When I read Lucille Clifton’s “forgiving my father” poem, I was struck with deep resonance on how profoundly I related to it.  I realized that it actually ended up setting a framework for how I could track and understand my own (rocky) process of forgiving my own father.  I came to a few realizations about the process of forgiveness – both from the poem and my own struggle with it. So, in honor of this year’s Father’s Day, a day when we can reflect on our perfect, all-providing Heavenly Father, but also a day when we can acknowledge the grief in how perhaps our earthly fathers fell short, I would like to share what I realized here.

At one moment during the party, I thought to myself, “…Was this really so bad? Was this family life really so bad that it was deemed not worth fighting for?” While I do know that my parents’ relationship was not great, I still could not help feeling a little sad.

The story of the Presentation of Jesus, as found in the Gospel of Luke Chapter 2, has always been one of my favorites, and has held a special place in my spiritual life as an adult child of divorce. When our parents are divorced, separated, or in a difficult marriage, the struggles in their relationship become the dominant force in the house. … In this beautiful mystery of the Presentation, let us look at the Holy Family, and allow them to teach us and heal us in those places in need of the Lord’s light.

My parents officially divorced when I was about 17 years old.  My father persistently campaigned for a divorce. He confessed that he had been in a relationship with another woman whom he had actually married while on his “vacations” in Egypt. Since I was the eldest of three, my mother would share her pain with me. To this day, being the main witness to her inconsolable weeping is one of the most painful experiences I have had as a 41-year-old man.

During Covid some people learned to bake bread, some planted gardens, others drank too much wine. My Covid experience was time with Father God, Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit, fully aware that they were changing me. I became like the unrelenting child who asks too many questions. But my unrelenting was a prayer, “Heal my heart, Lord. Please heal my heart.” He did it when he knew I was ready.

Five branches from the trunk of the split tree

Four girls and a fella, that’s my siblings and me

In Three years we went from complete to shut down

Two people once in love

No one left to be found

I searched my heart for months and I accepted how I felt about this situation and made a decision. I realized that if I did not take care of them my guilt would have been much worse than I had experienced in my life. My father remained at his home with home health care and I oversaw his care. My mother eventually spent the last nine months of her life at home with my husband and me.

...my version of “forgiveness” was simple: never let anyone get close enough to hurt me. But the Lord broke through my defenses and gradually brought me back to Him through a reversion to the Catholic faith. ... When I first attended the Life-Giving Wounds retreat, my heart overflowed with awe and gratitude as I heard the truth about God’s intention for the love between mother, father, and child.

One common ACOD challenge is that typical sibling-to-sibling relationship “issues” can be impacted by the family upheaval, and relationships between step-siblings bring fresh challenges, which sometimes can make a bad thing (divorce) worse and can cause even further alienation and discouragement between existing and new family members.

When my father left the family during my late teens, I fell right back into infancy: I was unable to call my father “dad” because “dad” was no longer present. And that translated to my relationship with God: I did not call God “Father” because it seemed that God left me, too.

There are only a few memories I can recall to explore the day my father left our house. These are expressed in the first sonnet: The Loss. It reflects a memory of events that culminated in the day my dad left the house where our family lived. The second sonnet, The Suffering, covers the period of my adolescence through early adulthood. The third sonnet, The Healing, opens with an allusion to The Interior Castle by St. Teresa of Avila; this is a work I confess to having not yet read, but I have heard numerous talks on the Saint and her work on inner prayer. The second stanza of the third sonnet begins by referencing a song by Life Giving Wounds team member and musician Michael Corsini called Waiting in the Wound. This song had a profound impact upon me when I went on the Life Giving Wounds retreat and I still will listen to it and meditate when the mood arises.