding was not, and is not wrong. But no groom thinking of hitting it on his honeymoon wants to have a deeply distressing conversation about emotional understand. To be fair, I'm not sure if anyone is ever ready for that. But, my friend, I'll hope you can agree, it's an important road to journey yourself. Now, perhaps, before you enter the club. "No regrets" is a hell of a bumper sticker. It also probably describes a life lived in hell. Outside of that, I've yet to see it done. Not, at least, by anyone at the Club of Adult Orphans. And once the lid is closed on life and the shovels of dirt begin to fall, the myth of Extreme Unction, the idea that you can "make peace with your past in death and dying," is a dream you'll always chase. Oh, you can live in peace. And you can live forgiven. And you can know freedom. But all that being said, there are some opportunities that never come around again. So, before you enter the club... stop for a bit. live wisely.

thus spake,

me