THE WISDOM OF OUR FATHERS

a sermon preached by
the Rev Dr Tim W Jensen
at the First Religious Society
in Carlisle, Massachusetts
Father’s Day Sunday,
June 17th, 2007

READING: "Remembering My Father" by Betty Jo Jensen

I want you all to know, notwithstanding the title of today’s sermon and in the spirit of full disclosure, that my own father wasn’t or isn’t an especially wise man. But, like a lot of fathers, over the years he’s developed a reputation for being a lot wiser than he really is -- a reputation no doubt at least in part enhanced by the habit I’ve developed over the years of attributing to him anything wise I happen to overhear that bears repeating in a sermon, regardless of where I may have heard it first.

Think of it as “Sermonic License....”

My father is often opinionated and frequently outspoken -- two characteristics which, as his son, I sometimes fear I have inherited; and since these days our opinions rarely agree, clearly the Old Man’s not as wise as I’ve made him out to be over the years. But my father is also a kind, generous, hardworking man, as well as being someone who is genuinely optimistic about the fundamental goodness of other human beings, and the providential nature of the Universe itself. And he has a fantastic sense of humor. A few weeks ago, when my brothers and I were all together around our mother’s hospital bed during her final hours, he told us “When I die, I want to go peacefully in my sleep like your grandfather. Not screaming in terror like all the passengers in his car....”

My father isn’t perfect...I don’t think any father is. But part of the wisdom of growing up is learning to see and appreciate our parents for who they are in spite of their shortcomings and for all their limitations and imperfections (just as they have appreciated us)...knowing that as mature adults ourselves, we embody both their many faults and their many virtues in ways we may never fully understand (or at least not without years of psychotherapy). But even though our own fathers may sometimes fall far short of perfection, there is also a collective “Wisdom of Fatherhood” which, taken in aggregate, is enough to redeem the reputation of them all.

We don’t always have to look to our own fathers to acquire this Wisdom of Fatherhood for ourselves. The world is full of potential “Father Figures” -- teachers, coaches, mentors, friends -- many of whom are filled with wisdom, many others who are merely full of themselves...and one of the most important gifts our own fathers can give us is the ability to discern who is worth listening to (and learning from), and who is not. Our parents instruct us by both precept and example, and the lessons we learn are not always those they hoped to teach us. And yet ultimately the decisions we chose to make are our own, and we alone are responsible for the lives we end up living.

My own father tried to teach me how to throw a football, catch a baseball, hit a golf ball, and shoot a basketball; how to bait a hook, fly a kite, row a boat and tie a necktie; to open doors for ladies (and to leave the seat down), and so many, many other things I can scarcely begin to remember them all...some of which I actually learned, some of which I NEVER learned, and still others which I’m still learning, or had to go and relearn correctly later. But the three most important things he tried to teach me are so much a part of my consciousness now that sometimes it’s hard to tell where my dad’s teaching leaves off and my learning begins.

And the first of these lessons is about the importance of Integrity. Personal integrity was and remains without a doubt one of my father’s most significant core values. The West Point Honor Code seems mild by comparison: my brothers and I were not only taught not to lie, cheat, or steal, or tolerate those who do; we were also told that we were only as good as our word, that our good reputation was our most precious and valuable possession, and that once it was damaged it was almost impossible to repair. Honesty and Trustworthiness were everything to him; as kids we could screw up in almost every way imaginable (and believe me, we did...mostly my brothers though; not so much me....); but no matter what it was that we had done, my father could always forgive us...provided we didn’t try to lie our way out of it.

It was sometimes OK to keep secrets...provided they weren’t the kind of secrets you should NEVER keep, and we were working diligently to make things right again; because, like for a lot of parents, there came a time when my Dad didn’t really WANT to know everything we were up to. Self-Reliance was a very important value for him also, as were minding your own business and being kind and not cruel. Just because the truth sometimes hurts doesn't mean one should be brutally candid just to be hurtful. But more often than not, when we got in trouble we were a lot better off just “fessing up” and asking for his help. Because as important as Self-Reliance was to my Dad, it was even more important that other people knew that they could rely on us, and that we knew we could rely on him.

And this brings me to the second thing that my Father taught me, which is the importance of Accountability. I suspect there are still a lot of households where the phrase “Just wait until your Father gets home” still strikes terror in the hearts of naughty children. In our home, my mother never even had to say it out loud -- we learned at a very early age that we were responsible for the things we’d done wrong, and my father wasn’t so much the Enforcer as he was a “Disciplinarian” in the truest sense of that word.

I remember the thing I hated most was being sent to my room, not as punishment, but so that I could think about what I had done wrong (and why it was wrong), and then later explain it to my father in such a way that he understood that I understood why I should never do that particular thing again.

It was agonizing. And yet it also taught me that there are natural consequences to every decision that we make, and that we should try to anticipate those consequences BEFORE we act impulsively on our choices, because we will indeed eventually have to live with the result. Or as my Dad sometimes liked to put it “we pay tuition for every lesson we learn in life, and there’s simply not enough time to make all the mistakes we need to make ourselves in order to learn what we want to know by trial and error.”

Learning how to learn from the mistakes of others, and taking responsibility for our own decisions rather than simply going along with the crowd, were also both important components in this process. And as far as my Dad was concerned, when it came to accountability it didn’t really matter whether you were an active participant in the wrongdoing, or simply looking on. He had another saying: “one boy, one brain; two boys, half a brain; three boys, no brains.” No matter what the other kids were doing, we were expected to keep our heads, and to make our own decisions.

Don’t get me wrong; my father was a very forgiving parent, who was proud of his sons and expected his sons to be proud of themselves. Which was why it was so important to him that we take responsibility for our actions and choices, and that we never do anything that we would have to be ashamed of.

And this brings me to the third thing my father taught me, which is the importance of Excellence. Not Perfection, mind you, because perfection is meaningless. We were already perfect in my father’s eyes, and nothing was going to change that. But Excellence: the Ambition, the Aspiration, the Desire to Excel -- to do the very best that we were capable of doing at that particular moment, and to accept nothing less from ourselves.

Perfection is impossible; we all know that. But Excellence is Personal: and the only person who can honestly judge whether you have really given it your all, or simply gone through the motions and phoned it in, is yourself. My Dad had very high expectations for his boys, and he honestly believed (or at least convinced us to believe) that we had unlimited potential. But he was much less concerned that we would let him down than that we would someday feel like we’d let ourselves down.

I don’t think anybody ever really wants to disappoint either of their parents, but the great thing about my Dad is that the only way we could really disappoint him is if we disappointed ourselves. Ultimately, it was up to us to choose our own paths, to set our own goals and standards of success or failure, to determine for ourselves who we were, and what we wanted to do with our lives, and the kind of mark we hoped to leave on the world. And no matter what we chose (and we all chose very differently), he was going to be proud of us...

Which is not to say that while we were growing up, he didn’t insist that we try certain activities whether we thought we’d like them or not. It was a lot like having to eat our vegetables: “how are you going to know you don’t like it if you don’t even try?” And by this he didn’t mean just a toe in the water, or a little nibble at the corner of the artichoke. We had to give it our best shot, no matter how awful it (or we) might be at first; and only once we had pretty much reached the limit of our natural ability were we allowed to decide whether to continue on or opt out.

Of course, the other half of this arrangement was that my father rarely said “no” to anything we wanted to try. He might ask us some hard questions (like “how do you expect to pay for this pony?”), but he always heard us out, and often was able to help us see for ourselves that maybe this wasn’t quite as good an idea as we had originally thought.

My Father’s core values of Integrity, Accountability, and Excellence were the cornerstones for everything else he tried to teach me, and form the foundation for who I am today. But there was one other lesson I learned from my father, and this had to do with the nature of Regret. Even (or perhaps especially) over the course of living a long (and hopefully satisfying) life, we all still end up with things that we regret -- perhaps little things that we wish we’d done differently, or important choices we made which, in retrospect, didn’t quite work out the way that we’d hoped they would.

But my father was never one to linger over his regrets, nor was he the type to let them pile up. And he was also the first to expose me to a question I continually puzzle over even today: in the long run, do we come to regret more the things we’ve done and wish we hadn’t, or the things we didn’t do, and wish we had? I’m not really sure there’s a right answer to this question; or, more precisely, I suspect the answer is often both.... But at the end of the day, we can’t really go back and change the things we wish we hadn’t done; the best we can do is to try to make amends. Yet we can always take a chance and try something new, especially if we are also willing to run the risk of looking foolish while we fail...the first time. Because the only REAL failure is not trying in the first place.

Be true to yourself, be true to your word, follow your dreams, and try to live your life without regret -- not because you never look back, but rather by looking ahead far enough to avoid doing things you will probably regret later, and by looking within yourself to find the courage to take the risk of at least trying to do the essential things you will someday regret not doing when you could.

This is some of the wisdom that my father tried to impart to me; some of the same wisdom I’ve tried to impart to my children... and I suspect that many these same precepts, perhaps in slightly different words, are familiar to most of you as well. The Wisdom of Our Fathers is not rocket science, nor even brain surgery; it’s not mysterious or esoteric or obscure.... Instead, it is simple and down-to-earth, practical, pragmatic, and tested by time: the hard-learned lessons of lifetime after lifetime of hands-on personal experience.

And yet, notwithstanding these simple truths, the most precious gift my father gave me, rivaled only perhaps by the gift of life itself, was the gift of his time and his attention. Knowing that I was the apple of his eye, knowing that I was “Precious in my Father’s sight,” gave me the confidence to pursue my own aspirations, and to be worthy of my father’s confidence in me....

[extemporaneous conclusion and farewells]