This past Sunday the young adults presented a fine worship service at First Unitarian.  Joseph Boyd spoke movingly of his father (it was Father’s Day), and I asked him to be a guest writer on my blog.  I’m sorry that you will not see here his evocative delivery, but the words hold power, still:

My father loved baseball. As a kid he dreamed of going to see a live baseball game, and at the age of 38 he got his first opportunity. I was nine, and he took me along to see the Seattle Mariners. My father wanted to get the most out of this experience, so he did some research, and discovered that the teams held batting practice two hours before the start of the game. If you stood in the outfield during batting practice, you would have a small chance of catching one of the baseballs that was hit over the fence. My father bought us both baseball mitts and we drove up to Seattle, and arrived two hours before the start of the game.

When we arrived we saw hundreds of other fathers with their children, all wearing baseball mitts. We took a spot in center field, and up to bat comes Ken Griffey Jr., one of our favorite baseball players. On the first pitch he smacks it to center field straight toward my father. It is such a straight shot that everyone around us backs away and gives my father space to focus on the ball hurdling toward him. The ball comes closer and closer, and he has his black mitt in front of his face. The ball hits the top of his mitt, smacks him in the forehead, and bounces onto the field.

Without skipping a beat my father shouts to the outfielder: “Hey, that’s my ball. Look!” He points to his forehead where the baseball has made an imprint. You can see the stitches of the baseball. The center fielder laughed, and then threw the ball up to my father. My father then gave the ball to me as a memento of that day.

When people ask me about my father today, I usually tell them that he died years ago, and that’s about all I usually share. My father struggled with depression for most of his life, and I let that struggle define who he was in my mind. When I thought of my father I saw a man who was sad, a man who was lonely, a man who was broken. It was a two dimensional view of him that I clung onto.

God and father are often synonymous in many spiritual traditions. “Our father who art in heaven,” for example. Growing up, our fathers are gods to us. They are certainly bigger than us, and more powerful. They are there to protect us, to guide us, to love us.

As we get older we quickly learn that our fathers don’t have all the answers, and that they’re not always going to be there when we need them. For some of us our fathers were never there. They were absent- physically, emotionally, or both.

My father knew he wasn’t perfect. One day he came into my room, and he asked me: “You know I love you, right?” I could tell by his body language that the question was not rhetorical. It was a real question for him. “You know I love you, right?” I saw in that moment that he doubted himself as a father, he doubted his ability to communicate his love to me.

My father communicated his love to many people. He was a minister, and his ministry has served as a guide to my life. Through his life, he taught me two important lessons:

1. Strength is not the absence of weakness. True strength is leading with your weakness.

2. How to write a sermon. As a boy I was fascinated with the process of constructing and delivering a sermon that would move hundreds, thousands, millions of people. My father slowed me down and taught me: Don’t worry about writing a great sermon. Live a great sermon, and the words will follow.

Our fathers are divine, but not in the way we expect. Their divinity does not stem from perfection, but from their fallibility. It stems from the imperfect love they offer us. It comes from their hurt, their vulnerabilities. To give love, and to raise a child in the midst this hurt and vulnerability, is truly divine.

As a boy I saw my father as a man who was sad, a man who was lonely, a man who was broken. Today I see my father is more than that. My father was a man who loved baseball, a man who loved God, and a man who loved me.