LONG FORM: Lament for a Christian Father 

What happens when we play the record of our lives backward?

It’s December 2017, and I am standing by my father’s casket, the ground still soft on my mother’s neighboring grave. She was sixty-nine. He was seventy-two. She had been my best friend. As the oldest son and a postulant to the Anglican diaconate, I fumbled my way through the Book of Common Prayer’s Burial Rite and then turned to words of remembrance. I eulogized my dad as being “high voltage.” “Sure, I’d been zapped my share of times, but I knew some high voltage love too,” I said. I was minimizing with euphemistic vagueness and hoped to thread the needle between honesty and respect. People who were close enough to my dad knew what I was talking about.

Humans, like delivery trucks, have governors that throttle their engines down to a safe and acceptable speed. My dad had no such governor. He was not safe. Emotionally he was the Spinal Tap amp that went to eleven. He was stuck on eleven. There might have been joy at noon and hell at one. Praising God with hands lifted high (at a church where no one raised their hands. “Do we have to sit on the front row?”), then road rage at someone on the way home who turned out to be a fellow congregant. (Yes, that happened.) There are scenes I can’t erase. Scenes like the time his rage turned on the sheetrock wall, or our cat who barely survived, or the many times it turned on mom or me. As a kid you have no idea you should keep your distance, so you keep getting zapped again and again. You learn later in books and counseling sessions that you’ve internalized your parents’ shame, but you don’t know any of that then. You just feel it.

In preschool I started to have what I would later know is called hyperhidrosis, or excessive sweating. I would sweat like an athlete, but it was all in my palms. My mom didn’t save my childhood papers and artwork, but if she had, they would be water-damaged and wrinkled. We kept a hand towel near the Atari console to wipe the joystick between turns with my friends. In adulthood I would have surgery to cut off the sweat nerve to my hands.

My older sister was the poster child of a black sheep. She was born to an eighteen-year-old version of my mom, who had eloped in Mexico with a Navy guy the year before. Her young husband was in a car wreck, and in one fateful week my mom went from expectant wife to widowed to a single mom. Photos of a spaced-out and traumatized teenage girl in a black dress next to a Catholic baptismal font demand grace for the life my sister would lead. Experts are beginning to realize that nature and nurture are a complexly intertwined dichotomy, not a simple binary. Only God knows how much of my sister’s path was carved out in those days and how much she was doomed for more trauma the day she was a flower girl at her mother’s wedding to the guy we would share as a father.

Parts of my sister’s story seem impossible today, but in Austin, Texas in the early 1980s, after one of the times she had stolen the family car and was off partying, I remember a police officer bringing her home and handcuffing her to the bed in her room. He handed the key to my dad and said she was going to end up dead if he and Mom didn’t figure something out. Later that day, confused, I found the key and helped her escape out the window. Everything soon changed. My sister disappeared to a last-resort fundamentalist reform school that would later be shut down by the Texas government, and my family started doing Bill Gothard’s homeschool program. (See the documentary Shiny Happy People for more on Gothard, as well as Rachel Darnall’s recent Current feature.)

Homeschool was virtually unknown in 1983. In those days the words “home” and “school” didn’t go together. It was not “jumbo shrimp” oxymoronic; it was “square circle” incoherent. As an eight-year-old boy who lived two blocks from the wooded creek and another two blocks from the baseball card shop, homeschooling enabled an extreme version of the free-range childhood still afforded kids in the 1980s. Down at Walnut Creek grace was liquid and redemptive. That grace contrasted sharply with the moral stricture and anger I stepped back into at home every evening. I love God’s Word, but I still hate the “the rod” language of Proverbs thirteen and the wicked mulberry tree that supplied ours. These knobby, elastic switches were used unsparingly, with pants dropped well into my teens, leaving whelps and sometimes breaking the skin.

Dad had learned an apologetic script that he faithfully rehearsed each time he was verbally abusive or ruined a family holiday. The script wore thin over the years. It somehow evaded connecting his abuse to a deeper brokenness in himself or to the breaking that was happening in me and my family. The Gothard system of homeschool was one of many fundamentalist devices offering a workaround to the broken world. The day’s narrative in our corner of evangelicalism was that Satan was destroying kids primarily through the changing culture, not through unchanging parents. The assumption was that you could learn more about Satan by playing a Metallica record backwards than by playing our own lives backwards.

The shame was infuriating. But it was the muzzling of both my emerging adult voice and the questions I asked that was unbearable. It was either “Yes sir” or “No sir.” There was no dialogue. There was little sign in my teen years and beyond that my dad had the capacity to tune into me. He and I had both shared the hobby of operating ham radios since I was a kid. We eventually got a high-end ICON “trans-ceiver,” but in the earlier days the transmitter and the receiver were separate machines. To talk to anybody you had to receive and transmit on the same frequency; otherwise you’d simply send messages out into space. From time to time Dad would gush effusive affirmations toward me, but he didn’t transmit on my frequency, and I didn’t receive on his. He wasn’t receiving my clear but nonverbal SOSs, which said, You hurt me—do you care? and Could you calm down so I can relax? Knowing he loved God and me only compounded my shame. Maybe my receiver was just broken.

In his lesser-known book Heretics G.K. Chesterton wrote of the cheap adventure-seeking of his day: hunting tigers in India or traversing the Orient by camel. He considered such adventures a “running from life”: There’s actually no real story in this sort of travel because you’re in control. He says the real adventure is being born, because it’s the moment you’re least in control. “There we do walk suddenly into a splendid and startling trap. There we do see something of which we have not dreamed before. Our father and mother do lie in wait for us and leap out on us, like brigands from a bush.” Being born is a true adventure for Chesterton because adventure “by its nature [is] a thing that comes to us. It is a thing that chooses us, not a thing that we choose.” This is a real story.

Somehow—and this is grace—Chesterton’s writing helped me look for plot, drama, and development in my life and in my father’s. Friendships, and even a lot of romance, are safer and more transactional. The effort put into the relationship is rewarding, or you start putting less into it. Somewhere there’s a sweat-stained copy of Chesterton’s Heretics I acquired in my early twenties that gave me the paradigm to see God in my story.

Jesus added safeguards to his teaching to prevent us from abstracting the gospel and dehumanizing our abusers: “Forgive and it will be forgiven.” “Shouldn’t you have had mercy on your fellow servant?” Patricide, like genocide, requires us to dehumanize and “other” them, while mercy requires that we rehumanize and “together” them. Our fathers’ lives are stories too, and stories provide the possibility of solidarity.

My dad was enough of an open book that I didn’t have to do deep archeological work on his story. A sick rabbit he had autopsied as a young teen (he wanted to be a veterinarian) had given him a disease that left him with the shaky hands of a late-stage Parkinson’s sufferer. As a kid I envied the part of the story where the doctor put him on a high-calorie diet and he got all the malted milk balls he wanted. But those tremors and that temper meant real trauma for me. Working with him under the hood of our old Mercury Cougar station wagon, I knew that a carburetor was like a time bomb. A screw falling into the engine was like clipping the wrong colored wire. Boom.

Dad’s dad had cheated on his mom, which led to my dad—a Jersey boy with a Yankee accent—boarding a train to South Texas where he was regularly bullied. The day before he died, Dad told me his mom must have been pregnant on that train ride from Jersey. Nanny was a nurse, and when Dad was a baby she would check him into an empty hospital room while she worked her shift. One of those times he was checked in not so she could work but so she could have a procedure. She never knew that he knew. When Dad talked about being suicidal and institutionalized in his early twenties, he didn’t talk about it with shame but with surprise that most people didn’t have the same haunting thoughts.

My grandfather died of a brain aneurysm when he was fifty eight in the same red arm-chair that his father had died in also at the age of fifty eight. My dad was fifteen. That armchair ended up in my room, and it was in that armchair when I was fifteen that I read the book of Galatians. Chapter three stunned me: “We are not saved by grace through faith and then perfected by Gothardism” (my dynamic equivalent translation). This truth freed me from the law but also weaponized me for theological conflict a few months later: I was sent to Oakbrook, Illinois to work as a landscaper at the Gothard headquarters in exchange for room and board, and on breaks I had one-on-one meetings with Bill in his office, where he tried to cajole me back to his version of “the faith.” My defense of the gospel in those days was nothing less than a fight for my existential survival. It was as instinctual as it was theological. It was a fight I shouldn’t have had to fight.

People say “forgiveness is a process.” Bitterness is also a process. By grace I tipped toward forgiveness when my own children were born. I confronted Dad the first time he lost his temper around my firstborn, Ava. I out-alpha dogged the aging alpha dog. That was it. He never lost his temper again in my presence. Dad’s softening as an older man made him a great grandpa to my kids. When our second daughter Layla was diagnosed as intellectually disabled, his gushing love was uninterrupted. We had a third child in part to lessen long-term care burdens on Ava, and when we found out our little boy Henri had Down Syndrome, my wife and I were staggered. But Dad wasn’t. God was in charge of this story, and it wasn’t finished.

Henri would go with me to the rehab center in Dad’s final months. They had a special connection I didn’t envy; instead, I entered it. It was an indirect sacrament. My receiver began picking up scratchy signals of love. It was a channel of God’s love through my dad’s love to my son. And to me. I had hung in there with Dad all those years with a gospel-informed instinct that grace works in a cruciform pattern, not a Hallmark pattern. Chesterton was right about adventure and story and family, and Jesus was right about forgiveness and mercy.

In December of 2017 my formerly sweaty hand held Dad’s formerly shaking hand as he died. Since his passing I’ve been surprised to find a type of grace I didn’t know existed before: a post-mortem grace, a grace of relational plasticity. Every parent of an intellectually-disabled child knows the hopeful word “neuroplasticity.” Similarly, there’s a relational plasticity that extends past the grave because of grace. All the earthly footage of my dad and me has been shot and the set has been torn down, but the biopic film of his life still sits on the cutting floor in my heart and memory. Even now, scenes take on new meaning and arrangement. As I write this, the work of forgiveness and healing doesn’t necessarily eliminate a painful scene, but it does move it to a less defining part of our story. It adds different notes to the musical score. I now offer overdue gratitude for forty-seven years of Dad’s working a government desk job, driving an unairconditioned VW Bug in the Texas heat, eating sack lunches at work. These sorts of things add color to a mundane provision that slipped past me with no acknowledged sense of God’s or my dad’s goodness. A legacy of his gifts, once obscured by pain, emerge. I play the record of mine and Dad’s life backward, and every time I listen, I hear new messages of the gospel and of grace.

P.S. When Dad died in 2017, I was unaware there was any video footage from my childhood. I had some unmarked eight-millimeter film converted, and I found this. I cry every time I watch it.

Paul Van Allen works in global church advocacy with Pioneers and is planting a multiethnic Anglican church in Pflugerville, Texas.  You can reach him at hardbreakfast@gmail.com.

Image: Furnished by author