Where's Dad?

“If you cannot see that divinity includes male and female characteristics and at the same time transcends them, you have bad consequences.”

“The face he showed in Jesus is really his true and single face.”

― Hans Küng

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Dear Kate,

Last night as I was listening to a lecture on Catholic theology, I thought, Um, maybe it is time to see if Dad is dead...

Yes, he has passed away two weeks ago, without me knowing, no family member to tell me.

About 10 years ago I wrote on my blog:

"What brings me to the library?  It's a question I can never really answer.  I know I often went with a devastation: to seek, to know, to reconcile, to understand, to see, to be free.  Yes, it is my struggle for freedom, usually from the tyranny of human beings, people who I am called to love, people who I can hardly trust, people who I am lucky to not be destroyed in their hands before I can learn to love them enough.  Yesterday, again devastated, I picked up Hans Küng's memoirs, again, and I whispered, 'Hey, Daddy, long time no see.  I need your words...again.'  Authentic, honest, wise, strong, kind, loving, humble, always in the realm of sacredness and truth, a real Man as God creates us to be, that's the kind of Father that I want and need.  God is graceful; He knows my needs and wants."

I met my father Hans Küng about 10 years before I wrote the above.  Right before I became a father myself.  I was struggling then, trying to fight the world, so I thought, to not be another piece of middle-class statistic, and worse, a male piece.  I was quite aware of what a male piece is, not only when I was taking a piss, but not what being a male is and already devastated by what it could be.  Men around me, many of them, all of them, none I want to learn from.  I was arrogant, of course, but the world gave me no good reason to not stick to my guns.

One of my many guns was the intellect.  It was with it in hand that I went into an old library in New Westminster about 20 years ago to ask for a showdown.  Give me the biggest, most difficult &^$#% book there ever is in this Wild West of wisdom, I kicked the doors open.  The city holds the distinction of having the first public library in the province of British Columbia, and the one where I was the oldest still standing.  No country for old men; I was there to dismantle buried bombs.

It was there I met Hans Küng, a powder keg of a Roman Catholic priest/theologian who didn't want to be called a Father, ditched the clerical attire whenever he can for well-cut suits, all life long insisted on playing intellectual Rock 'N' Roll to the tunes of Gregorian chant.  And fought with every church father that there ever was, naturally.

Twenty years ago, there it was, his magnum opus, On Being a Christian, looking sexy and dangerous, staring at my wandering eyes.  Later I would purchase my own copy from the Regent Bookstore and the day I received it from a friend who ordered it for me was when I was teaching Sunday School to my peers, cradling my newborn daughter in my arms, searching for answers together after 9/11, a moment when intellectual rigor was not merely optional.

And is it ever?  How quickly we have forgotten about lessons we thought we would never unlearn and gone right back to our juvenile vision of superheroes and easy moralism.  Whereas intellectual rigor might not necessarily lead to moral integrity, there can be no moral integrity without rigorous intellectual engagement. 

Küng observes, "Lay people are usually unaware that the scrupulous scholarly work achieved by modern biblical criticism … represented by scrupulous academic work over about 300 years, belongs among the greatest intellectual achievements of the human race. Has any of the great world religions outside of the Jewish-Christian tradition investigated its own foundations and its own history so thoroughly and impartially? None of them has remotely approached this. The Bible is far and away the most studied book in world literature."  Do you know that?  Do we ever acknowledge the effort and achievement of our fathers and mothers while rocking in our easy chair preaching our lazy moralism?

I will write more about the book itself, but not today.  One risks hurting his wrists carrying it from one room to another.  Seven-hundred-and-twenty pages, big deal you say, but not when every page reads like seven-hundred-and-twenty.  I dropped my guns after the second page, couldn't find them since, still don't understand half of what he was saying 20 years later.  A towering cathedral, you don't stop being mesmerized by it for having learned more about architecture.  I've grown much since, and could even say to have spotted the many flaws in Küng's high-wire act.  But that is this son still looking from the ground up.

Dad has passed away two weeks ago, without me knowing, no family member to tell me.

Yours, Alex