Fatherhood, Marriage, Faith, and Family: Father’s Day Thoughts 2013

Paul Adams

All the young families at Mass today, together with our new young parish priest and several other spiritual fathers, made vividly present to me the links among fatherhood, marriage, faith, and family.  

Fatherhood and marriage

Marriage created fatherhood. Not biologically, of course.  When men mate, most will sooner or later become fathers.  All of us alive and dead had a father.  But not all our fathers were married or stayed married.  Marriage creates fatherhood as a social role, in the sense of a male caring for children he knows to be his (see Miller, 2000 on “The Troubled Dawn of Fatherhood”), a sense unknown to our closest kin, the chimpanzees.  This was the explicit aim of marriage law from the very earliest known legal codes in Mesopotamia, which concerned themselves mostly with marriage, its nature, rights, and obligations. Their point was to give to the child the mother and father who made the child. They created fatherhood, so to speak, with the stroke of a pen.

Marriage is the institution through which one generation sacrifices itself for the next.  It is the institution that binds fathers to their own children.  It is the institution that enables and supports a man’s decision, as between the choices all males face, to be a protector rather than a predator.

Faith and family

As Mary Eberstadt compellingly argues, there is an intimate and complex tie between faith and family.  Not only do the religiously observant have more children, but couples with more children are more likely to be or become religious.  Children drive their parents to church.  Christianity, in particular, with its God as Father, its Holy Family, is hard to comprehend in the absence of a natural father who loves and protects, guides and corrects.  Where such fathers are rare in the experience of communities, Christianity atrophies. Christianity and the natural family rise and fall together.

In our community of Ave Maria, we see fatherhood, marriage, faith and family, thriving together and supporting each other.  This has, of course, ceased to be the norm in the larger society in the West.  Even a place like this is not immune to the anti-family, anti-marriage, secularizing influences expressed in explicit promotion of the sexual revolution and all that attends it as official government ideology - the new state religion.  Or in the ubiquity of internet pornography.  Each in its way delinks sex from marriage and both from children.  It is astonishing to me now to see how openly a show like Frasier, not to mention Seinfeld or Sex and the City, promoted casual sex as normal, morally acceptable, and healthy, as well as how minimal (exiguous to the point of nullity) a role children play in their individualistic ideology of sexual expressionism.  

Strong faith and large families are the norm here, but for some of us, myself included, it was only, in Hegel’s metaphor, with the coming of the dusk that the owl of Minerva spread its wings and took flight.  And no-one imagines that even the young who grow up or study in this community are uniformly virtuous.

There is any case, no utopia on earth - the very etymology of the term, coined by St. Thomas More in 1516, tells us that there is no such place.  We fathers are, in the English understatement, no better than we should be.  Our efforts to do the best by our families are shaped, enabled and constrained by the community of faith and family life around us - and the wider pressures of media and government that impinge on it.

Fatherhood, we are reminded today, is a social role shaped by the experience of millennia.  It is created by and tied to marriage and to faith.  The results of breaking those links are disastrous - the social and personal costs of fatherlessness in our society are staggering.  We are reaping what the sexual revolution in its myriad social, legal, and ideological expressions sowed.  The weakening of the links among marriage, sex, and fatherhood has affected even the way we define and conceptualize marriage.  This is apparent in the widespread tendency to reduce our concept of marriage to a kind of Hallmark card sentiment, having to do with the feelings of love and commitment between two adults (so long as the feelings last), but nothing intrinsically to do with sex, sexual complementarity, or children.

Walking the Way

Last month I walked the Camino de Santiago from Sarria to Santiago de Compostela in northern Spain with my adult daughter (see the blog posts here - working from last, April 26, to most recent, June 10).  Others we met on pilgrimage also undertook the journey at least in part as a time for family bonding.  The father-child theme is at the center of the The Way, the film by the father-son team of Sheen-Estevez.  It is also the heart of the best recent writing I have seen on the Camino, about another father-daughter team, ten years younger than us, who made the pilgrimage last year.  The father blogged the experience from start to finish along the whole of the longest, French route - see Webster Bull’s vivid and inspiring narrative - now an e-book and to be developed into a memoir.

The Camino continues to be, as it has been for more than a thousand years, many things - religious, spiritual, cultural, even athletic - to many people.  But for some of us it serves as a time of respite, of healing or convalescence.  Even without the personal drama and intensities of the movie, it is a time of restoring or rebuilding or sustaining those bonds of family and fatherhood that time along with other demands and pressures, competing ideological tendencies, and the mad, dehumanizing pace of our mundane lives, as well as our own fallen natures, vices, and follies, has weakened.

Walking the Way Part 3 - The Final Stretch

Paul Adams (commentary) and Katryn Adams (pictures)

Wisteria

This did not make any more sense in English

There were several fancier memorials along the way, but we found this humble effort the most touching

Nearly there.  Katryn's disposable poncho did not last much longer

More monuments and markers as we get closer to Santiago

Stream at Lavacolla where pilgrims traditionally purified themselves before entering Santiago

Our first glimpse of the cathedral in Santiago

The old seminary where we spent the first night

and its courtyard

The seminary holds some 170 pilgrims and is well supplied with kitchen, laundry facilities, lockers, and shop. When we arrived the city and cathedral was celebrating the feast of the Ascension and we were warned that the doors would be locked at 2:00 a.m.  We looked at each other, laughed, and the man at the desk recommended we take individual rooms at the back of the building.  We heard nothing and were asleep by 10:00 p.m. 

Inside the pilgrim office where we received our  compostelas

Catedral de Santiago de Compostela

Carved pillar from the original Romanesque doorway of the cathedral. If you look closely towards the bottom you can see the imprint of 1000 years of pilgrims putting their hands on it.

Old confessionals labeled with the languages spoken by the attending priest (in this case German and Hungarian). A wonderful young priest heard my confession in English and granted absolution in Spanish.  Katryn asked him to bless some medals she had brought for the purpose on behalf of a friend's mother in Oregon. I did a similar thing on behalf of a friend here at Ave Maria, FL.

Tombstone of Bishop Theodomirus, who founded the first church here (AD 829) 

Romanesque transept with presumably later dome

Detail of the baroque altarpiece

Pilgrims Mass: Where hundreds of thousands had been before us

The famous botafumeiro in front of the baroque altar.  Unfortunately we didn't get to see it in action. That happens on Sundays and feast days.  We thought it was a feast day but it seems they celebrated the Ascension a day earlier than the rest of the Church.  There's a clip of the botafumeiro, an enormous censer in action with Benedict XVI calmly waiting for the giant swinging flaming ball to come to a rest while everyone else gawked - in the first of this series of posts about the Camino, along with Webster Bull's excellent comment.  You can also see it near the end of The Way, Emilio Estevez's film starring his father Martin Sheen. Here's a clip, with a lot of interesting info at the beginning and end.  El Botafumeiro, use of which began in the 11th century, swings alarmingly back and forth in the transept above the heads of the pilgrims for whom this area is reserved.  As this clip points out at the beginning, "The primary reason for El Botofumeiro is to facilitate the offering of incense to God on a grand scale.  The incense smoke also provides the ancillary benefit of masking the odor of unwashed pilgrims who have journeyed across Europe to the cathedral to venerate the corpus of Saint James the Greater since medieval times."  I believe it was also meant to prevent the spread of contagious disease among the pilgrims and those who served them
.

Tympanum depicting the visitation of the Magi

Looking up towards the Convento de Bevis, next to the seminary where we stayed

11th-century manuscript depicting the missions of the apostles. That's St James going to Galicia at the bottom.

San Roque and his little dog

St. John with a tiny dragon emerging from his cup.  This, I learned from Wikipedia, depicts the legend according to which St. John was handed a cup of poisoned wine, from which, at his blessing, the poison rose in the shape of a serpent or dragon.

The little fruit market outside our hotel in Santiago

Le mejor cerveza

And so back home via Barcelona and some more amazing Gaudi and other Barcelona Art Nouveau architecture there

&&&&&

Remembering with deep gratitude all the many blessings of this wonderful journey and recalling the ancient Pilgrims' Prayer to St. James that is said at the end of the Pilgrim Mass along the way.  Its immediate sense is about the journey of the Camino itself, but it can be understood as about the journey of life that takes us to the "end of the Road." It also reminds us that before the days of modern transportation, this pilgrimage was a round-trip journey.

O God, who brought your servant Abraham out of the land of the Chaldeans, protecting him in his wanderings, who guided the Hebrew people across the desert, we ask that you watch over us, your servants, as we walk in the love of your name to Santiago de Compostela. 

Be for us our companion on the walk,
Our guide at the crossroads,
Our breath in our weariness,
Our protection in danger,
Our albergue on the Camino,
Our shade in the heat,
Our light in the darkness,
Our consolation in our discouragements,
And our strength in our intentions. 

So that with your guidance we may arrive safe and sound at the end of the Road and enriched with grace and virtue we return safely to our homes filled with joy. 

In the name of Jesus Christ our Lord, Amen. 

Apostle Santiago, pray for us.
Santa Maria, pray for us.

Pilgrims on the Way: Walking the Way Part 2

Paul Adams (commentary) and Katryn Adams (pictures)

A friendly cat at La Bodeguina in Mercadoiro. And the dormitory building where we slept. Many pilgrims stopped off here for a drink or meal.  We stayed overnight.  All the hostels we stayed at were clean and pleasant.  We carried our sleeping bags on our backs, sleeping in bunks in rooms with ten or more peregrinos, male and female, always for ten euros or less.  Usually there were private rooms available at double the price ($25 or $26), still a great deal.  Fellow pilgrims we encountered were quiet and considerate.  I had little use for the ear plugs with which I came well supplied.  

We passed through many small old farm towns like this one

 And on to Portomarin, where the yellow arrows that were helpful almost everywhere on the Camino in this case pointed us into and out of town at the same time.  Good for business but confusing for pilgrims!

Santa Maria de las Nieves in Portomarin

El rio Mino

Misty morning at the Mino river across from Portomarin

Finally, a sunny day.  Not too much of the Camino goes along beside with the highway like this, a bit more as we approached the outskirts of Santiago, but not too much.  The markers directed to side paths and lanes that crisscrossed the highway whenever possible.

Caterpillar train! How to make yourself look five times bigger.

My favorite hostel/inn was this one, run very efficiently by two young couples, with food from the family farm.  

Young Catholic volunteers from southern Spain provided free tea, coffee and use of toilets to pilgrims

One of several 17th century wayside crosses along the Camino

Symbols of St James on the street in Palas de Rei

Most people walk the Camino, some do it on bicycle, and a few make the journey on horseback.  If you go by bicycle or on horseback, you have to cover twice the minimum distance to qualify for a Compostela. Horses parked outside a bar in Palas de Rei

No idea what this is

Another medieval bridge

Very fancy tap for the local beer - Estrella Galicia

Walking the Way - A Religious and Cultural Experience in Words and, Especially, Pictures - Part 1

Paul Adams (commentary) and Katryn Adams (pictures)

We flew into Barcelona, where we visited some wonderful art nouveau architecture, before making our way by train to Leon and after a short stay in that beautiful medieval city, by bus to Sarria, where we joined the Camino for the 112 km walk to Santiago de Compostela.  Even in Barcelona, it was cold (close to freezing at the end of April) and rainy.  There was such a long line to see Gaudi's famous church Sagrada Familia, his "catechism in stone" begun in 1882 and still under construction, that we decided not to stand in line in the cold and rain, though we went to Mass in a small pre-Gaudi section of the church which required no line and gave no access to the rest of the building.

And here is the Gothic cathedral in Barcelona, outside and in:

The church of Santa Maria del Mar in Barcelona was funded by the dockworkers guild and there are images of them on the doors:

and on to the beautiful town and cathedral of Leon:

and on to Sarria, where we began our pilgrimage in a moment of respite from the rain:

on our way, on Ponte Aspera, outside Sarria:

Igrexa de Santiago in tiny Barbadelo, where the priest performed a mass just for us.  Most peregrinos did not attend the Masses meant specially for them along the way, though probably all attended the Pilgrims Mass in Santiago de Compostela.  But in this 12th century church, we were the only ones there apart from an elderly priest, who called us up to the altar at the end and had me read a special blessing in English.  The altarpiece was different from anything else we saw, in a primitive, folk art kind of way.

Somewhere between Barbadelo and Morgade:

A memorable moment.  As we walked past him, this man called us over to the side of the road where he was stripping the bark off a stick to make a walking pole. He gave me the pole but would take no money for it.  He asked us to pray for him at the Cathedral in Santiago.  Katryn thought he picked me out from the hundreds of pilgrims who must have passed him because I "looked sincere."  Or perhaps just old and unsteady on my feet!  In any case, along with some other commissions from friends back home, it gave the sense that we were representing others in our pilgrimage and our blessings and graces were to be shared.  The stick saved me from several bad falls on slippery rocks and mud over the next few hours and days.

Other pilgrims along the way:

These fancy corn cribs are a big thing in Galicia:

Just 100 km to go!