Dad Loved Animals, Children And God — But Often Hated Himself
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(OPINION) My dad wouldn’t look at old family photographs. If the rest of us pulled out a photo album or a shoebox full of pictures, he’d get up and leave the room.
“It’s too sad,” he’d say.
I was in my office at home the other day, glancing around the room, trying to avoid the labor of writing.
I noticed an unframed, serrated snapshot of Dad on an upper bookshelf, propped against some books. In the picture, he’s sitting on the back stoop of a frame house in Pulaski County, Kentucky, out in the country.
I took it down for a closer look. The black-and-white photo is faded, so some details are hard to make out. It’s dated 53 in my mom’s handwriting — 1953, the year they got married — and apparently was taken in the summer, because the yard looks full and Dad’s casual shirt is short-sleeved.
He would have been 22. His legs are stretched before him into the grass, crossed at the ankles. As nearly as I can tell he’s wearing khakis, argyle socks and what appear to be white bucks. He’s just a boy.
He’s grinning big-toothed at the photographer, who no doubt is his bride, eventually to become my mother.
Naturally, he’s holding a puppy. I imagine he’s saying to Mom something like, “What about this dog?” He loved dogs. There was always one following him around the house or the yard, or snoring alongside him on the couch as he napped.
He loved children, too. When he taught school, the kids loved him back and kept up with him long after they were grown and had families of their own. They called. They sent cards and letters thanking him for all the help and joy he gave them.
Having grown up in Appalachian poverty during the Great Depression, he particularly had a soft spot for poor kids and underdogs of every species.
Dad loved my sister and me, and he worshipped our mother, to whom he was married 50 years.
More than anybody I’ve ever known, though, Dad loved God. I mean, he really loved God, as if God was as real and tangible as a puppy or my mom. Of course he talked about God from the pulpit, being a preacher.
But he also talked to God all day long, weekdays and holidays, wherever he was. If he was driving down the highway he’d be in a conversation with the Almighty. Anytime he needed to make a big decision, or even a small one, he’d run it by the Lord first. Whenever something wonderful happened — like the time he was instantaneously healed of end-stage cancer — he’d shout the glory to God. When something terrible happened, he’d drop to his knees and cry for help.
God wasn’t just the center of his life. God was his life.
When I was young, none of my friends had fathers like that, and he was sometimes embarrassing to me. Their dads talked about normal things. Basketball. Tobacco crops. The factory. Pretty women. Their dads didn’t speak in tongues or carry a big Bible or evangelize strangers.
My personality was very different from my father’s, and that difference produced tensions between us right up until he passed away in 2012. We worked together at times, including several years when we co-pastored the same church. Mainly, it wasn’t easy.
Nobody I’ve ever known could make me any madder any faster. I loved him. I admired him. And he drove me stark raving nuts. I think those feelings were mutual.
From the time I was a teenager, I understood that he probably was afflicted with some sort of emotional disorder. I don’t know what that disorder would have been called by a professional, because he never sought outside help. He would have liked to, he said, but in those days the stigma of mental problems was so bad he was afraid it would cost him his job and whatever minor social standing we enjoyed.
So he fought it on his own, the best he could, with no counseling and no medication, just him and the Holy Ghost waging war with his demons. At times he was paranoid. At times he buzzed with outsized energy and huge dreams that never materialized. Other times he wept uncontrollably for no apparent reason. He wrestled always with self-doubt, I think.
Yet for other long stretches, years on end, he was utterly reasonable, as stable as a jurist, funny, articulate and well-read — as wise and compassionate a man as I’ve ever met. He helped hundreds, probably thousands, of seekers along their spiritual journey. I’m an eyewitness to the profound good he did.
I hold that serrated, fading snapshot and stare at that toothy kid from 71 years ago, on a sunny afternoon, on the back stoop of a forgotten country parsonage, a kid with no inkling of the glorious and devastating things that will befall him.
Where is he now? I ask the silence. What was it all about? Did any of it matter? Was he a holy fool or a true saint — or is there any difference between the two?
“It’s too sad,” he used to say.
Paul Prather has been a rural Pentecostal pastor in Kentucky for more than 40 years. Also a journalist, he was The Lexington Herald-Leader’s staff religion writer in the 1990s, before leaving to devote his full time to the ministry. He now writes a regular column about faith and religion for the Herald-Leader, where this column first appeared. Prather’s written four books. You can email him at pratpd@yahoo.com.