Stand Up Fathers!

This Fathers’ Day stuff is all very well, but let’s face it, it doesn’t carry quite the conviction of Mothers’ Day. We pretty much all love our Mammies, but Daddies are perhaps more problematic. Some of the very greatest works of literature concern delinquent fathers, witness King Lear (again) and The Brothers Karamazov. Christ famously advised us to ‘call no man Father’, urging us to focus rather on Our Father in Heaven. While considering fatherhood, one should always bear this in mind. Now as a Grandad I’m getting a kind of double dose of it in one way, and a chance to view the business in a more detached fashion too. May I at last get the right balance between too much and too little fathering? But the bottom line is simply this: we have to figure out what is best for our families, and do our best to provide it and set them on the way of it....

A sudden eerie peace has descended on the house. The four grandchildren who have been staying here for the last few days, have departed. On the whole they coped with the computer game/video free life which we lead here very well. But then they were able to play on a little rocky shore below the house, and learn to row, and to sail out to witness a massive congregation of dolphins and whales, set off with the excited screeches of diving gannets, some 7 miles to the Southwest of here.

The display out-lasted the children’s attention span, and instead of relaxing as I would have them into the dream as the Anna M sailed gently along in such company, they had to go below and eat and draw pictures of whales. But, I reflected, that itself is some kind of victory. Images and food are after all two basic necessities for human beings. The problem is that humanity tends to get so interested in spinning stories, creating images, that we cease to focus on the thing itself!

Images are indeed the tools, the vehicles that we require to situate ourselves in the midst of life’s confusing complexity, to find our way. ‘Man does not live by bread alone.’ But the first priority is to really get in touch with our own imagination and to remain rooted there, or else we must settle for second-hand images, fed us according to the interests of one mass image producer or another. At this stage it seems to be an even bigger industry than producing food! Meanwhile a good father does not attempt to merely impose his own preferred images, but to help his children to acquire their own.

Of course, the great Protestant and North American Dream was fashioned of just such an aspiration. Away with all your bishops and kings, with their dogmas and their enforced loyalties! Down with your scheming statesmen and their Empires! Down with decrepit Spain and bankrupt old Europe! We will even improve on old England, living free, relying on our own resources, according to our own lights!...  But where is the American Dream now? It seems that no people could be more obsessed with their images and stories, but less satisfied with them!

Then again what, in the aftermath of that brilliant Enlightenment, did old Catholic Europe fall back on? It may seem that about the only thing they vaguely remembered was that the well-springs of imagination were in a sense communal property; the individual imagination, to be activated, must paradoxically tap into a level of consciousness that transcends the individual; ‘No man is an island.’ Yet where was the ability to ‘plug in’ to the divine, that alone is able to reconcile the individual and social dimensions? Many fell back on a renewed tribalism, in the form of nationalism, with its male and female faces, namely fascism and communism.

One might have thought that all that stuff lay buried under the rubble of the mid 20th century. We have enjoyed in Europe nearly a full life-time of relative peace and prosperity, but the fabric has become frayed again, and the old primordial problems are forcing their way into our consciousness with renewed vigour. Who has been using the relatively peaceful times to access anew those well-springs of truth, deep within us? Well, says I, some of them at least were sailors!

The politicians and the media, the image masters and story-tellers, would on the whole rather we did not attempt to do so ourselves. They like to think it’s their prerogative to set the agenda, but since they are more interested in power and perks than in that dreadful business of taking responsibility, the agenda they set tends to be that which they calculate will deliver the power and perks. So we all tend to get caught up in a false loop that is sold as ‘democracy’. It takes a massive crisis to bring out leaders of real integrity, such as Churchill and de Gaulle.

The current craze for referenda illustrates such false loops. Your real leader would not say - this is a most important decision, almost a matter of life and death, but I’ll go along with whatever you choose - the democratic will shall prevail! Imagine such an attitude in the skipper of a boat!

The only honest thing for a true democratic leader to say, if he knows something to be of crucial importance, is this is what I believe. Now you can vote for me and I will act on that belief, or you can find someone else to lead you! The problem is actually one of the integrity of fatherhood, and it is reflected in the widespread failure of us fathers to take the responsibility of our role. People must be feeling the desperate lack….

The degree of success of the likes of Messrs Boris Johnson, Nigel Farage and Donald Trump in picking up such a mantle should be a wake-up call. But do we really want to be led by such people? In frustration, people turn to false fathers. I have been shocked by friends and family members who have bought into their stories. But having taken a good look down that hole, I hope they will yet turn away from it, rather as Ireland looked into the abyss back at the time of Bobby Sands’ funeral, and turned away.

For Europe, and Britain’s involvement in it, will not go away. There is no going back to some mythical state of independence. One has seen that bundle of lies trundling down the tracks of the great British media for years. It is a joy of the new media that, when one has the time, one can keep an eye on the various strands of opinion without actually buying their newspapers! Of course, like all successful lies, they proceed by distorting big truths.

I believe the vote will be to Remain, but it’s a close call. If Remain does prevail, I think that it will be in no small part thanks to Mrs Jo Cox. Her murder has given a crucial pause to think more deeply, a reality check, and lifted a corner of the mask of the Leave crowd. As usual, there’s a woman challenging us men to be true fathers! But now I have said all I am going to say about the British referendum, at least until there is a result. They must decide what they believe to be true, and stand up for it.