A Father’s Day Reflection

In introducing an article titled A Father’s Day Reflection: Bring Back the Father and the Shooting Will Stop, Gary J. Isbell (a member of the Board of Directors of The American Society for the Defense of Tradition, Family and Property and Webmaster for TFP.org, an organization of lay Catholic Americans) wrote:

This Father’s Day, the true father is missing. We need more than ever the revival of the Christian father. We need a father that serves as a monitor, provider and protector. A father that makes the world return to order and God. Only with this father will the shooting stop.

In “Fatherlessness is everybody’s problem,” Presbyterian Robert J. Pacienza (President and CEO of D. James Kennedy Ministries) writes:

Leftist social policies have helped encourage fatherlessness and broken families, which has been a major factor in parental indifference in the rearing and education of children.

The crucial importance of a father in a child’s life is “something our culture minimizes and even ignores to our peril.”

Do modern Baptists agree with the importance of the Christian father in the home?

And, ye fathers, provoke not your children to wrath: but bring them up in the nurture and admonition of the Lord. Ephesians 6:4

The Little Chap Who Follows Me

“The Little Chap Who Follows Me!”

A careful man I must always be,
a little fellow follows me.
I know I dare not go astray,
for fear he’ll go the self-same way.

I cannot once escape his eyes,
what’er he sees me do he tries.
Like me he says he’s going to be,
this little chap who follows me.

He thinks that I am good and fine,
believes in every word of mine.
The base in me he must not see,
this little chap who follows me.

I must be careful as I go,
through summer sun and winter snow.
Because I am building for the years to be,
this little chap who follows me.

Author unknown; as read by former UCLA basketball coach John Wooden

This Be The Verse

Below is a slightly sanitized version of "This Be The Verse" by Philip Larkin:

They mess you up, your mum and dad.
They may not mean to, but they do.
They fill you with the faults they had
And add some extra, just for you.

But they were messed up in their turn
By fools in old-style hats and coats,
Who half the time were soppy-stern
And half at one another's throats.

Man hands on misery to man.
It deepens like a coastal shelf.
Get out as early as you can,
And don't have any kids yourself.

I think there is some truth in "the verse" despite its pessimistic fatalistic tone. Judith Harris apparently felt sorry for the parents having had no chance to reply to the son's charges, so she spoke for them in this manner:

How sharper than a serpent's tooth
To hear your child make such a fuss.
It isn't fair — it's not the truth —
He's messed up, yes, but not by us.