Reasons #7,693 - 7,697 I Love My Dad

So I started "playing" softball in the spring exhibition league at work, which really isn't considered a big deal, but my dad has tried to be at all my games. So far he hasn't made it to one, although he came close the other day when he got there in time to see us line up and say "goodgamegoodgamegoodgamegoodgame".

That was Tuesday, and he was having really bad radiator trouble but he still drove out to see me play. The truck ended up overheating on the way home from the field, and we parked in the right hand lane while he made three trips up to the gas station for coolant and water. It was dark and I grabbed my flashlight out of the glove compartment, and while I steadied the beam on the funnel I could see his face while he poured, not even angry or annoyed at the steam. I know I would be spitting pissed at that point, but my dad is so patient and solid. He knows not to get caught up in the little stuff. He was just happy to have someone to hold the flashlight, someone who happens to be his daughter.

When we finally got home, he started making what we called "an international meal" - fishsticks, red beans and rice from a box, baked potatoes, and italian bread, complemented with a fine California merlot. I cleared the kitchen table of mail, newspapers, keys, and cellphones. He asked me, as he was stirring the rice, "Did they pick a new pope?"
"Yeah, like the worst one up for the job."

My dad and I don't talk about religion very much anymore. He was raised Catholic, went to parochial schools, woke me up for church every Sunday of my childhood, and taught Sunday school. Before he met my mother, he thought about becoming a priest, just as his father did before meeting my grandmother.

He was in the Knights of Colombus and together we would visit institutions for the mentally retarded, along with a deacon, bringing Jesus and cookies into their lives for two hours a week. I was only 12, but I remember knowing how God must have wanted us to live our lives as I watched my father wheel the broken shells of humans, ones society gave up on at birth and who had spent their lives in decrepid institutions, into the common room for a simple mass.

Most of the residents in the place had no teeth, because they would bite themselves or others. Rather than work to fix the behavior problems, the caretakers chose to remove their teeth altogether - it was quicker and easier. This would upset me, but again I watched my father place the communion hosts in the mouths of these broken angels and help them gum them down, and knew what love was.

But one week, when I was 17, the Sunday morning wake-up calls stopped. I remember waking up late and seeing my dad mowing the lawn. I had already started having my own doubts about the Catholic doctrine - why doesn't God love my gay friends? - and couldn't believe my good fortune at not having been dragged out of bed to get down on my knees and pray to a God who hated people I loved. I didn't ask why we weren't at church for fear that my parents had just forgotten what day it was, and mentioning it would remind them.

Come Tuesday night, I still hadn't asked him.

I know my mother's tough stance on religion - she can't stand the hypocrisy of Catholicism - but in talking with her about it she always made it sound like my dad was, despite not going to church, a die-hard Catholic. So I was shocked when we started talking about the new pope, and I finally asked the question I haven't been able to ask for years.

"Dad, do you consider yourself Catholic?"
He was wiping down the table, and in his slow, steady way he said, "No, honey."
"Why not now?"
"Well," he said in that way reserved for older men who are recounting stories of the good old days, "your mother and I decided awhile back that the worst thing to happen to human spirituality is organized religion."
I couldn't believe what I was hearing. He kept going.
"I just figure, if you want to have a relationship with God, why let everyone else tell you how to do it? That gets in the way a lot. The politics of a parish get in the way a lot too. People get greedy about power and status. And once the church gets involved, then it's all about money and how much money can we make. There's marketing, advertising. It's a business. A thinly-veiled business, but a business."

He finished wiping down the table and that was all he said. He took the fishsticks out of the oven as I opened the wine. We gathered around the table and said grace over our "international meal", mother, father, sister, brother and God, no marketing or politics, just a family. Amen.