Legacy of a Father
“Cornelia
kept her in talk till her children came from school, ‘and these,’ said she, ‘are
my jewels.’” —Robert Burton (1577–1640)
The
Talmud, an ancient collection of
rabbinic writings, says there are three things a man ought to do before he dies:
plant a tree, write a book and have a son. In other words, he ought to leave
something behind that prolongs his usefulness.
I’ve
done all three with varying degrees of success. I’ve planted a number of trees,
some of which have flourished while others have perished of drought,
pestilence, or neglect. Despite the lofty Latin names we give them—semper vivere, for example—no tree lives
forever.
I’ve
written a number of books and a few of them remain, though it’s not likely that
any of them will long endure. Like Carl Barth, I imagine myself entering heaven
with a pushcart full of my books and hearing the angels laugh at me. “I shall
be dump them,” as he suggests, “on some heavenly floor as a pile of waste
paper.”
But,
if you’ll allow me one conceit, I’m inordinately proud of our three sons, who
have grown into strong young men. They are my most significant legacy.
There
is a universal preoccupation among us to build something enduring. No one wants
to drift through life and leave nothing noteworthy behind. That’s why we work
so hard at our work and spend so much time and energy on our widgets. We spend
ourselves building a house or a city, rising up early and going late to rest, “eating
the bread of anxious toil,” (Ps. 127:1,2), busying ourselves beyond all common
sense and human endurance to make our mark on this world, all the while
overlooking the one investment that matters beyond imagination—our children.
“Behold!” Solomon declares, as though stabbed awake
by the insight, “Children are a heritage from the Lord,” an invaluable legacy
he has bequeathed us. They are “wages from the womb,” a priceless pay–off.
Nothing is more worthy of our energy and time. “Like arrows in the hand of a
warrior are the sons of one’s youth,” is Solomon’s striking simile. Our
children are our most powerful and far–ranging asset. “Happy is the man who has
his quiver full of them.” (Psalm 127:3-5).
Yet, for so many young men and women there is “not
enough father,” as Robert Blye used to say. Young people have fathers, to be
sure, but they’re mostly absent or distant for they’re much too busy making a
living.
Nobody understands this better than Fredrick
Buechner who weaves the tale of Godric, a Twelfth Century holy man, around this
theme. Old Godric looks back to his childhood and struggles to recall the face
of his father, Aedlward:
Aedlward’s face I’ve long since lost,
but his back I can still behold. He held his head cocked sideways, and his ears
stood out like handles on a pot as he strode forth from the smoke of our hut to
work our own scant croft of leeks, parsley, shallots, and the like, or else my
lord’s wide acres. Endless was the work there was, the seeding, the spreading
of dung, reaping and threshing, cutting and storing. In winter there were
scythes and plows to mend, the beasts to keep, roofs to patch until your
fingers froze. It seems that he was ever striding off in every way but ours so
I scarcely had the time to mark the smile or scowl of him. Even the look of his
eyes is gone. They were grey as the sea like mine, it’s said, only full of
kindness, but what matter how kind a man’s eye be if he never fixes you with it
long enough to learn?
He had a way of whistling through his
teeth like wind through wattle, and it’s like wind that I remember him. His was
a power to thump doon, open and shut like wind, a grey gust of a man to make
flames fly and scatter chaff. But wind has no power to comfort a child or lend
a strong arm to a lad whose bones are weak with growing. If Aedlward and Godric
meet in Paradise, they’ll meet as strangers do and never know.
It was fear kept Aedlward from us, and next to God
what he feared of all things most was an empty belly…. It was his fear we’d
starve that made him starve us for that one of all things that we hungered for
the most, which was the man himself (Godric.
San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1980, pgs. 9,10)
But,
you ask, “How can I give my children what they hunger for when I must keep the
wolf from my door?” Israel’s poet answers: there is no need for “anxious toil, for
(God) gives to his loved ones while they sleep” (Ps. 127:2).
There’s
something very significant about this psalm, something easily missed unless we
understand that the Sabbath for Israel began not on Saturday morning but on
Friday evening at bedtime. The Hebrew evening and morning sequence says
something very important: God puts his children to sleep so he can get their work done. “Sleep is
God's contrivance for giving us the help he cannot get into us when we are
awake,” said George MacDonald.
Fatigue
overtakes us in the evening and we have to stop working. We lay ourselves down
to sleep and drift off into blessed oblivion for the next 6-8 hours, a state in
which we are totally non–productive. But
nothing essential stops. Though we may leave many things undone and most
projects unfinished God is still on the job. “He gives to those he loves while
they sleep.” The next morning his eyes sweep over us and he awakens us to enjoy
the benefits of all that he has done and to join in a work in progress.
In
other words God is at work when we are not. (Truth be known, he is at work when
we are.) We can make time for our children and leave our work to him. They are
our legacy, an investment we will never
regret.
David Roper
