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Sunday
When I was thinking of a poem for today’s post—a religious lyric that would also celebrate Father’s Day–I initially thought of John Donne’s “Hymn to God the Father,” in which the speaker pleads with God to forgive him for his sins. These sins include sins that he continues to commit:
Wilt thou forgive that sin, through which I run,
And do run still, though still I do deplore?
The final sin is doubting Jesus’s promise of life after death:
I have a sin of fear, that when I have spun
My last thread, I shall perish on the shore…
And always there is the refrain, with the poet punning on his name:
When thou hast done [forgiving], thou hast not done,
For I have more.
As the speaker piles up all the different ways that he’s sinned, growing more desperate with each item on the list, the image of God as an angry parent becomes more entrenched. Even though Donne all but grabs God by the coat lapels and demands assurance—”swear by thyself, that at my death thy Son/ Shall shine as he shines now, and heretofore”—I emerge from the poem exhausted. Is Christianity, at its core, a drama of anger, punishment, and scapegoat sacrifice, with Jesus offering himself up to placate an angry daddy. “Die he or Justice must; unless for him/ Some other able, and as willing, pay/ The rigid satisfaction, death for death,” thunders Milton’s God in Paradise Lost.
“Sinners in the hands of an angry god,” as Calvinist Jonathan Edwards would have it.
This is not my god. When I think of divinity as a father—which I occasionally do but just as often think of Her as mother—I imagine Him more as the father in Naomi Shihab Nye ‘s wonderful poem “Shoulders.” Such a god is one who loves us despite our faults, who doesn’t insist on punishment and blood sacrifice. We are the child that God, like Nye’s father, holds lovingly and protectively in his arms.
I remember holding my son Toby in my arms for three hours right after he was born as Julia went off to have a follow-up operation. Apparently the nurses told her later that they couldn’t get him away from me. I don’t remember them trying but I vividly remember the touch.
Shoulders
By Naomi Shihab Nye
A man crosses the street in rain,
stepping gently, looking two times north and south,
because his son is asleep on his shoulder.No car must splash him.
No car drive too near to his shadow.This man carries the world’s most sensitive cargo
but he’s not marked.
Nowhere does his jacket say FRAGILE,
HANDLE WITH CARE.His ear fills up with breathing.
He hears the hum of a boy’s dream
deep inside him.We’re not going to be able
to live in this world
if we’re not willing to do what he’s doing
with one another.The road will only be wide.
The rain will never stop falling.
Though the road is indeed wide and the rain is falling, God hears the hum of our dreams, deep inside Him. “As I have loved you, so you must love one another,” Jesus told his disciples (John 13:34), and Nye gives us a powerful image of such love.
Happy Fathers Day.
