A Father's Love

Masculine Love

“Our fathers were our models for God. If our fathers bailed, what does that tell you about God?”

-Tyler Durden, Fight Club

My Dad loved me. I can’t write that sentence without thinking of that scene in the movie Due Date where Robert Downey Jr. tells the tragic story to Zack Gallifinackis about when his dad ditched him and his family for good, to which Zack Gallifinackis, true to form, responds by laughing in his face and telling Downey Jr. that his (Zack’s) dad would never do that because he loved him.

I think the reason why my mind goes there is due to the sad truth that a father’s love consistently and plentifully given to his children is most often the exception rather than the rule. Yet, my father showed his love to me and my family every day. The gift of that love, plentifully and generously given every day, transformed me into a father who am able to do the same for my children, and the hope is, they will continue to pass it on.

My dad showed us his love by financially supporting us and working on everything around the house. When he came home tired from work in the summer he would still play kickball with us kids. He handmade an entire crate of blocks to play with as young children, and he always fixed any of our broken toys. He even built my sister a realistic white painted two story wooden dollhouse complete with individual wooden shingles, a red brick chimney, plastic see through windows with glued on blue shutters, and a staircase inside. Most of all, though, he was my dad, and what that word “dad” meant to me was a constant, loving, positive masculine presence in my day to day life. He was a personal authority who deftly and often humorously solved our childhood problems. Whenever I went to him with one of my piffling problems he always said or did the right thing to make me, a sensitive, melancholic boy with deep feelings, feel better about whatever life had in store for me.

Once, when I was about nine or ten years old, and a little too old to feel the way I was, I told him I had been getting scared every night and was having nightmares consistently of a witch or a vampire or whatever the kid monster happened to be. In response, he nodded and without a word found me a flashlight, both because I was still afraid of the dark and also of not being able to see whatever it was that was definitely coming for me. Instead of denying the existence of the thing that was shaking me to my core every night, he took his knife out of his pocket and gave it to me and told me to put it under my pillow and never to open it unless something was actually there. I did what he said that night and fell asleep clasping the unopened knife and flashlight under my pillow and slept the first deep and untroubled sleep I had for a long while. I kept these weapons imbued with the magic of a father’s love, and their power staved off all evil until the whole experience faded from my thoughts and feelings and I was able to give his knife back to him because I didn’t need it anymore.

Another thing he excelled at was making us feel better whenever anyone was sick, both of body and of soul. When I would be throwing up he would clean everything that needed cleaning, fetch anything that needed fetching, and he intuitively knew whether to stay, and for how long, and when I needed rest, and was always quick with a joke to dispel the gloom brought on by illness. When I was feeling better, he would always get me laughing. I remember once the cat walked in and he picked it up and pulled the cat’s scalp back giving it a funny face and said something goofy that has been lost to the mists of time. I look back now and I don’t find it that funny, but at the time, and at the age that I was, I cried laughing and felt even healthier afterwards.

From time to time I would inexplicably feel depressed. I moped around the house and lost interest in everything. I slept through most of the day, only getting up to eat, and then I returned back to bed. And this went on for days on end. I was worryingly young to be showing these kinds of signs of depression. My mom even brought me in to see my pediatrician to see what was the matter, which nothing, of course, was found. I was only about eight or nine years old the first time it happened, but I couldn’t shake this heavy feeling of overwhelming and inexplicable sadness, sometimes for days at a time when it struck.

The first time I had it, my dad dispelled it, not by addressing or ignoring it, but simply by buying me a candy bar. After I bit into it, the feeling just went away as mysteriously as it had come. Another time I had it bad for days, maybe a week, and he rented me my favorite video game and I got so excited, that once again, the feeling disappeared. Looking back, I’m not sure what caused these dark moods, but what I think he instinctively picked up on what I needed, and ended up giving me, was something a little extra. This extra that was given was all that I needed to make me feel and know the security of love. Within this security, I felt empowered to champion the world again, knowing that whatever happened he had my back.

A father's protective love given freely and generously every day heals wounds. It empowers. It imparts lifelong stability. It is a beautiful thing, one of the most beautiful things in life, outside of a mother's love, of course. A father's love mirrors the divine, and when a child is embraced in it, he knows true peace. Without knowing this love, all of these beautiful things a child should know and be given, turn into their inverse.

The child becomes wounded and lashes out, not necessarily out of malice, though maybe, but mostly out of pain and frustration, knowing the wounds he carries will have to heal only by scarring over the course of time. He automatically begins life feeling disempowered and this destabilizing sense only increases as life continues to hurl larger and more painful stumbling blocks in his way the older he gets. The hardness of the world comes out the clearest and most forceful in his life. Any notion of God as a being of love, if not outright laughable, is certainly as unknowable as it is unapproachable. This hard way of seeing life only intensifies and cycles out of control when it tries to find a momentary balm to the pain through addiction of any kind.

Recently I've started to see the dawning of recognition on social media that there is a crisis of masculinity of pandemic proportions plaguing the West. We see thousands of people, presumably from terrible homes, and also presumably, most with terrible dads. These thousands of people are in all of our cities, living on the streets, addicted to substances, primarily fentanyl. On the internet, we see men lacking drive, looking to other men like Andrew Tate and his adjacents in the man-o-sphere for support and help. We see men of all ages acting like petulant children, everywhere, all the time. We see men not knowing how to date women with ease and fun, many giving up the thrill and fun of the chase altogether, and, presumably, perpetually hooking up with themselves and their fantasies instead.

Of course there are many complicated reasons for men doing all of these things. Men aren't a monolith nor are these problems monoliths. It is a complicated, hard, socially ambiguous, and dangerous world out there and many, if not most, young men lacked their fathers' careful guidance starting out. No one showed these guys how to navigate the intricacies of work and dating, of finances and home maintenance and all the other individual stressful things that make up a day. These poor guys lacked their dads’ simple, humorous instructions on how to balance all of these things with humor and God's good grace. More than that though, they lacked their father's loving and daily presence. The catalyst to all of these kinds of destructive behaviors is a severe lack of fatherly, masculine love daily shown to children.

The crisis of manhood in the West is personal, but the answer is cliche as it is true. The answer to the crisis of masculinity is love. More to the point, the answer is masculine love. Men who are lost need to embody masculine love. Yet, we as a culture are so far along now, we don’t even know what masculine love looks like. We get confused thinking masculinity is anger or aggression. It's neither of those things, and it's certainly not domination. Masculine love is self sacrifice for the good of those who are loved. Men give up their wants, desires, their time, their contentedness, and even their bodies, when necessary, to give a moment of joy and happiness to those they love, knowing that each of these moments add up to a lifetime of happiness for their family and loved ones.

My dad was a very masculine, blue collar, world hardened guy. Yet, he wasn’t above laughing at himself or showing his children tenderness and care. He also wasn’t above grueling work and long hours, or a long commute, when he needed to put them in. What my dad taught me about masculinity is that it means daily self sacrifice. He put us, his family, first, all the time. He put us in front of all of his wants and all the little things he would have liked having or doing, except a football game, obviously. Nothing comes between a man and the big game. Joking aside, he put us first all the time. He showed us kids what it meant to love. He loved God, he loved my mom, he loved us kids and he loved and took care of his own parents, who lived in the same town as us, until the day that he died.

Furthermore, by constantly shedding his love onto us kids, he modeled a more profound, and ultimately more foundational love for us. He modeled a love that lasts for eternity. We model God from our fathers, Tyler Durden from Fight Club was at least right about that, but what he, and the Andrew Tates of the world, like him, miss is, men's love is self-sacrificial. Without that sacrifice of ourselves, we men become consumed with our selves.

The problem, the crisis of men in the West isn't ideological at heart, it's profound selfishness and self centeredness. We won't find a solution for that until we learn to sacrifice in our love every day for those we love. Until men in the West understand we need to sacrifice in our love, and ultimately until we learn to embrace the divine sacrifice in the person and divinity of Jesus Christ, until we take our cross on our backs as He took on his, in a wellspring of love to give mankind back our hope, until we learn to take on the discomfort and pain of our daily cross with grace, humility, and their natural outpouring which is humor, all out of love for those around us, we will continue to perpetrate and perpetuate this crisis.