Legacy of the Stone Harp

This past Monday we celebrated Thanksgiving here in Canada, and for several days I’ve found my mind drifting to thoughts of my father, who died in late August. His loss is still fresh, and, of course, as is often the case, loss brings perspective. In my reflective mood, with the uncanny vividness of a hindsight sharpened by the finality of death, I realized how much I owed my father, how deeply and existentially, both literally and metaphorically, the fabric of his life has been woven into mine, how much of my own calling as a father, as well as a writer/artist/scholar, is bound up with him. My musing also evoked in my mind that hoary old debate about nature and nurture. The two seem, in the light of my own experience, an inextricable tangle, a hopelessly confused dialectic, no more likely to be resolved than the perennial question of the chicken and the egg and which came first. By dint of age and, I hope, growing wisdom, I’ve come to recognize many of my own personality traits and attitudes as stemming from him in a strange, alchemical fusion of genetics and upbringing, even though for the longest time in my life I couldn’t imagine how I could be more dissimilar.

My father was 89 years old and his passing was not unexpected. His had been a long life, one of unimaginable turbulence, for he had survived an unhappy childhood in Europe and the horrors of World War II. He had been ill for several months, during which time he lapsed into a state of anxiety and homesickness that rendered him a shadow of his former self.

Nonetheless, ripe though he was in years and dismaying as was his decline, he was deeply mourned by my siblings and myself, as well as his grandchildren, to whom he was a figure of golden benevolence, a kind of archetypal representative of fatherhood.

My father was a man for whom his Christian faith was the bedrock of life. The great Catholic mystic, St. John of the Cross, has a striking phrase that cuts right to the heart of the matter for those of us who profess to be followers of Christ. St. John of the Cross says that, “in the evening of our lives we will be judged on love”. There is a rich ambiguity about this brilliant summary of the essence of the Christian message. It means that the extent to which our lives have exemplified love will be the primary measure by which we will be weighed in the balance, once we “shuffle off this mortal coil,” to quote Shakespeare’s Hamlet. It’s a harrowing thought, a sobering jolt to the self-regard that invests so many of us. Happily, this phrase also means that in the evening of our lives we will come before an infinitely merciful judge, one with a loving and intimate awareness of the weaknesses and foibles of the human condition.

My father, I can honestly say, was one of the finest and most honourable men I’ve ever known. Throughout his life he showed a selflessness that makes me convinced that, in such a final accounting based on love, he, of all people, would not have been found wanting. Generous and unreserved in his giving, I don’t believe there was a selfish bone in his body. And this was not just in a material sense. My father was magnanimous, “great-souled,” as this word means literally from its Latin roots. Always quick to forgive, he never harboured grudges. In this respect he was guileless and almost child-like. I mean this in a good way, the way that Jesus says in the gospel of Mark that, unless you become like a child, you cannot enter the Kingdom of God.

My mother, frail as she is and with her mental faculties failing, summed up who my father was best and most beautifully, when she was told by my sister that her husband of 61 years had passed away. My sister explained to her that dad was now with God. Without missing a beat, in a moment of sublime, preternatural lucidity that burst through the dark fog of her Alzheimer’s, my mom immediately responded, “Dad’s always been with God.”

I loved my father.