I can remember the first time I realized that my father wasn’t the all-powerful, all-knowing, utterly perfect person I had believed him to be. I was quite young, probably about four or five years old. My family had gone to the beach for the day, a wonderful broad sandy beach on the North Shore, about forty miles north of Boston.

Unlike the beaches of the Delaware and Maryland coast, Crane’s beach has a significant surf. In fact, for a four-year old who was probably just a bit over three feet tall, those waves were significant indeed. They were probably breaking at about the level of my chest that day.

I remember standing in the surf, my father behind me holding my hands above my head. As the waves rolled in, I would bend my knees and he would lift me up high in the air so that it seemed as though I was jumping over the wave just as it crashed. I found this delightfully fun and exciting, screaming with exaggerated terror as each wave approached.

It was fun, that is, until the moment when Dad’s timing was off, and he waited just a second too long before lifting me above the wave. Instead of "jumping" over it, I was hit full in the face with the surging power of a breaking wave. I don’t remember what happened next; I don’t think Dad let go of me, so I didn’t fall down, but I remember sputtering and struggling for breath, feeling surprised, frightened and betrayed.

That was the beginning of my understanding that my father was capable of making a mistake, of letting me down; in fact, he was even capable of allowing me to get hurt and frightened, though I know that that was never his intention.

I don’t know how much of this my five-year old brain and heart was able to understand at the moment, and how much of the understanding came much later, probably in adulthood, probably in therapy. But I’m quite sure that, as I was sputtering for breath and struggling to get the sand and water out of my eyes, I was thinking that maybe I couldn’t trust my Daddy quite as much as I had before.

I’ve never discussed this with him. I have no idea if he even remembered it, although the experience is burned indelibly into my own memory. If he did remember, it was undoubtedly with pain, embarrassment, shame and sorrow. He had let down his little girl, something no self-respecting father is ever supposed to do. Yet what father hasn’t? And what mother hasn’t let her children down, for that matter?

Parenthood is painful, because it forces us to acknowledge our fallibility, our weakness, our imperfection. As they grow older, our children have many opportunities to realize just how imperfect we are. Yet most of us survive somehow, children and parents alike. For the most part, we go on loving and trusting our parents, most of the time. And when we grow up, especially if we become parents ourselves, we forgive them for being only human.

Welcome to the human race. Come, let us worship together.

Every father in our culture is swimming in a stormy sea with waves crashing around him. Expectations are impossibly high, the pace of change is so rapid that we can’t even tell from which direction the next super-large sleeper wave will break over us. The world is complex, closely interconnected, and so very present. The news is filled with stories that strike terror into our hearts as we contemplate the dangers and threats our children are exposed to every day.

With bravado, a father may tell his 7-year old sons and daughters that he could swim as far as was needed in the midst of the storm, and indeed, when our children are threatened, most of us would either swim to the rescue or die trying.

But even if we strive to be perfect fathers, the truth is that we’re fallible. Sometimes our timing is off just a moment, as Judy’s Dad, Russ did, we unintentionally cause a hurt that lasts a lifetime. Perfection in the multiple roles of fatherhood is impossible. There are inherent conflicts among our roles.

None of us has had a perfect role model in our own father, and very few of us have had any meaningful training to be parents outside the school of hard knocks where we mostly learn by doing it wrong. Authorities disagree on the most effective approaches to parenting, and there are ambiguities inherent in being a father.

Even if we were infallible, none of us could be a perfect father, nor even define clear criteria for determining what that might be. And we’re certainly not infallible. As much as we might like to strut our stuff and project an image of power and control, the truth is that most of the time we aren’t in control and our powers are limited.

Our bodies don’t always perform as we want them to, we get sick and bones break. We can’t ever know everything and be as smart as our preschoolers expect us to be, nor can we predict with complete accuracy the effects our actions will have. As much as we might be upset when our expectations to the contrary trip us up, the world isn’t perfect.

We can’t be perfect parents. But most of us can be effective and loving parents or friends of children if we work at it and take the job seriously.

Unfortunately, too many men have given up, and been absent from their children’s lives, or perhaps worse, have abused the power they have over their children, who have been the victims of emotional abuse, physical violence, or sexual betrayal. Some of the victims are adults among us, and I acknowledge the pain and grief at not having a loving father present in your life if you are one of them. It’s a hurt that can’t be healed.

I was in Seattle this past week to celebrate with my family as the baby, now 21 and a delightful young adult woman, graduated from the University of Washington. Sarah and I had a date to spend all of Monday together, and we had a wonderful time just hanging out on a typical rainy Seattle day. We sat in her favorite University District coffee shop for a couple of hours, we did some errands downtown, and we walked along the waterfront, ducking under the shelter of a roof when the showers came. Dinner was chowder and fish and chips at Ivar’s, a Seattle institution that was already several decades old when I was a kid.

I had not seen Sarah since she visited us last August as she’s spent much of the past year in Europe and India studying urban planning, sustainable development, and the empowerment of women to take charge of their own lives.

She showed me photos from her travels and told stories about her adventures that would strike fear into the heart of any dad. And that made me proud of her self-confidence and ability to cope with the unexpected.

She asked me some big questions that opened a deeper conversation than we’ve had before. Like, "Tell me, Dad, what made you decide to become a minister?" We talked about her plans for the future and how she might proceed to develop a career. She said that she had told her best friends that in order to understand her, they should observe both her mother and me and recognize our differences and the ways she balances them and has taken the best qualities from each of us. (I guess that was a compliment.)

As I left her at the ferry dock on Monday evening so I could return to my Mother’s house where I was staying, I felt a very deep and old pain at our separation. My children’s mother and I ended our marriage when Sarah was not yet two years old, and I had every-other-weekend custody of all three of my children. Sunday evenings when I dropped them off at their mother’s home were terribly painful for me. More than once I walked along the Columbia River until the sunrise, unable to bare returning to my empty house. I remember thinking often that it would be easier to disappear than to experience the biweekly tearing of the scab off the wounds from our separation. And simultaneously I knew that I would never do that, but that I would swim as far as was needed to stay in their lives.

That pain opened a place in me that understands how some dads could choose to disappear from their kids’ lives.

My paternal grandfather, whom I never really knew well, has a reputation of having been a mean, angry, and abusive man. My father remembered that his dad paid more attention to his own mother than he did to his wife and children. He forced his kids to work and then confiscated their earnings, and he was often angry.

Dad, who was the youngest of six children, was the peacemaker. He encouraged his siblings to let their past go and to move on with their lives instead of dwelling on their negative childhood experiences and carrying the disdain for their father like a millstone. I remember him telling his oldest brother, who was bitter and angry as death approached, "Let it go, Karl. He’s long gone and it isn’t worth all the energy you’re putting into hating him."

I don’t think Dad was able to fully forgive his own father, but he had moved on in many ways, starting with his refusal to work in the family bakery. Instead he took up an apprenticeship in carpentry. Perhaps swinging a framing hammer was a way for him to work out his frustrations.

He built five of the houses that became our family’s home, including three that were labeled ‘retirement homes’ for my mother and him. There were three because he was never fully satisfied with their design, and kept envisioning something closer to perfection. Mostly this was a matter of making necessary design tradeoffs and later discovering that as their needs changed, my parents wanted to make different choices.

Even after he was too weak to swing a hammer, he ‘supervised’ my sister’s efforts to renovate her tiny house, and it’s easy to see his legacy in her well-designed small kitchen.

Just as those three retirement houses were imperfect, the perfect role of fatherhood is a fantasy that’s impossible to achieve. We make necessary tradeoffs. Some of our needs conflict with others. We can’t both shelter and protect our children from every risk and at the same time encourage them to be independent and self-assured. We can’t put as much attention to our careers as would maximize our earning potential and spend enough time nurturing loving relationships with our kids.

In his book FatherLove, Richard Louv suggests five key dimensions of fatherhood. He labels them breadwinning, nurturing, community building, finding our place in time, and developing a spiritual life.

He describes each of these in some detail and suggests ways institutions and our culture might better support effective fatherhood in each of the five dimensions.

Breadwinning is, of course, the baseline role of fathers in our culture. Sex-role stereotypes are deeply ingrained, and most of us carry the cultural expectation that the man of the family will be the primary provider. We expect a father’s career and income to be more significant than that of his wife.

In addition to the cultural expectation, many of us have a legal obligation as well. If you’re not contributing court-mandated financial support for your kids, you can be jailed in most states. The pressure of expectations is intense, and men react in different ways.

Some of us throw ourselves into our work with such ferocity that we become absent from our families, coming home late and exhausted. Teenage fathers sometimes resort to dealing drugs in order pay child support, and wind up in jail when they get caught. It’s a double-edged sword: jail if you fail to pay or jail if you get caught dealing. And far too many of us just disappear, ducking our responsibilities to provide and at the same time robbing our kids of a primary source of nurturing.

As a society, we need to find ways to hold fathers accountable for providing adequate support for their children. But we also need to seek ways to balance the role of being a breadwinner with the other roles of fatherhood.

The questions we should probably be asking ourselves are "What is enough?" and "How can we design career paths that provide both the satisfaction of productive engagement in the economy and a work schedule that supports the other dimensions of fatherhood?" The pressure to consume and to have more stuff is intense and almost ceaseless. A better mousetrap is introduced every other week, and we’ve just got to have it. We’re peppered with messages that tell us we’re inadequate, unattractive, and in danger of living at the margins without happiness if we don’t keep up with the latest fashion, the newest gadgets, and the most spiffy toys.

More and more people opt for a simpler lifestyle with less emphasis on consumption and more on the quality of life without all the stuff. Guidebooks, magazines, websites, and newspaper columns offer advice on living more simply. It’s not a new idea: Thoreau went to Walden to live more simply, and he wrote eloquently about the experience in texts that are being rediscovered, republished, and widely read.

Louv writes about the president of an urban design and planning firm who called his staff together to tell them he had decided to divorce the company. He would continue to be president, but he was no longer going to work large amounts of overtime nor travel every week. He wanted to spend more time with his four-year old son, who he said was the only person he had met who he couldn’t con. Not only that, but he was requiring them to cut back, too, in order that they might spend time with their families or develop outside interests.

His plan was met with heavy resistance. Planning and design firms tend to be notoriously hard-driven. But he persisted. After the change was implemented — it took two years — his employees expressed gratitude for the free time and the company became more productive as its employees found a better balance in their lives.

As more moms have entered the workforce and staked their claims on being treated as equal adults, dads have been expected to participate more fully in the daily care of children. Women haven’t yet achieved equity, despite important strides that have been made. I was surprised to read in the paper this week that the average US father will receive gifts today valued at $107.50. The average US mom got only $94.00 worth of gifts on Mother’s Day last month. What does that mean? That Mom’s are not worth as much to us? That we feel a stronger need to buy Dad’s love?

Unfortunately for too many fathers, sharing responsibility for running the household has turned children into walking chore lists. Care for our kids is an important part of nurturing. Sharing in the work has its rewards. A recent Harvard study showed that men who clean toilets report better sex lives. (The men can ask me for details during the coffee hour.) But doing some of the chores isn’t enough to fulfill our children’s needs for a nurturing father.

Our culture needs to do more to encourage fathers to be emotionally present to their children, and to lift up the role of men as nurturing and caring parents. The most effective way I can think of to explore what this might look like is to seek out fathers who have positive and caring relationships with their children as role models. There are more than a few right here among us, and we ought to celebrate them.

The community building dimension is a source of energy and enthusiasm for the fathers that Louv interviewed for his book. These are the fathers who volunteer in their children’s day care center, who coach a sports team, or who work to improve company policies toward parenting. To be effective in these roles, he argues, men must first develop the nurturing dimension.

The dimension he calls finding our place in time is about recognizing and embracing our place in the generations, as both child and parent. For a father, this means feeling a connection with his father and grandfather and with his children and grandchildren. It recognizes that becoming a father commits us to that role for the rest of our lives.

The final dimension of fatherhood, developing a spiritual life as a father, is about embracing a deep connection with family, community, and self as well as with the transcendent mystery — with life itself. It’s about creating a deeper masculinity that moves beyond the macho, that embraces our essence as powerful beings who are committed to serve life and love and it’s about the empowerment of others to be loving people.

Being an effective father is a big deal. It’s rough. We all fail at it because the stakes are so high, the expectations conflict, and we’re fallible. It’s a mathematical truth that you can’t maximize multiple functions simultaneously expect in trivial cases. It’s like going to the grocery story with $5.00 and trying to bring back as many apples and as many oranges as possible. You can’t do both. No one can be optimally proficient in each of the many dimensions of fatherhood. Our task is to be good enough at all of them, and to find a balance among them.

Some of us have good role models in our own fathers. None of them was perfect, though, so we would all do well to seek out effective role models among our peers and to create new ways of fulfilling our roles as fathers with integrity to our espoused values. We need father-heroes to show us the way. They are among us, and each of us who is a father can be one.

What’s called for is to strive teach our children that they are held in unconditional love. That no matter what happens we will still love them. That doesn’t mean we will tolerate bad behavior, but even in setting boundaries and establishing consequences for acting outside the rules, we can affirm our children’s inherent worth and dignity.

We must show our kids they are powerful people with the ability to change the world. Even if they are only able to directly effect a small change, we recognize that we are each a part of a vast interconnected web of all existence and that even a small change changes the world.

We must teach our children by modeling integrity that they have a responsibility to use their power ethically — to make those changes positive ones, to bring more love to the world. That’s doing God’s work as co-creators.

As his death five years ago approached, Dad had already given his drafting tools to my oldest daughter, the architect, but he sent Mom out on a mission to buy him a new tee-square, triangle, and scale so he could draw one more plan. He was persistent in fantasizing about building one more house: it would be a one-room cabin in the woods. He spoke of it as if it were real and as if he were ready to start work on the foundation any day, as soon as he found the right site. It would be the perfect cabin. Like the perfect father, it would never be built.

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