Father's Day Meditation

I am a father: yes indeed, I have a daughter and a son. Gail and I had our first child a few months after I finished graduate school.  I began teaching and fatherhood at the same time. It was really hard; I was up late studying, preparing examinations, and reading papers, plus helping with nighttime nursing, diaper changing, and so forth. At the end of the first academic year, I had triple bags under my eyes. A few years later we started A Cook's Wares™ and had our second child at the same time. I became a father with two jobs: professor and proprietor.

Fatherhood is by far the most difficult role I have shouldered. It awakened a love I did not know was in me, and challenged my character - my wisdom, patience, compassion, fairness - to the extreme. I would say life was somewhat unreal before children. Nevertheless, Father's Day is somewhat of an embarrassment to me. I know my flaws and failures all too well. Moreover, I did not have children for the honor that might come my way. Furthermore, I believe the fatherhood that really counts is aesthetic, moral, and spiritual, not biological. As Diotima expresses in Plato's Symposium, if we have any substantial success as fathers, it is because we have nurtured aesthetic, moral, and spiritual good in children. In so far as that happens to us with biological children and to those without, whether we be adoptive dads, an older brother, priests, monks, teachers, administrators, or counselors, it is a great and awesome good, a blessing and destiny divine.

The point is this: whether you have biological children or not, celebrate the spiritual good males have nurtured in children. Plato would say, "That is true fatherhood." And I would say, "That is truly worth a celebration."