Padre nuestro, part 3

The Lord's Prayer (in Spanish) is the last thing my kids hear from me at night -- at least the last thing before they hear, "If your foot touches the floor you're on time out. I love you. Go to sleep. I'll miss you till the morning. Do you want to go to time out? Buenas noches, Melía. OK, I'm getting it. Cow's milk or soy milk? I DID warm it! OK, I'll dry it. There. Now go to sleep. Te quiero muchísimo, preciosa. Melía! You're on time out...."

OK, so the Lord's Prayer is ONE of the things they hear from me in the last half-hour of their day.

Anyway, I was sharing what this nocturnal last rite looks like on a typical evening, and then began reflecting on what the prayer means to me as I'm saying it.

Don't let any of this lead you to believe that I am actually thinking about the prayer each night. Some nights, it registers as gibberish even more to me than to my monolingual daughters, just a familiar game-over chant tantamount to the fat lady's song. Sometimes I literally forget the words and have to rehearse and start over to get to the Amén.

But often enough, a phrase strikes a chord, a word revives a dead branch of my soul. To use Jars of Clay's verbiage, the prayer can be "shelter from the rain or the rain to wash me away." Those nights, the words come alive on me. Or something in me comes alive on them.

Sometimes not. But often enough, I reconnect with the One who taught me to pray this way just enough to keep trying.

Santificado sea tu nombre (Hallowed be your name)

Kneeling beside my daughters' beds -- or scooting back and forth between them -- I realize once in a while that this is more than an acknowledgement that God is amazingly holy. That God is holy is plain enough to them, and to me.

They could tell you that God is taller than the roof, that He can fly, that He knows everything, is everywhere and can do anything. He is strong enough to carry all of us and our sleeping loved ones to heaven, and will when the time comes.

I could tell you how much God has grown up in my mind since I had all the answers, somewhere around adolescence. Bigger than my denomination, bigger than the Bible, bigger than Christianity, He is much taller than the ceiling under which I've often kept Him.

He is holy, and wholly other. Unbound by my expectations, unlimited by my anthropomorphizing bent, unaltered by the glass through which I see Him dimly.

I get this.

But the prayer is not saying, "Yo, God. Guess what? You are one holy Deity." This would be redundant, though not totally unhelpful. We do need reminding of the basics. Often.

But the prayer does not do this. It uses "sea" (read "SAY-uh"), the subjunctive mood of the verb be, which is nearly unheard of in English. It's suggesting, wishing, lobbying in favor of the Heavenly Father's name being holy. Maybe it's something more like, "God I want your name to be holy. I wish it were holy. Would that it were holy."

Is this blasphemous? I mean, of all things that need no intercessory prayer, you'd think God's holiness would be one of them.

But want to know why I do intercede for the holiness of God's name? Because to my princesses, I bear that name. I have the radical blessing of being "father," the metaphor God was crazy enough to use for Himself throughout the New Testament.

Like I said last time, I find peace saying, "Our Father in the heavens," because it reminds me that my kids have a Father more reliable than me. But the fact remains--their relationship to their Heavenly Father hangs heavily on my portrayal of the role of "father" in their world. If the earthly father is condemning, they might assume, how much more judgmental must the omniscient One be? If earthly Daddy is prone to rage, just how scary must the Daddy in Heaven, in all His power, be on a bad day?

Father God forbid.

God of Daddyhood, with all that I am, I dream that my fatherhood might do more good than harm to the hallowed name of "father." Whatever mistakes I may make, whether indecency, bankruptcy, idocy or whatever -- just let my girls grow up knowing that being in the arms of a Father is a good thing.

I don't know why you chose "Father" to sum up Who You are to us, Lord. I'm honored and terrified by it. But tonight, I beg You: Please let Your name, the name "Father" -- as I embody it -- be holy.

Padre nuestro, part 2

Last post, I described what it looks like when I'm praying the Lord's Prayer (el Padre Nuestro) with my girls at night. This time, I want to begin sharing some of the things that have gone on in my head as I've said that prayer with them.

As a teen, I was devoutly anti-ritualistic. People repeating the Lord's Prayer in unison seemed ridiculous, and totally missed the point, I was convinced. Praying exactly the words Jesus gave his disciples seemed about as literalistic and lame as someone wearing a tunic and walking around with fisherman in an attempt to do what Jesus did. Obviously, I contended, Jesus was offering us a pattern to follow, not a liturgy to repeat.

These days, I've come to appreciate memorized prayers. After a day of work and parenting, sometimes it's nice not to have to drum up a prayer that is natural yet appropriate, heartfelt while setting a good theological example for the little listening souls.

Actually, we pray both, beginning with homemade prayers from the Mommy and the Daddy and whoever else is game. But often, the prayer that ushers in the most peace--and not just because it's the one closer to the end of the exhausting bedtime dance--is the one that comes straight from the 1960 Reina-Valera (think Spanish King James) Version of Matthew 6:9-13.

Padre nuestro, que estás en los cielos.... (Our Father, which art in heaven...)

Thank God I am not the only Daddy they have. Hard as it is to explain that I'm their father and so is God, what a relief to know my limited resources are but the hint of the aroma of the crust on the tip of the iceberg of their strength. After hours trying to love, discipline, feed, teach, referee, encourage, correct, clean up after and play with my beautiful brood of princesses, it is a grace to realize that at the end of the day, I do not have to be king.

"Our father." In these words, my wife and girls and I are on our knees together, equally childish, equally helpless to defend or make sense of ourselves. Not Brielle, Melía, Ashlyn, but it's me, oh Lord standing in the need of prayer. We all need Your Fatherhood.

With one Father, in a sense we are siblings. Sometimes the idea of being big brother to my girls seems more desirable to me even than Daddy. It allows me to love, protect and guide while acknowledging that the little ones and I have one Source. More than teacher to them, I am peer tutor, still a student, as needy as ever for wisdom from the Master.

I've always been intimidated by Bible heroes' abysmal records as fathers. (See Fathering fears, then and now.) Adam, born in perfection, raises a murderer. Noah, the one who found favor in the eyes of the Lord, ends up cursing a son and his descendants after waking up on the wrong side of the bed. David, man after God's own heart, raises one son who rapes a half-sister and another who starts a bloody rebellion against David.

I was talking through this uninspiring "cloud of witnesses" with a friend and mentor named Tracy. "I get a little freaked out realizing that most of the biggest heroes in the Bible really sucked at being fathers," I laughed nervously.

Tracy looked back at me, never missing a beat, and uttered the words that may have done more than anything else to put my heart at rest. "You're going to suck at it too, Mike." (Did he actually say that? I wondered.) "And by grace, they are going to be OK anyway."

"Padre nuestro." I am so deeply grateful that these little girls are not stuck with just this frail human father.

They have One who is in the heavens. And the old-school Spanish reminds me that it is not just "Heaven" singular, that far-away paradise where God sits on a chaise lounge with his iced tea while we suffer down in our ghetto of sin. It is "los cielos," "the heavens"--all three of them, including the sky above us and the air around us, even the breath I breathed to say this prayer. He is the Father whose kingdom is not of this world, but absolutely is in it--a kingdom within us, among us.

Our true Father is in heaven. And He is closer to us than our skin.

Thanks, Lord. I needed that.

I love everybody who loves my kids

Thinking back through the holidays, I'm realizing I pretty much only like to be with people who like to be with my children.

I really hope that friends I had in the BC (Before Children) years did not have such a narrow focus, because before I had a child, I did not like anyone's children. I was not even that hot on the childhood version of myself and my brothers. While others idealized the innocence of childhood, I remembered being cruel, narcissistic, insensitive and judgmental. (Really, I was even worse in these areas then than now!)

So if you don't like being with my children, or anyone's children, and are just reading this to enhance whatever method of birth control you're currently employing, please, feel ye not bad. You've got sympathy here, my brother/sister. From there, only by the grace of God (and the instincts of parenthood) have come I.

It's just that, reviewing December, the common thread of all the people I really loved hanging out with was a genuine affection for my little girls. I never imagined myself choosing friends based on who my kids clicked with, and while that does happen, it's not what I'm talking about. I simply like all people--big or small, young or old, rich or poor, red, brown, yellow, black or white--who realize that Brielle, Melía and Ashlyn are priceless princess gifts from God, and who treat them as such. People like this are the Chosen Ones who get it, who've seen the Light, who stand in right relationship to the Truth that my girls RULE!

Can I get a witness?

No, but there really is a sort of religious fanaticism to this litmus test. Dig my daughters and you pass--well done thou good and faithful servant; here's your harp. Everyone else, weeping and gnashing of teeth for you; here's your accordion.

At first this seemed analogous to God's insistence that we love His Son, the whole "No man comes to the Father but by me" thing, which some Christians love to quote to prove that we are the only ones God really likes. (A strikingly effective way to endear people to the faith, don't you think?) And from that angle I didn't really like God or myself very much. Being so infatuated with one's begotten (even if it is the Only Begotten) that you doom all non-fans of the begotten to second-rate friendship or eternal alienation just didn't seem to be what Jesus would do.

But maybe that is the wrong angle. Maybe God's fatherly fixation is more on people loving His children--all umpteen billion of them who've ever lived. Loving Jesus is great, because it betters our odds of finding love for the Father. But surely God is more self-secure than I am and has less of a compulsive need than I do for folks to love his child.

Perhaps God and I are more alike in this way: We both have invested a lot of blood, sweat and tears in each one of our kids, and anyone who treats them as less valuable than we see them to be just doesn't fit in. We're both kind of nutty about our children; through the screaming and snot and poop, we see this beautiful perfection, this image of God, which may be more fantasy than reality. But we're passionate about that fantasy, and remember, we're nuts enough to believe that it might be real. And the more we get into our kids--the more that we give of ourselves to enrich them and show them love--the more fanatical we become about other people seeing them as we do.

Or, maybe it's just that I feel more comfortable around people who don't mind a half-full potty being brought out into the living room. I don't know.

But I do know this. My girls RULE. (Can I get an "Amen"?)

---

Questions I'm asking myself:

- How can I transfer my generous Dad's eye view of my kids to some of God's snotty, poopy, screaming adult children of whom I take a more dim view?

- Why are some people able to have so much love for children without having had their own, while others, like me, don't find that love until they are parents themselves?

Welcome (To what? And why?)

So I'm blogging my life as a father now.

This strikes me right off as a warped combination of megalomania, voyeurism and boredom. As for the first, you'll have to be the judge. The voyeurism will actually depend on what you, the reader, bring to the reading. And boredom? Please visit our home sometime (life and health insurance required, AD&D strongly advised) and decide how bored we are.

OK, guilty misgivings aside (or only begun?), let me welcome you to this public private space and share my vision for the thing. Why a blog on my daily experience of daddyhood? Here are my Six Selfish Reasons:

1. I live better with accountability; daily posts to the Web may help me be a more intentional daddy.
2. Sometimes the best me surfaces when I am sharing in a group instead of just left to my own devices.
3. Committing to a year of daily journaling (5 posts a week) will help me reflect on and, by grace, learn from my goofs--which are legion.
4. This is good writing practice.
5. If, aided by your candid comments, enough decent stuff shows up, maybe some will get published beyond the blogosphere.
6. This is an excuse to play on the computer that my wife thinks is kind of sweet.

And maybe, as a side effect, my ranting, panting and praying here will help you as a [future] parent feel less lonely on the journey. Maybe together we'll even come out a notch or two more enlightened. No promises, but it is a possibility.

Here is what I will promise not to do in this site:

1. Preach. Heaven knows I'm a common seaman, not a captain (Contrary to La Bamba's songwriter, Yo sí soy marinero, no soy capitán, no soy capitán.) Please don't let my use of sacred texts or other quotes scare you off; when they show up, it's because that string of words is the life ring keeping me afloat, or the dive belt taking me to the right depth.
   
2. Tell all. This will be intimate, but within limits. For your sake and my family's, I will self-censor to a degree.
3. Go on forever. With rare exception, posts will be brief and will spare you the newsy details. Again, for the sake of both family and readers, I'm committed to pounds of fathering for every ounce of father-blogging.

Which reminds me, I've gone on too long.

It's time to dance with my girls.