The Prodigal Son Who Judges The Father
On hard work and the difficulty of receiving mercy
I received the following e-mail from a reader in response to yesterday’s newsletter, “Hard Work & The Chieftain”:
It’s interesting the comparison you make between you and your father with regards to the nature of what is “real work”, and the value thereof. My own experience with my father has had its own difficulties that put me in mind of yours.
I hear a lot in the conservative sphere about the “value of hard work”, and the virtue therein, but there is a darker side to it - an unspoken rebuke often directed at those who are judged to not “work hard enough”. We on the right love to extoll those who did work hard and bettered their lives and the lives of others through their blood sweat and tears, but we can be awfully judgmental about it. Calvinism runs deep in the marrow of America still, and judges our internal virtues and favor with God by way of our external appearances and fortunes. We praise hard work as a supreme virtue, but too often demean those whose work just wasn’t “good enough” to our eyes. And if our work wasn’t “good enough” or “useful” (which seems to be the judgement your own father heaped on your writing), or if we fail to attain external success by our work, then we are demeaned, declared without virtue, and judged to have somehow incurred divine disfavor.
I don’t know if you still hear the voice of your father in your head, questioning your work. I still hear mine, and it doesn’t help that we still run a business together. From a very young age I was lectured that I didn’t really appreciate the value of hard work, that I didn’t appreciate the value of a dollar, and so forth (to be fair, in my teens this was not an accusation without merit). In a way I suppose there was a kernel of truth, in that I had a rather comfortable upbringing compared to what he had (his father was a mechanic, and the family fortunes rose and fell depending on how much work my grandfather had), but at the same time my father has always been deeply deeply critical of my work (and everyone else’s really), often conveying that what I did do is subpar, foolish, or worse - as a kid I rather hated asking for his help on school projects because he would inevitably shove me aside and do a lot of it himself while demeaning my own efforts (my siblings had this happen to them too - we all have stories). It was the same with things like car repairs, household repairs, yard work, or other “manly” activities - what help I could give him, or what I did on my own never really measured up to what he expected, and even when I found ways that might improve upon his methods he would be prone to tearing those down too, while accusing me of disobedience. So little ever seemed to measure up, and he was quick to convey that.
To be constantly told that one does not somehow value hard work, but to also have one’s work constantly demeaned as “not good enough”, is draining. After a time, why make the effort if the effort will be undermined? Why work hard when the work will be undone? This has continued at times in the family business, and it often spills over into many things besides. I’m able to do things like my own home repairs today, in no small part because of the skills I did legitimately learn from my old man, but I cannot so much as change a faucet out without hearing him in my mind yelling at me that I’m not doing it right. I’m ashamed to admit that quite often I have avoided volunteering to help others with things because I’m terrified I’m going to fail and do it wrong and be dressed down there too. And I don’t like asking for help on difficult work for similar reasons - I don’t want the attention, or to be made a fool the way he so often has done to me. And all along is the voice telling me that I still don’t know how to really work hard, and am lazy to boot.
To this day I have to frequently fight imposter syndrome when I undertake projects of any size - even if they are just for myself. I know that to outward appearances, this makes me appear lazy, or aloof - accusations sometimes flung in my face - or at other times overzealous in trying to get things done (especially when I’m doing something to prove to myself, and the voice in my head, that I damn well do know what I’m doing). In short, I overthink everything before I’ve even lifted a finger. And it’s something I wonder about with other people too - maybe they really are lazy and foolish (and the people from ‘Hillbilly Elegy’ could have been my best friend’s family, or some of my own relatives - they’re all from the same culture), but there are a lot of others who have almost a paralysis about work - they’re just terrified of failure. I’m usually able to over come that (with a lot of quirks), but not everyone can.
I should balance this out by noting that my father really has worked hard throughout life - he’s a prolific inventor with a number of patents to his name, built several successful businesses (his way of course), and pulled another formerly successful one out of bankruptcy after its prior owner ran it into the ground. He’s no villain (else I never would have gone into business with him), but he is awfully judgmental. And that is something I’m very sensitive too when others extoll hard work - they often mean “hard work that’s good enough”, and show a disdain for those who really did work hard, but weren’t perfect at it, or those who made a few ungainly attempts at working hard, failed, were demeaned for their failure, and never tried again out of shame.
Anyways, that’s my own quirky experience here. I’m glad you found peace with your own father - I’m still hoping to do so with mine, while there’ s time.
I really appreciate the honestly of this letter. I don’t think of my dad in this way, but my wife has said to me in the past that she believes the reason that I don’t even try to do basic repair work around the house is that I hear the voice of my father in my head criticizing me for not doing it right — so I don’t even make the attempt. I resented her when she first said so, but I had to admit after thinking about it that she was probbly right. To my recollection, my dad didn’t criticize me like this, but I was such a sensitive kid that I assumed he was, even if he said nothing. It really can be paralyzing, this fear of failure. I honestly don’t know to what extent my dad was responsible for making me feel this way, and to what extent I projected my own sense of inadequacy onto him. Probably more of the latter. Still, it’s real.
I had an interesting conversation this afternoon outside a coffee shop with a new friend, a fellow practicing Christian. We talked in part about family and its effect on us. I had the newsletter post from last night on my mind, so I talked about how my father valued hard work, and how much I appreciated the work ethic he gave me. But when the conversation went to spiritual topics, and I told him the story of what I had learned in my journey through Dante — that I knew God loved me but hadn’t believed that he approved of me, because I had unconsciously confused God the Father with my dad — my friend began talking about the potential spiritual fallout of my dad’s relationship to work.
He pointed out that until that revelation, I had believed that I had to work to earn God’s favor, even though I consciously rejected that idea as a theological proposition. Um, yes, I said, that’s true. The friend asked if I thought that my dad’s views on work had something to do with that.
“You said that your dad judged a man by his willingness to work hard,” said my friend. “Do you think that in some way that might have made you think that you were less worthy of God’s love because you weren’t willing to work as hard spiritually as you think you ought to have been?”
Honest to God, I have never thought of it that way. But I think the guy is on to something. I’ve been thinking about this point all evening. In The Little Way Of Ruthie Leming, I wrote about this incredible conversation with my father on his back porch one Sunday after dinner, after we had moved to Louisiana:
“There’s something I regret even more, he carried on. “I can see now, at the end of my life, that it would have been better if after your Mama and I got married, we had packed up and left here.”
I couldn’t believe what I had just heard.
“What do you mean?”
“I mean what I said: we should have left this place, and never looked back.”
And then Paw told me how he had spent his entire life sacrificing for his mother, his father, his brother, his aunts, and his cousins – all of whom, in his recollection, worked him like a dog and never gave him a moment’s thanks. They could always count on Ray to fix anything, to do any job they asked of him, to give up his free time, and spend his own money, to help them. They used him up.
“I was a sucker,” he said, the bitterness heavy in his voice. “Aunt Lois was the only one of the whole lot who was ever straight with me. But there was only one of her.”
Paw told a story about the time many years earlier when he had tried to buy 17 acres on the back of the old Simmons plantation from Aunt Lois. She told him that would be fine with her, if he would pay for the survey. Paw began contacting surveyors, but Loisie called him and said she was withdrawing the offer. Hilda was begging her not to sell that land.
“I’ve got to live with her,” Aunt Lois told Paw. “If I don’t do what she says, I’ll never have a moment’s peace. Please understand, dear.”
Paw told her that was fine. Decades later, long after Hilda and Lois were dead, and the land had passed through the hands of a no-good cousin whom Aunt Hilda favored, Paw and Mam ran across a stunning document in the courthouse. It was a bill of sale for the land to the scoundrel relative – with Lois’s signature on it. Hilda had forged her sister’s name to make sure the land went to the cretinous cousin. The survey my father was arranging would have revealed her crime.
“How do you think that made me feel, after all I had done for Aunt Hilda?” Paw said. “That right there was an evil woman.”
How could I disagree? The hurt in Paw’s heart was so raw. It was as if it had all happened yesterday.
“I loved my own mother more than life itself, but she was terrible to Dorothy,” he continued. “She and her sisters, Rita and Ann, they treated your Mama like dirt. They thought I had married beneath myself. Aunt Rita disowned me for marrying your mother. But you know, Dorothy took it all from them. She served them like a dog, and nobody would help her.”
“I should have taken her away from here,” he said. “But I was so caught up in my family, and in trying to do the right thing for them. And I was tied down by this place. I was 12 years old when I bought that Farmall Cub tractor with my own money, and started planting. Farming was my dream. Aunt Lois saw that, and she helped me. She paid for me to go to Chicago to show my 4-H club steer. She drove me herself to the State Fair in Shreveport. I bought this place over here from Aunt Em, Loisie’s sister-in-law, and put cows on it. When I married your mother, I had so much going on here I didn’t think I was free to leave.”
I sat there across from him as he spoke, imagining that stout, barrel-chested boy of 12 who was my father, riding high on his little tractor, a shock of fiery orange, cowlicked hair jammed under a straw cowboy hat, dragging a plow across a Starhill field, laying the groundwork for what he thought would be an empire of his own. He would have his family and he would be loved and respected by them all, and everything would work out the way it was supposed to because that’s how things turn out for good men who do right, stay loyal, and follow the rules.
Paw’s face was tense and pale as he continued to disburden himself.
“The day finally came when I stood up to my parents,” he continued. “I was working in my shop over there behind Daddy’s place. A piece of my equipment had broken, and it was a complicated weld to fix it. I had spent four hours that afternoon, working out there in the heat, setting that weld up. Everything was in place, when here comes Daddy out the back door to see what I was doing.
“He always had to have his hands all over whatever I was up to. Lord have mercy, I can’t tell you the number of times I would be working on an electrical box, and I would have to slap his hand away – I’m talking about literally slap his hand – because he was about to touch a hot wire and electrocute himself. That’s how he was.”
Paw said his father ambled over to the weld, tried to pick it up, and caused the three pieces of metal to fall to the ground, destroying an entire afternoon’s work. Paw did what he had never had the courage to do before: tell his father to get the hell out of his business, and stay out. When dark came, Paw went into the house to tell his father goodbye, and found the old man sitting on the front porch, in good spirits.
“We never had another problem after that,” Paw said. “I should have said something like that to him and my mother a long time before. But I didn’t, and by then, I was about 50 years old. It was too late for me.”
I was speechless. He kept talking.
“Your sister, she was right to stand up to me over marrying Mike,” Paw continued. “And so were you, when you went back to Washington to be a writer. I was too strong-willed and stubborn back then. I regret that very much.”
We sat in silence for a moment.
“Daddy, I have to tell you, I don’t know what to think about all this,” I said. “Here I am, a man who turned his life upside down to move back here for the family, and because of the land. And now here you are telling me that you made a false idol of family and place, and that you wish you had left it all behind when you were young, just like I did. What am I supposed to make of that?”
His chin trembled, he wrung his hands together, he looked me straight in the eye, and that my father said: “That I’m a sorrier man than you.”
Sorrier. It means having more regret. But in Southern parlance, it also means morally less worthy.
“But Daddy, I hope you understand that I really do want to be back here,” I said. “Because I went away all those years ago, I could come back not out of guilt, but out of love, of my own free choice.”
“I know, son,” he said. “I know. And I appreciate it. What I want to say to you, though, is that I don’t want you to feel trapped by this place. When I’m gone, half of it is going to be yours, and the other half will go to Ruthie’s children. I want you to do whatever you want with it. Did you know it’s the last piece of the old Benjamin Plantation that’s still owned by someone in the family? If you want to keep it up, you have my blessing. If you want to sell it, you also have my blessing. You’re free.”
This conversation was the most graceful thing I have ever witnessed. My father, in the twilight of his long life, gave me the greatest gift imaginable. My heart swelled in my chest, and for the first time, I could feel the depth of my roots, the strength of my wings, and the power of love in humility to make everything new.
(Maybe I should say here that I allowed everyone in my family to read the manuscript for Little Way before I turned it in to the publisher, in case there were any passages they thought were too intimate, or that I had gotten wrong. My father consented to my telling this story in the book.)
As readers of my Dante book know, this wasn’t the end of the story at all. Even though my dad said those words, it’s not so easy to overcome a lifetime of practice. As he and I continued our wrestling with each other, up until the last week of his life, I came to see that Daddy had a foundational belief that a man could bend the world to his will if he just worked hard enough at it. What he never could do, though, was make his family — his folks, his aunts, and others — love him like he wanted to be loved. He was so incredibly faithful to them, even at the expense of his own wife and kids, by his own admission. Once, when I was a little kid, his mom and dad had forgotten to leave their water dripping during a hard freeze, and the water line suspended over Grant’s Bayou, down the hill from their cottage, froze and cracked. To fix it, my dad had to go hang out over the bayou, in the wintry cold, and replace the pipe. I don’t know how he did it, but he did. He was doing things like that for them all the time — and still.
The poor man really did believe that if he worked hard enough, they would give him his due. But they didn’t. He outlived them all, and came to believe it was all in vain. And yet, he expected the same thing of me: to conform to his will as the only acceptable proof of my love for him. He really did believe that my failure to be exactly as he wanted me to be was a failure of love on my part — and he kept the pressure up even after that back porch conversation, up until the final months of his life. Even though he had a flash of illumination on the back porch that evening, and saw the futility and falseness of his lifelong stance, it didn’t change anything. Now that he’s gone, I feel so much mercy and compassion for him. He was such a good man, the master of everything he sought to do, but as I can now see, he was afraid of being unloved. He was a giant of a man, but he lived in the dark shadow of that fear.
Until that conversation today, I had not thought of my father’s passion for hard work as his coping mechanism for the things that frightened him.
What if that was true of me for so long, with God? What if it still is, to some extent? That is, what if I have a deep need to act as if receiving God’s love was something I could control by my own behavior, because it was too frightening to think that I could receive it as a free gift? Understand me, I do not believe and I have never believed that God’s love is something one can earn. But what we confess with our mouths, and affirm in our conscious minds, may be different from what we hold to be true in our hearts, even as we hide it from ourselves.
How hard all this is! How do we keep from passing on these pathologies to our children? One thing I have endeavored to do throughout my children’s lives is to tell them, openly, that my love for them is unconditional, and to say it over and over, because I don’t want them ever to doubt it. Come to think of it, I have learned more surprising things about God’s love for me from being a father to my children than I have from being a son to a father — though the good things I’ve been able to give my children also came from my father, who was capable of great tenderness with us kids.
I do suspect that this is something I will wrestle with the rest of my life, to shed. Dante was so right: his Purgatorio is not where we suffer for our sins, but where we are purged of the tendency towards certain sins. It is an allegory for the life of repentance on this earth. The older I get, the more clear it becomes to me that my greatest challenge in the spiritual life is getting out of the way of myself. You know Rembrandt’s Return of the Prodigal Son? I’m like the Prodigal if he told his father, “Hold on, you aren’t allowed to welcome me back like that. I’m going to live like my brother for a while to show you that I really have changed, and am worthy now of your love.”
That’s not how the kingdom of God works. But for some reason, I find it hard to think of it working any other way. Why am I so disappointed in God for not holding me to a higher standard? Why do I presume to judge God?