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A dad, a father, spent an entire dinner correcting his young son’s table manners, and he eventually turned to his wife and said, “Will the training never end?” His wife replied, “Your son’s training will never end. He will get married and then his wife will take over.” Now, this story, to some degree, illustrates that the role of parenting should be a shared role. And in the modern world, the stereotypical roles of father as breadwinner and provider and mother as homemaker is almost gone. The roles of mother and father have become interchangeable today. Men are freer to express their maternal and femining side and women are freer to exercise their paternal, masculine role. And so, this is a progressive and healthy development in our society today.

Yet there are those critics who would argue that it has all gone too far. The critics would say that roles have become blurred and enmeshed and that children today need definite role models. In Ireland, there are many single mothers and very few men going into the profession of teaching. So, they also say that they don’t need men who have become emasculated, or women who have become de-feminized. Some would say that the feminist movement went far too far. It has done a disservice to the very people it hoped to set free. And the burning of that significant and symbolic piece of women’s clothing back in the 1960’s was, I believe, a necessary heralding in of the end of domination of men over women, and end to a patriarchal society. However, some would say that a heavy price has been paid by women who have to work, who have to be breadwinners, who have to raise a family and be mother and wife all at once. So, I wonder how much freedom and how much liberation can be found in such a demanding role. And, of course, women had a powerful role within the home. We used to say that “the hand that rocked the cradle rocked the nation.”

So, on this Fathers’ Day I wonder, have our expectations of our dads, of our fathers, changed much in the last forty to forty-five years. Do we expect our fathers, or our dads, to be big and strong, to be macho and oozing with masculinity? Do we expect them to be the providers? Do we expect them to never cry? Do we expect them to do the chastening, or the chastising, when we do something wrong? Do we expect them always to be Mr. Fixit? Is there exclusively “Daddy stuff” still to be done in the home? Is Dad to be loved and feared at the same time? And, of course, fear, in the Biblical sense, means to be in awe of somebody. Fear, in the other sense, can be terrible and frightening.

Another story, of Matthew, told by his dad Walter, may illustrate that only subtle changes have taken place. Matthew was a determined and headstrong little boy. Matthew had a love for comic books. He loved them so much that he continued to borrow them from the library without the librarians’ knowledge. Of course, this upset his father who marched him down to the library to return the comic books and to apologize to the librarian, as a stern and good father would do. Now, the following summer, during vacation time, Dad discovered that Matthew had another pile of comic books, and this time he had borrowed them from the local general store. The father, as a good moral guardian, reminded Matthew of the seventh commandment, “Thou shalt not steal.” Matthew, however, borrowed again. This time, his father resorted to spanking him. Now, years later, when Matthew and his mom reminisced about his stealing habits, Matthew said to his mother, “You know after that incident with Dad I never stole anything again.” And his mother retorted, “I suppose the reason was because your father spanked you.” “No,” replied Matthew. “It was because when he stepped out of the room I could hear him crying.”

Now, I never saw or heard my father cry. I never saw my father change a diaper, or a “nappy” as we call them back home. I never saw my father iron a shirt or wash a dish or go shopping. I never saw my father kiss or hold my mother in any kind of an affectionate way. He always did it in secret. And I only ever saw my father, I suppose, as the man about the house, the provider, the bread-winner. So he was a typical working man, molded in a typical fatherly role of his time. And I suppose that’s my take of it. That’s my understanding of his role, and I don’t know if my father ever sat down or had the time to sit down and reflect on his role, to discover what he was all about. There was certainly nothing heroic about it, as we understand that term in the adventure sense. My father got on with what was seemingly the mundane task of being a quiet and reassuring presence as a dad in our house.

I suppose we all dream of having heroic dads, or to borrow a phrase from today’s first reading, from Jeremiah, “We’d all love to have a a mighty champion as a dad.” We’d all love to boast of our father’s great achievements, the best baseball player in the league, the wizard at computers, the climber of the highest mountain, the sailor of the deadly seas, and the survivor of the most fierce battles. We’d all love to claim that our fathers had the courage of a lion and, for want of a better image, the fidelity of a homing pigeon. We’d all love to pin all the medals for valor and courage and prestige on their broad, muscular breasts. We’d always love to be proud of our fathers, never to be ashamed.

Now the character “Eddy” in Mitch Albom’s book “The Five People You Meet in Heaven” could never see his father in heroic terms. Eddy remained angry with his father all his life. Mitch Albom, in the same book, states that all parents damage their children. It cannot be helped. And the damage done by Eddy’s father was the damage of neglect. So, when the news came that his father had died, Eddy felt the emptiest kind of anger, the kind that circles in a cage. And, like most working men and sons, Eddy had envisioned for his father a heroic death to counter the commonness of his life. But there was nothing heroic about a drunken stupor on a beach. And then Eddy had to learn in heaven that he needed to forgive his father to release his pent-up anger. Hopefully, we won’t have to wait that long if we have to forgive. Eddy didn’t have an ideal father, and I don’t think I had the ideal or perfect dad, and as Dougie McLean’s song will tell us later, “There will always be the brave one. There will be the one who turns away.” I had a father I loved and feared, not “feared” in the frightening or terrible sense, but in the Biblical sense. So, a question.... Is there no template today by which fathers in their unique relational circumstances can live out their fatherly roles? I don’t know if there is much of a chance of that in the modern world where the role of daddy is ever-changing, and, in some people’s eyes, under stress. Could we be moving to a time when all that men would be needed for is a reproductive donation, or even less, with all the cloning that’s going on? Could men become obsolete?

Whatever the future holds, we do have a heavenly template today, a Father who is love and forgiveness par excellence. Jeremiah sees God the Father as a mighty champion because he defends him against his so-called friends who turn out to be his enemies. God the Father defends him and can be trusted to support him in his time of crisis. God the Father is presented in today’s gospel as One in whom we can place our trust. God the Father is the One who has intimate knowledge of each and every one of us. He is omniscient. Even all the hairs on your head are counted. And the idea that the modern dad is more domesticated, that he is more in touch with his anima, his feminine side, that he is working in collaboration with his partner on all fronts, and that the stereotypical definitions are well-spent is very welcome indeed. Yet it is much more comforting, I think, to know that Dad is loving, that he is forgiving, that he is trustworthy, and that he is faithful, someone we can turn to in times of trouble and that, as he brushes his hands through our hair, that he knows us as intimately as the heavenly Father knows us.

So, it is in loving, it is in forgiving, it is in trusting, and it is in fidelity that our fathers are mighty champions, heroes in our eyes. Amen.