So today would be my dad's 57th birthday. Except that he's been gone 16 years this month. I hate January. There are too many memories associated with this time of year for me, and I'd rather just bypass the whole month and shoot straight for February, which I guess I could do if I moved to Walmart. They have Valentine's Day stuff out the day after Christmas, so evidently they have an aversion to the whole month of January as well...
I suppose then that it should come as no surprise that God is using this month to make me
So the thought of staying angry at any one person for any amount of time seemed ridiculous to me. I don't keep people in my life long enough to have a reason to ever get angry at them, right? Wrong. Despite frivolously approaching my need to forgive, I came to the ugly conclusion that I've been irrationally and irrevocably angry at two "people" for the better part of two decades, namely my father and my Father. Yes. My name is Johanna, and I'm pissed at a dead guy and God. Like, really pissed. Like a sordid Elizabeth Barrett Browning poem kind of pissed: "How do I hate thee? Let me count the ways..."
My relationship with my earthly father was never strong. There was never much of an attachment there. My dad lost his own father when he was seven and never had a spectacular grip on what it was like to be a father, let alone a father to a strong willed, introverted, anxious-to-please little girl. He wasn't one to seek out quality time with me and very rarely complimented me outright. I grew up feeling like he didn't care much for me, and I eventually pulled away and stopped reaching out. I tell you this not to request your pity; this isn't the reason I'm angry with my father; I'm well acquainted with the types of difficulties he faced parenting two girls, as I have two of my own. I explain this more to give you some perspective if nothing else.
No. My anger finds it's origins in what he did rather than what he didn't do. Shortly before he was diagnosed with cancer, my mother learned that my father had been having an affair. Of course as a child, the idea seemed preposterous. Parents didn't do that. They stayed happily married forever. Not in my house. I should have suspected something abnormal about the fact that he suddenly took an interest in taking me to play with his secretary's kids. The man who rarely took me anywhere would drive me to her house a couple times a week on the pretense that I loved playing with her two kids. As a child, it made me a little uncomfortable, but I considered the fact that he wanted to take me anywhere a step in the right direction. As an adult, it makes me feel used.
Along that same vein, as his cancer progressed he started taking me for Saturday breakfast. Once or twice a month for a handful of months he took me out so we could spend time together. This gesture left me with some of the more positive memories I have of him. My dad wasn't a talker, and I'm horrible at conversation initiation, so I think a lot of the time was spent just sitting and eating. But every once in a while he would touch on a bit of his childhood and share something that I didn't know before. I don't harbor any resentment or anger at this; the anger comes in when I think about the fact that it took a life threatening cancer diagnosis for my father to make an effort at getting to know his oldest child. The anger also stems from the fact that he died before he could start answering the really difficult questions. And for that, I direct my anger at God.
I've always struggled with the image of God as loving and constant. Truthfully, I've struggled with God as good at all. My childhood experiences of God were of a being that gave and harshly took away. It's hard to get past that and believe in the verses that say that He works everything for our good when still, 16 years later, I come up empty as to the good that came from my dad's premature death. I find I'm rather stuck. It's like I hit a wall in my relationship with God, and I've kind of been running myself back into it for years. The older I get the harder it becomes to refer to my dad's death, which seems so utterly unfair. People say time heals, but for me it's only made the wounds deeper and more apparent. As a child, the death of my father affected me very little. I sat emotionless on my parent's bed the night we watched him die on the fold-out couch in our basement. I watched "The Fugitive." I didn't cry when the seemingly endless string of phone calls was made to people who took an interest in my family and his passing, and I didn't cry at the funeral. Maybe I was already numb.
I can say with a veritable surety that I'm not numb anymore. The anger has seeped ever so slowly into my heart poisoning relationships that could have been and preventing much spiritual growth of any kind. What I feel most acutely now is pain and regret, both direct results of this incessant anger. I don't know how to deal. How do you forgive someone who can't physically accept your apology (assuming I'm even entitled to offer forgiveness for things I know in my heart were not maliciously meant) and a God who supposedly can do no wrong?
In the case of my father, I need to start being realistic. He was a good man, and he did his best. He was a good father. Or at least that's what I have to tell myself, or I'll never be able to move through this. I need to regret and put to bed my conceived notions of the relationship that could have been and learn to be grateful for the relationship that was, regardless of how I've skewed it in my own heart. I have to stop resenting him for dying, and yes. I am cognizant of how ridiculous that sounds. I get the feeling that this will be the hardest part of my forgiveness journey. The rational part of me (however small that part may be) tells me that my father did not die of cancer on purpose. No one would choose that death. He didn't desert us, no matter how strongly the 14-year-old version of myself screams this. I have to forgive his earthly shortcomings and forgive myself for harboring so much hate because of them. It's going to hurt. In the eloquent but simple words of Wat from A Knight's Tale, there's probably going to be "Pain. Lot's of pain!"
"Forgiving" God comes much less easily. See, if I believe that He is actually in control at all, I have to believe that he did have a purpose for the hardships I've experienced. And that that purpose is a good one. For someone who has been angry this long, I feel like I basically have to relearn who God is and what He represents, how He works and how He loves.
And I have to want to forgive, both in my head and in my heart. I retract my earlier statement above. Without a doubt, this will be the hardest part. Because it's always easier to languish in anger (especially when that anger is grossly self perpetuated) than it is to actively forgive. There's a part of me that has clung to this for such a long time, and that part of me says that someone is going to have to pry this buoy from my cold, dead hands. Or I could just release and sink into the peaceful oblivion that comes with finally letting go.
But that's a decision only I can make. And at some point I'm going to have to seek forgiveness for digging in my heels and wallowing in this for such a long time.
There's so much work to be done in this heart.
- J.
- J.
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