When you grow up with a vicious father, the bar for bad behaviour is set quite high.
I don’t mean that other people let me get away with more, but that, having grown up with a truly heinous model of what an adult could become, anything I did was still worlds away from the behaviour I’d seen growing up.
More than just the typical child of divorced parents, I was (I am?) the child of narcissism and delusions, a childhood where my memories were always viewed as faulty, because there’s no way that really happened.
I imagine my father continues to hold tightly to the role of victim even now, lying to himself and everyone around him about the real reasons that I haven’t seen him since entering adulthood.
I want to live an examined life, because I’ve seen first-hand what happens if you don’t.
My father threw words the way he threw his anger around: not stopping until everyone was bleeding. Not often externally, because that would be too easily seen by others, harder to convince away. He preferred the deep, internal bleeding that comes from shattering your foundational ideas of how valuable (not very), loved (not much) and safe you are (not at all).
Surrounded by a support crew of clanging sycophants, devoid of both truth and love, he avoided apologies, never wanting to admit fault or appear less. Occasionally he’d frame as a “sorry” his pleas for us to make him feel better about himself, in which he was always deeply regretful of something from the past, and never his explosions in the present.
Surprisingly - or maybe, sadly, not - my father was a Christian minister.
He raised us in the Anabaptist tradition, where formal liturgy (broadly defined as having a written order to the Sunday service) is often viewed as anathema. Instead, things are meant to progress more spontaneously, based on your current emotional state, to be more ‘authentic’.1
One of the weaknesses of this tradition is that confession doesn’t come up very often. It turns out that expecting people to spontanously express a good theology of confession and forgiveness is a big ask.
Prayers of confession, where you pray aloud as a community and admit fault, that “…we have sinned against you [God] in thought, word, and deed, and in what we have failed to do…”2, are essential for the spiritual health of us all.
Not only does it remind us of our need to continually receive God’s grace (vs it being something we only need once at conversion), these prayers often include lists of the different ways we can sin, making it more difficult to drift into thinking that we aren’t the type of people who need to ask for forgiveness, after all.
I certainly don’t meant to imply that my father’s behaviour was entirely caused by a lack of written prayers - I feel that goes without saying, but I’ll say it for clarity’s sake.
He was the sort of Christian minister who was in it for the power, just as you get corruption in all jobs with some semblance of power in our society - except that, as a minister, the wounds you create can go so much deeper. It’s giving your child a snake when they asked for some fish to eat, a Bible verse3 I always struggled to understand: Of course my father would give me a snake. Is that not normal?
I’ve seen where a life without confession leads, and it is not pretty.
But I don’t just mean this for my father, as unfortunately perfect an illustration he is for this. I mean it for myself, too.
When you have at your disposal an angry megalomaniac for comparison, your own life and sinfulness, the ways you hurt others or mistrust God’s goodness, start to look practically perfect in comparison.
I began to pray, “Thank you God that I’m not like him.”
And so, not only because of the example of my father, but because of the example of my own heart, I’m thankful to the beautiful Anglican church in the Inner West of Sydney that I moved to in my 20s, where I was taught to pray aloud in confession, and where I learned the importance of liturgy for shaping my heart towards the beauty of God, so I could stop standing in the corner with my eyes raised to the heavens, loudly proclaiming “Thank you God that I’m not like him”.4
9 He told this next parable against those who trusted in their own righteous standing and despised others.
10 “Two men,” he said, “went up to the Temple to pray. One was a Pharisee, the other was a tax-collector. 11 The Pharisee stood and prayed in this way to himself: ‘God, I thank you that I am not like the other people—greedy, unjust, immoral, or even like this tax-collector. 12 I fast twice in the week; I give tithes of all that I get.’
13 “But the tax-collector stood a long way off, and didn’t even want to raise his eyes to heaven. He beat his breast and said, ‘God, be merciful to me, sinner that I am.’ 14 Let me tell you, he was the one who went back to his house in the right before God, not the other. Don’t you see? People who exalt themselves will be humbled, and people who humble themselves will be exalted.”
Luke 18:9-14, NTFE
There’s a fascinating aside during one of John Dickson’s wonderful Undeceptions podcast episodes that speaks to this - the link between our culture seeing expressing our emotions in the moment as the ultimate source of authenticity, and how that leads to an undervaluing of written (formal) liturgy, and its power to shape us. I’ll add the episode number in when I find it!
Part of a Prayer of Confession, from the Book of Common Prayer, Australia
9 Don’t you see? Supposing your son asks you for bread—which of you is going to give him a stone? 10 Or if he asks for a fish—which of you is going to give him a serpent? 11 Well then: you may be evil, but you still know how to give good gifts to your children; how much more will your father in heaven give good things to those who ask him!
Matthew 7:9-11 NTFE
Luke 18:11
Thank you for sharing your story, so raw and emotional. You are a wonderful mother to your children , giving good gifts to them, showing them all your love and support and teaching them to love others too. I can't imagine how difficult your childhood must have been and I'm sorry you suffered.
Thanks you for sharing honestly. Manny will relate and we can all learn from your experience.