Seamus Heaney was born in 1939 in rural Northern Ireland. He grew up surrounded by cattle dealers and farmers. A brilliant student, he attended Queen’s University, Belfast, where he discovered his own vocation as a poet.

In Digging, one of his most famous works, he reflects on his vocation, armed with his ‘squat pen’, in the light of the vocations of his father and grandfather.
 
In the second stanza, Heaney is at his father’s house, for outside the window his father is digging in the garden. His father bends among the potatoes and comes up “twenty years away” - this digging has been his whole life.
 
I think we can pick up on a certain tension between the poet and his father. Notice the distance - the son is inside, the father outside; the son is above, the father below - “I look down.” It seems to be an emotional distance as well as a physical one.

Most, if not all, relationships between sons and fathers have degrees of complexity. And it is not unusual for sons to – at least for a time - view their father, either in his work or his family, as not quite good enough. Or worse. And to look down on their father. And for the son to compare the superiority of his squat pen with the inferiority of his father’s spade.

But then, like in this poem, like in life, the perspective – maybe through time, maturity, or happenstance – can shift. What Seamus considered inferior he did not before really understand. Now though he sees his father up close, how neatly and skillfully he digs. The poet marvels at what his father does: “By God, the old man could handle a spade.”

Heaney finds in his memories of his father (who may at the time of writing be dead) things about ‘the old man’ he could admire. Appreciation is a doorway to thankfulness. And thankfulness a doorway to forgiveness. And fathers and sons need to do lots of forgiving of themselves and each other.

To‘ by God, the old man could handle a spade’ Seamus adds “Just like his old man. ”We sense from the language that Heaney’s grandfather was a legend in the village, skilled at nicking and slicing neatly.

 
At the beginning of the poem, the poet was looking down, out of a window, watching his father dig; but now at the end of poem he is on the ground, delighting in the smell, the feel, the sound of digging, and the memories invoked.
 
“But,” Heaney concludes, “I’ve no spade to follow men like them.” And he returns to where he started: “Between my finger and my thumb / The squat pen rests. / I’ll dig with it.”

And in that ending, he alludes to the inevitability of change. The vocation of the father won’t be the vocation of the son. The son will find his own way, his own digging implement. And the son, we hope, will never again look down on the implements and vocations of his male forebears in earlier times. And the fathers, we pray, will not discourage or despise the digging implements and vocations of their present and future sons and daughters.

Here’s a story about fathers and sons from that master storyteller Bob Fulghum[i]:

1981.

From deep in the aisles of the supermarket comes what sounds like a small-scale bus crash followed by an air raid. If you follow the running employee armed with mop and broom you would come upon a young father, his 3-year-old son, an upturned shopping cart, and a good part of a soft drinks shelf – all in a heap on the floor.

The child is experiencing what might be called ‘significant fluid loss’. Tears, mixed with mucus from a runny nose, mixed with saliva drooling from a mouth that is wide open and making a noise that would drive a dog under a bed.  The small lake of soft drink doesn’t make rescue any easier for the supermarket 111 squad arriving on the scene.

The child is not hurt. And the father has had some experience with the uselessness of the [then prevalent] stop-crying-or-I’ll-smack-you syndrome and has remained amazingly quiet and still in the face of the catastrophe.

The father is calm because he is thinking about running away from home. Now. Just walking away, getting into the car, driving away somewhere down South, changing his name, getting a job as a paperboy or a cook at a hamburger bar. Something –anything – that doesn’t involve 3-year-olds.

Oh sure, someday he might find all this amusing, but in the most private part of his heart he is sorry for himself, sorry that he grew up, and sorry he had kids. He will not and cannot say these things to anybody, ever, but they are there and they are not funny.

The supermarket squad and the accumulated spectators are terribly sympathetic and consoling. Later, the father sits in his car in the carpark holding the sobbing child in his arms until the child sleeps. He drives home and carries the child up to his bed and tucks him in. The father looks at the sleeping child for along time. The father does not run away from home.

1994.

Same man paces my living room, cursing and weeping by turns. In his hand is what’s left of a letter that has been crumpled into a ball and then uncrumpled again several times. The letter is from his sixteen-year-old son [same son]. The pride of his father’s eye – or was until today’s mail.

The son says he hates him and never wants to see him again. The son is going to runaway from home. Because of his terrible father. The son thinks the father is a failure as a parent. The son thinks the father is a jerk.

What the father thinks of the son right now is somewhat incoherent, but it isn’t nice.

Outside the house it is a lovely day, the first day of Spring. But inside it is more like Apocalypse Now, the first day of one’s man’s next stage of fatherhood. Someday – some long day from now – he may even laugh about this. For the moment there is only anguish. “Why did this happen to me?” the father shouts at the ceiling.

Well, he had a son. That’s all it takes. And it doesn’t do any good to explain about that right now. First, you have to live through it. Wisdom comes later. Right now he just has to stand there and take it.

2016.

Same man and same son. The son is 28 now, married, with his own three-year-old son, home, career, and all the rest.  The father is fifty.  

Three mornings a week I see them out jogging together at 6.30 am. As they cross a busy street, I see the son look both ways, with a hand on his father’s elbow to hold him back from the danger of oncoming cars, protecting him from harm. I hear them laughing as they run up the hill into the morning. And when they sprint toward home, the son doesn’t run ahead but runs alongside his father at his pace.

They love each other a lot. You can see it. They are very care-full of each other –they have been through a lot together, but it’s all right now. One of their favourite stories is about once upon a time in a supermarket.

This Fulghum story touches on the fraught, and occasionally fabulous, world of fathering.

Everyone has or had a father, but many don’t or didn’t really know their father – and sometimes what they did know they didn’t like. For those who have had good experiences Father’s Day can be a time of appreciation and gratitude.  For those who haven’t had good experiences it can be a time of painful remembrance. Father’s Day can also be difficult for those who have wished to be father’s but couldn’t, or whose child[ren] have died.

This story reminds us that in the broad sweep of life our perspectives change. The viewpoint changes and our understandings change. What we understood as a child, or as an adolescent, or as a young parent, can change.  

The Fulghum story also evoked for me how in the last 120 years fathering has significantly changed. My grandfather, who I knew well, was born in the late 1800s. The expectation was that he would be the financial provider and protector of the family. Fiscal and physical strength were important. However, due to injuries sustained at the Battle of the Somme, neither was to be. His life was one of gardening, walking, reading, and [unusually for his day]attending his children’s school activities and sport’s days. That said, the raising of children in the home was largely my grandmother’s realm.

My father, born in the 1920s, also received this provider and protector script, with my mother having the ‘raising’ task. Dad was unskilled at matters like conflict resolution. His domain was his garage – and it was there [or out in the bush] that any talking with his children happened. I never heard his views on many things, including God. [God was a private matter].

It was during the latter part of my father’s life that huge changes started happening in society. Fiscally, in most suburbs in New Zealand, a single income became less and less sufficient for a family to survive on. Physical prowess progressively became less and less important as most jobs, even jobs traditionally considered ‘working class’, required more brain than brawn, and more education to get through the interview door. With women entering, and rmaining in, many workplaces that used to be male domains, the relationship between the genders both at work and at home underwent change.  

‘Change’ was everywhere the latter half of my father’s life. In the 60s and 70s what models were there for how to father? If you wanted to change how you fathered was there any men/mates who could assist you, especially given your gendered conditioning not to talk about feelings or admit to shortcomings? Who could coach you in how to be a good father? Indeed, what was a ‘good’ father?  

Of course, these questions continue today. My experience is that in each generation fathers usually try to improve on the fathering they’ve received, or have perceived they’ve received. And in that there is some hope, and also some seeds of forgiveness that might sprout in their children.

The Bible is largely not helpful when it comes to examples of fathering. The heroes of the Old Testament were appalling fathers by our standards. Think Abraham, think Jacob, think David. And the main exemplars for Christians – namely Jesus and Paul and the rest of the disciple gang either didn’t have kids or didn’t talk about them.

Some Father’s Day preachers use the Parable of the Prodigal Son, which is probably the best example of biblical fathering – with the father prepared to lose status and dignity in order to reconcile the relationship between himself and his sons, and the relationship between the boys.  But the cultural context is very different from our own.

I was amused to see that one Father’s Day sermon I read used the text from Luke 11:5-8 about perseverance [trying to borrow three loaves of bread off a friend at midnight]. The moral being that if you pester God, or your father, consistently and constantly, you will get what you want.

But maybe persistence, and resilience, is the ‘take-home’ learning for those of us privileged to be dads. Persistence in caring for and supporting our children through the seasons and changes of life. Persistence in sticking with our children when they mess up, and mess us up. Persistence in trying to do better. Persistence in trying to be a ‘good’ dad, and giving the time and thought such goodness needs. Persistence and resilience in loving.

[i] It Was On Fire When I Lay Down On It, Grafton, 1989.

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