The Greatest Gift A Father Offers

Happy Father’s Day.

I’ve come to believe that fatherhood is not a destination, but a doorway.  One we walk through again and again, each time a little more undone: less armored, less performed, more willing to let the false parts of us fall away so something truer can stand in their place. This allows us the opportunity to love all of ourselves  more unconditionally. Jung said, this process of loving ourselves unconditionally would, at times, be like “you were embracing a glowing red-hot iron: it burns into you and that is very painful.”

Fatherhood, is not the initiation of our children alone. It is our own.

Each day asks the same quiet question: will you stay open when the old wound says close? Will you be gentle when your history has only taught us to be hard? Will you keep becoming, long after we believed we should have already arrived? Will we begin again, after everything seems to have come to an end?

All of us were handed scars we never chose. I believe this is why the story of Jesus, after his body was perfectly resurrected, keeps his scars and reveals them. Every good dude, loves to show and tell the stories of his scars.  A good man’s work is not to erase them or hide them.

Open wounds are a little different, we may be embarrassed by our wounds that have yet to heal. We may feel shameful that they are still painfully tender and that we hurt our children when they touch the parts within us that are still hurting.

A good father is one who tends to his insecurities, his anxieties, his depression, his anger, his feelings of brokenness. A good man is surrounded by a few good men who help him turn and face them and to name them. To sit beside the warring parts of himself, not as a judge, but as a brother, and slowly invites them into the home of his heart. Jung named this individuation: the long, unglamorous pilgrimage toward integrating all these parts in us that we keep separated from us, when we do this we discover our wholeness.

Gathering in the forgotten pieces, the exiled pieces, these pieces that have strayed like lost sheep from the flock, called back one by one into the family of the whole self.

The old Hermetic wisdom says it plainly: as it goes within us, so it goes outside of us. The stillness we learn to build inside our own chests becomes the air our children learn to breathe inside of their chests.

The mercy we finally offer ourselves becomes the mercy they offer the world. And the courage it takes to walk into our own scary shadows becomes, without a single word spoken, the permission our children give themselves to walk into theirs.

So today I bow to the men still showing up. The ones breaking cycles past down from generations centuries older than us.

The best among us are the fathers who say I was wrong, I don’t know, I will look at that, I will correct that, the fathers who repair, who rise after they have fallen again. Who see tomorrow, but are fully present today. The fathers who are curious about what makes them anxious and willing to compassionately  embrace that which they would rather be at war with.

The ones carrying weights of their emotions, their financials, and wonder if their personal dreams are just fantasies floating away in exchange of providing stable grounds for their children to stand on. To me, there are no greater father, than the one choosing awareness of his wounds over blind inheritance of them, vulnerable presence over being walled up and polished, true love over the old, familiar fear.

Your children will likely never see the battles fought quietly in your own chest on their behalf. But they will spend their whole lives standing in the light from the peace you made when you ended the war inside.

Happy Father’s Day to every man doing the sacred, invisible work of individuation and in becoming whole by embracing the principles of hermetic philosophy as Jesus exemplified, and teaching the children who came from him how to do the same.

When we do this, then the lost tribes of Israel will be gathered, but this gathering first begins within.

Happy Father’s Day,

Hugh