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Honor Thy Father Grand Rapids, Michigan
Sunday, June 15, 2003 THE HISTORY
OF FATHER'S DAY
In today's world, Father's Day seems like a tradition that has been around forever. The truth of the matter is, however, that Father's Day is a relatively new institution, which became an official holiday only 29 years ago. While there is a discrepancy over who was actually the originator of the holiday, both people who are credited with the earliest Father's Day celebrations were women. While some feel that the first Father's Day observance was planned by Mrs. Charles Clayton of West Virginia in 1908, popular opinion credits Sonora Smart Dodd, of Spokane, Washington with the idea. Sonora Smart Dodd had lost her mother during the birth of her sixth child. For twenty-one years her father, William Jackson Smart, raised his six children on his own, making all the parental sacrifices that come with raising a family. To Sonora, her father was the perfect example of a selfless, loving, courageous man. In 1909, while listening intently to a Mother's Day sermon extolling the virtues of motherhood, Sonora longed for a way to honor her father for all he had done for her and her siblings. It is then that she came up with the idea of holding a Father's Day celebration to honor fathers everywhere. Mrs. Dodd was able to gain support for a local Father's Day celebration from the town's ministers and members of the local Y.M.C.A. The date suggested for the first Father's Day was June 5, 1910, William Smart's birthday. However, because of the time needed to prepare for the celebration, the date of the first Father's Day celebration was moved to June 19, the third Sunday in June. The rose was selected as the flower to be worn in Father's Day celebrations; the red rose for those whose father was living and the white rose for those whose father had passed away. Newspapers across the country that were endorsing Mother's Day carried stories of the Father's Day observance in Spokane. Interest in Father's Day increased and local observances popped up across the nation. The state of Washington made Father's Day an official holiday that same year. Though the holiday was popular as a local celebration in many communities, it wasn't readily accepted nationally. In 1912, J.H. Berringer, of Washington conducted a Father's Day service, choosing to wear a white lilac as the Father's Day flower. In 1915, Henry Meek, president of the Lions Club of Chicago also began promoting Father's Day celebrations. He gave several speeches around the United States supporting Father's Day and in 1920 the Lions Clubs of America presented him with a gold watch with the inscription "Originator of Father's Day". Many famous people supported Father's Day and attempted to secure official recognition for the holiday including William Jennings Bryan, Woodrow Wilson, and Calvin Coolidge. In 1916 President Wilson observed the holiday with his own family and in 1924 President Coolidge gave his support to states wishing to hold their own Father's Day observances believing that widespread observance of the holiday would draw families closer together. In 1957 Senator Margaret Chase Smith lobbied Congress for a national Father's Day, but it wasn't until 1966 that President Lyndon Johnson signed a presidential proclamation declaring the 3rd Sunday of June as Father's Day. In 1972, President Richard Nixon established a permanent national observance of Father's Day to be held on the 3rd Sunday of June. This article may be
re-published as long as the following resource box is included:
Today, Father's Day is celebrated across the globe. While it is not as widely celebrated as Mother's Day, Father's Day is the fifth-largest card-sending occasion in America, with over 85 million greeting cards exchanged. Sermon The inspiration for Father’s Day was Mother’s Day. Sonora Smart Dodd
was sitting in her church listening to a sermon extolling the virtues
of motherhood on Mother’s Day, and became convinced that father’s
needed a day of recognition, too, especially since because of her
mother’s death her father raised their family as the only parent. It
was first a local celebration in churches. It didn’t spread. Later in
her life, when she returned to Spokane in the 1930’s, Smart Dodd
pursued a wider recognition for fathers. But the nation was introduced
to this celebration only after the Associated Men’s Wear Retailers of
NYC started promoting it as a means to combat the Depression. They set
up the National Council for the Promotion of Father’s Day, and worked
with florists, tobacconists, and men’s clothiers to devise the rose as
the Father’s Day flower and the tie as the appropriate gift. It still
didn’t take! Years later, President Richard M. Nixon, in 1972, made it
an official national holiday. This day has as ambivalent a history as many people have feelings for
their father! I’ve always wanted to preach on Father’s Day and this is
the first congregation with whom I have had that opportunity. But
after last year, the first chance I ever had to preach on this day, I
realized I really didn’t have much original to say about fatherhood!
And since this is the only religious community in Grand Rapids that
prizes originality above all other qualities of the spiritual life,
this may be my last! So I understand the ambivalence on an additional
level, too! I realized during this morning’s anthem that this is the third Sunday
in an “implicit sermon series.” That is, that the last two Sundays and
this one form a unit portraying the nature of the liberal religious
life. Two Sundays ago, in talking about Thoreau’s masterpiece,
Walden, we discussed how it was that in our religious tradition
the spiritual life is characterized by taking one’s experiences and
diving into them for their spiritual content, instead of the orthodox,
creedal view that would insist our experiences fit into a previously
declared set of doctrinal revelations. Last Sunday we proclaimed that
the foundation of the liberal religious life is the faith statement,
deemed as such because it can’t be proven, that our experiences in
this world are the “really real,” and not illusory or preparation for
greater or more real life. And today we complete the series by
presenting the fruits of the spiritual life. That is, this morning I
want simply to give you my observations of fathers and fatherhood
throughout 20 years experience in the ministry, 21 years experience of
fatherhood, and 36 years experience of having a father, my dad having
died 12 years ago. Those experiences, like this life, are real. My
experiences are different from yours, but as befits our tradition, are
the grist for the mill of meaning. And, of course, you can add these
observations to your own, or discard them as nonsense, which they very
well may be. They lay no claim upon you because they come from the
lips of a preacher! In other words, treat this sermon like all others
in our tradition as Unitarian Universalists. Observation #1: The older a boy gets the more he needs his father,
until he reaches maturity. We mistakenly think that boys become or
should become more self-sufficient and more their own person through
adolescence, and for that an independence from fatherly influence is
required. Or, that boys become men through a differentiation from
father, which comes about in conjunction with the support of their
mother. I think boys become men as their fathers stand beside them
during the triumphs and failures that make up a male’s adolescence.
Those experiences shape an adolescent’s differentiation and
individuality, not his distance away from Dad. This is why men in a
church, working with male teenagers, are imperative to a teen’s
development as young men. An emerging man needs as many “father
figures” as possible standing next to him. Observation #2: The older a girl gets the more she needs distance
from her father until she reaches maturity. This is a hard one for
fathers who have “Daddy’s girls” to hear and execute, but she needs
distance in order to develop a healthy sense of her own femaleness
within a framework of security. As a daughter grows into adolescence
and moves away from hugging Dad, fathers need to stand near enough to
their daughters so that she feels secure, but not too near her. It is
a balancing act of one’s emotions that fathers are challenged to learn
because it involves the proper emotional distance. Observation #3: You never know your father. Oftentimes people
will declare their mother a mystery, saying, “I don’t know why she
does that.” But I think that the recognition that mother is a mystery
is derived from knowing so much about her. But, Dad is a mystery
because of what you don’t know about him, and probably never will
know. Our parents are the models of so much for us, and one such model
that is rarely discerned is that our parents are the models for our
understanding of the foundation of philosophy: epistemology, the study
of knowledge. As we encounter our parents we learn about the human
pursuit of knowledge! From our mothers we learn that however much we
know, the source of knowledge still remains a mystery. From our
fathers we learn how much we just don’t know! I can’t tell you how
many men and women I have talked with who, after their fathers have
died, realize how much they didn’t know about him and in pursuing
knowledge about him, learn how much more they didn’t know! Truly, I
have yet to meet anyone who knew their father, or knew enough about
their father. It comes to form a regret, a kind of mini-tragedy
ingrained as a condition of existence. Life is a mystery, and while
mothers are that part of the mystery that is never completely
known, fathers are that part of the mystery that is never
knowing enough. My final observation is one that directly impacts religious study,
although all of the previous do indirectly. Sometimes it is in death
that we see things in a larger perspective, especially in relationship
to those closest to us. It is said that when a mother dies the
family’s existence is threatened for the children, and when a father
dies each child feels that now he or she is in charge. I think that on
the whole both are true. Mothers birth life and are symbolic of the
tether we have to the fruitful, bountiful, fecund fabric woven into
existence. It’s why our planet is called Mother Earth. When mothers
die we wonder unconsciously whether the fabric of our lives will come
unraveled, our natural selves symbolically connected through the blood
of the family. But fathers are symbolic of something totally different. Freud said
that it was the primal father that was the origin of our
understandings of God, and I have found that an individual’s
understandings of and wrestlings with God are not unrelated to that
individual’s understanding and experience with the father. On a deeply
unconscious level wherein spiritual sentiments are formed, fathers are
symbolic of power. This leads our final observation: There is a
link between our understandings and experiences with father, power,
and God. Symbols are things that point towards something else while
participating in what they point to. So mothers can be symbolic of
earth and nature in ways fathers can’t because mothers and nature and
the earth all produce young. Men are physical specimens of power, even
brute force, and they are living examples of what human beings can and
cannot control. It’s why the sky gods were often male. Fathers,
therefore, are in part, symbols of power, what human beings can shape,
subdue, and destroy. God is the word we give to the animating power in
existence that is part of our life but is not understood by us. So as
individuals, our notions of God are not unrelated to our experiences
with our fathers, the first prolonged encounter and exposure we have
to power, its presence and its absence. Frustrations with father are intermingled with our suspicion of what
his power was, and how he did not wield it responsibly or effectively.
Pride in father is intermingled with an assurance we give ourselves
that he exercised power in a manner appropriate to what we think
should have been done. If your father was present you have developed
notions about the presence of power, and if he was absent you have
developed notions about the absence of power. And anytime religious
literature refers to fathers there is something also being said about
power, in the same way that in referring to mothers something is being
said about bountifulness and barrenness. Even just suspecting there is a relationship between father, power,
and God, how can we read either the Hebrew or Christian scriptures the
same again? When it is written that one of the Ten Commandments is
honor thy father and mother, how can we not read that without
wondering what were the kinds of power issues in the tribes of Israel
such that that commandment needed to be stated and given a divine
origin? To say that God commands children to honor their father is to
declare that there is a unit of power involved with blood relatives.
Why did that need to be stated, and with such authority as having come
from Yahweh, unless there were competing units of power that were not
blood relations. What does that mean? The 20th century was
full of political leaders who claimed to be as fathers to those whom
they ruled. Hitler (who ruled the Fatherland!), Mussolini, Stalin,
Caucescu, even Saddam. The 20th century was full of
religious leaders who claimed to be as fathers to their flocks, like
Jim Jones and David Koresh. Our own George Washington was proclaimed
the father of our country, a designation he so disdained as to clearly
differentiate himself from its implications of royal power by
rejecting the suggestion of a third presidential term or the
designation of president for life! In other words, the commandment
appears as sanctioned by God to dispute the claims of a tribal leader
that allegiance to the tribal leader is or should be the dominant unit
of power. The result is that power is dispersed, because there are
many fathers and mothers in any tribe. There are units of power that
compete for a person’s allegiance, which, strangely enough, also
insures theological diversity by “institutionalizing” different claims
upon us! In other words, men and women develop their notions of God
from their individual, unique, and different experiences with
different fathers! There is no suggestion that only one notion of God
is to hold sway any longer! And in the Christian scriptures, when Jesus teaches his disciples to
pay, saying “Our Father who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name,” he
is declaring an additional quality to power. There is a power larger
than the power of one’s own father! The prayer doesn’t say much about
what God, that larger power, is like, other than our forgiveness by
this power is directly linked to our act of forgiving others! But the
prayer, from its opening words, does declare that the rule of one’s
earthly father is not the same as God’s. In other words, we may get
our first notions of God from the experience of power that is our
father. But, and here fathers need heed the lesson that my family has
struggled to teach me all these years together, father and God are not
synonymous. Fathers do not rule the roost because they did not make
the roost, regardless of any claim of it being otherwise! Fathers do
not rule over the members of the family because they didn’t make their
children or their wives, their fathers or their mothers. There is a
source of power, which we cannot discern in its entirety, or discern
very much indeed, larger and different than any source of power that
lies solely within this finite world. The Lord’s Prayer is a
liberating prayer because in the first line the boast of any earthly
power – father, church, government, preacher, pope, president, any
earthly power - is shattered! Today is a day to honor one’s father. It is a day to honor one’s father by giving him his due, no more and no less. It includes giving him the gift of forgiveness and not giving him the burden of homage. AMEN |
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