This is wonderful, John; so eloquent, heartfelt and wise! With affection and admiration.

Second, I want to thank you (and Paul) for identifying with real clarity my father’s good points. I feel that I’m in a position to appreciate them myself right now, and I also appreciate the fact that other people can see so easily what was, in fact, not easy to see at the time. I had reasons, of course, for my position. I think it’s a pretty fair requirement that able-bodied people should contribute to their own upkeep. And my father’s laziness came in a context of real poverty (we had no heat, no hot water, no telephone, on food stamps, were squatting in a house we did not own, in New York City), and my mother’s real and at times painful effort. I have images in my brain that will never go away: the redness of her blistered hands, or the sound of her crying in her room after some fight with my father, or him exploding in wrath at the dinner table when his table setting had the wrong kind of fork (still for me an image of horrible injustice – something about it makes me burn on the inside still).

You take love and inclusion as your ideal, and I agree, but honestly I think it is more complicated than you present it. I think a different goal than love and inclusion, at first, is necessary: and that is why first-stage religion is so judgemental and unloving. I think there is wisdom in this. I can *feel* that your own “religion” – your values and principles – are like this (which is why you did not need to identify yourself as a young man – no one would ever have accused you of being anything else). You steer yourself away, intentionally, from religion – from anything with the word “Christianity” in the title! – and will only allow it in if Christianity is a “topic” but not taken seriously. Your reasoning for this is that religion is the inverse of intelligence – which is, obviously and transparently, your de facto religion.

In order to achieve this, you must hold at arm’s length things which you find stupid. You can’t sharpen a knife with pillows. And the sharpness is what you want. So you’re not going to spend time with intellectual fluff.

I admire this. It’s very admirable. It’s precisely the kind of limited goal we all have to set for ourselves at first. But I can guarantee that if you stick with it forever, it will cause trouble for you in the future. At some point you will be called on to love something or more likely someone whose intelligence you cannot really respect. In fact, that person someday may well be yourself. And you’ll have to loosen up a bit.

You seem to be getting there: while you acknowledge that your comments are aggressive in tone – which they are, they are bristling with unresolved negativity – you admit that that’s not the whole you, and even ask forgiveness for the aggressiveness.

Again, this kind of thing makes me feel that there is really one “religion.” (I’m perfectly willing to have discussions as to whether or not we need a new word for our highest values, but I’ll use the old word.) Just the *feel* of your comment indicates to me that you have in yourself some fairly powerful resentments, ones which I bet occasionally cause you some opposition from people who might otherwise listen to you. (I have the same problem myself). I have in my life found deeply religious people who have a completely different energy to them – who just feel *good* to be around. This is the result of a lot of self-acceptance and the resolution of inner tensions, and I think it goes by the word “wisdom,” which we too often think of as a commodity to be “obtained” the way data might be obtained. It’s more like personal wholeness than the acquisition of a skill. One of the ways that I have recognized people like this in my life is that *even when they have difficult things to say to me I find myself willing to listen to them.* Even if other people have told me the same thing and I ignored them, certain wise people have the power to give me advice, because I respect them in a deep way. And the people I know like this have always been religious. I think Hitchens and Dawkins are smart, for example, but they have none of this quality at all. And to be honest, I don’t know any atheists who have it. And to me it’s a higher value than mere intelligence, though the people I have known with it have had both.

If it weren’t for my hidden agenda, I would not have read beyond the first paragraph. Normally I couldn’t be bothered to read anything with the word “Christianity” in the title. I do not value the words or opinions of many of the Catholics or Christians (or Muslims for that matter) that I’ve encountered in my life. There appears (from my perspective) to be a direct correlation between religion and intelligence; those with one generally lack the other. There are many exceptions, but the rule often holds true.

However, I had already determined that you are an individual with a healthy supply of intelligence, and seeing that you mentioned both Christianity and Islam in the title gave me hope that perhaps you followed neither but were merely commenting on them both. So I began to read.

Immediately, in your second paragraph, you make a statement, judging your father to have had zero success except for “having a wonderful wife and children.” Interestingly, you wrap this achievment, which I might consider one of the greatest possible in life, in parentheses, seperating it from your “zero success” statement as if you hope to hide the blatant contradiction, while at the same time lending it a dismissive tone, as though a wonderful wife and children is no achievment at all. You manage to slip the admission that you have not yet reached success in this area of life into this parenthetical statement, this side note, as though it is of little relevance to the subject at hand. Dismissing this small achievment, you proceed to illustrate to your reader the rubric you measure against when judging your father (presumably the same as you apply to the rest of mankind). Your first attack, “He never worked a full-time job,” provides some insight into your values.

Working a full time job might be seen by many as an inhibitor to, rather than an indicator of, success and achievment. Personally, I have never worked a full-time job for any great stretch of time, and I hope someday my son, should I be successful enough to have one, will proudly tell his friends, “My father never worked a full-time job, not for long anyway. No, he wouldn’t be distracted from the pursuit of happiness and enlightenment by the pursuit of wealth and security, he would not sell himself for material gain, he would not subject himself to another man’s will, he was free.”

Your next statements concern your father’s income. Again, implying a direct connection between achievment/success and the material world, a connection that I refute. Your neighbor’s candid statements indicate that your father was an intelligent man; to achieve intelligence is a success in it’s own right. To achieve happiness is, in my humble opinion, the greatest success of them all, one I suspect you are far from reaching. To achieve a large annual income is scarcely something to be proud of, certainly not something you would hear me mention if you asked me to describe success.

Still in the same paragraph, with disdain for your father seeping from every word, you imply that your father’s choice to engage in the most beautiful of all human acts, lovemaking, (specifically the consumation of his love for your mother) in spite of the unnatural, perverse ruling against human pleasure decreed by his religion, was a reflection upon his willpower.

Perhaps you didn’t consider the possibility that he might have chosen to procreate because, for example, he saw through the blindfold of religion, and somehow instinctively knew that acting upon his feelings for your mother was not a “sin,” not an evil, but rather the natural, beautiful fullfillment of the antithesis of evil, Love. Or for another example, perhaps he refused to be bound by the words of other men, but rather followed his heart and did what he knew was right and good.

No, surely he was weak, and could not resist the temptations of the devil.

I did not know your father, and I do not dispute your claim that he was lazy. But that his laziness was to blame for your conception? This I cannot accept so easily. A man who loves a woman does not have sex with her because he’s not “good at hard things.” He does so because the power of love has triumphed, not because the evil of temptation has overcome him.

You say he didn’t take care of his children. I will not attempt to dispute that, for certainly based upon your account, I cannot see any grounds upon which to directly contradict this statement. You speak of his selfishness, and that too I will refrain from attacking, for I have no evidence to the contrary.

You say that at times it felt he only loved you because you were an extension of his self. That may be true. To love others, one must first love themself. Clearly he loved you. Clearly he longed to be loved by you, and your siblings, and your mother. You felt he only wanted an audience, but perhaps he only wanted to be loved. As twisted as his form of expression may have been, I still gather from your words that he surely must have loved you all very, very much.

“I never felt free of him enough to simply throw him away. My mother changed her number. I couldn’t. He was my father.” It must have been painful to write those words. To think those words. To acknowledge to yourself that you wanted to throw him away, to even admit that struggle existed.

Surely you loved him. But I might note that you say “despite all his faults,” not “with all his faults,” a distinction I think is significant. You didn’t love his faults, you loved him despite the faults. You did not love him wholly, for who he was, but rather partially, for his good side. Still, you did love him.

You said he had achieved nothing in his life, yet his children (at least one of them) loved him, which is a great and difficult achievment. So many fathers are hated by their children. You say he had achieved some level of culture (even if the level was not particularly high), and it sounds like he brought a great deal of happiness to others through his conversation. “He was a great storyteller,” He played baseball with his children, got them to listen to classical music, and built toy-train layouts, each achievments in their own right. He was good enough to his son, you, that in high school you would go so far as wearing his old baseball number “just to make him proud.” Many fathers have failed to such a degree that if they were into baseball, their children would have no part in it, and simply the fact that he maintained civil discourse with you and your siblings is no small success.

I will conclude this section about you and your father by noting that you make no mention of your father being judgmental of you, yet you judge him very harshly. He loved you and did not judge you, you judged him and loved him only grudgingly.

Your next paragraph turns toward religion. You seem proud of your “prestigous” high school and it’s conspicuous values. I find it humorous that you say this Catholic high school valued intellectual brilliance; I’ve never encountered a brilliant intellectual with any significant faith in Catholicism or any other organized monotheistic religion, and I sincerely doubt any Catholic’s ability to recognize intellectual brilliance. How can a man who believes in the Bible be considered worthy to judge intellect?

Brilliance and service, your pursuits. Unselfish service of others. Altruism. I hesitate to even go there. There does not exist an unselfish act. All humans are inherently selfish; this is not because we are born tainted with sin, this is because selfishness is natural, healthy, effective, and unavoidable. Selfishness is the highest of all virtues. You give to others, share with others, are kind to others, and perform what you might think are “unselfish acts” for one of two reasons, depending upon how intelligent you are. If you are a fool, you do so to secure a position in heaven. If you are wiser, you do so because it is in your best interest. Kind people are happier than cruel people, doing good things feels good, and you want to feel good. It is not “altruism.” Some acts are good, others evil, all acts are selfish.

You didn’t want to be him. You wanted very badly to be better than him. To outdo him. Prove that the apple can fall far from the tree. You seem so proud, as you compare yourself to him. I’m sure as you listed his income and work history earlier, you were making comparisons as well, and smiling smugly. You beat him. It wasn’t about being kind to others. It wasn’t about serving mankind, being a good friend. It wasn’t about contributing to society, about having a good work ethic. It was all about proving to yourself that you are a better man than your father. Yet who had the purest love, father for son or son for father? If I am the judge, he with the truest heart, he who loves best, he lived best and is best. Not he who did the most for others, nor he who worked the hardest, not he who suffered the most, nor he who dies with the most toys, nor he who gave the most away. No, the one who loves. Love is the purest form of all that is good.

What is the opposite of love? Ask anyone, they will tell you, without hesitation. The word passes from their lips almost before the question escapes yours. They are wrong. Love has no antonym.

Hate is evil, but it cannot possibly stand next to love, for the greatest of all hate does not even come near the magnitude of even the smallest kernel of love. Hate is merely an emotion, Love is so much more. They are not opposites, any more than a rainbow is the opposite of any one of the colors. Love contains hate, encompasses all emotion and more, so much more.

But I digress. Your north star, your noble ideal. It was flawed. One should seek love, truth, happiness. These are truly noble ideals. Not to rule by serving, or by any other manner, not to be the greatest, whether by mimicing the least or otherwise. Not to serve others, not to be the most “virtous” of all your friends, or your family. Only to be happy, and to truly and fully love yourself and those around you. Let love be your north star.

As you judge yourself on such a flawed rubric, you also judge others. You “tried being distant and reproachful; being warm and forgiving; being pragmatic, being inspirational, being insistent and being oblique, and nothing ever had any effect on him.” Your fatal flaw was trying to effect him at all. Love him, accept him, love and accept his laziness, his selfishness. Do not try to change him. Do not compare yourself to him, or him to others, or yourself to others. Love.

Love him the way he was on the day that he died. Do not overlook the flaws, embrace the flaws, love the flaws. Do not judge him for the porn magazines he left, and do not assume that looking at beautiful pictures of the human body is a vice. Do not ask him to reform, accept him as he is. Especially, at his funeral, or any other, never say it was a shame. If he really was quite talented, celebrate that. If he really was intelligent, celebrate that. If he loved, celebrate that. There’s no need for shame.

Death is simply the end of life. Life has a beginning and an end, one is not inherently better than the other, or even more beautiful. It should not be a trial. There is no final judgment, there is no need to reach perfection, nor is it possible to do so. If you wish to experience heaven, make heaven on earth, for there will be no other.

You say it is very, very rare to find a Christian who is not judgemental. I disagree. I would say there are no Christians who are not judgemental, as the basic tenets of Christianity require one believe that some will go to heaven and others to hell, after a final judgement. Your internal tension, which you expressed by trying to change your father, was not a result of your father’s character flaws. Your tension came from your desire to change him, from your lack of acceptance, from refusing to allow yourself to love him fully. Change him as you will, you would never resolve the tension, for always there would be some flaw to pick on, something to change. The only way to relieve the tension was during his life, and remains after his death, accepting his character flaws and loving him wholly, as a package, flaws included.

When he died, the sadness began to eat away at you. You were not sad because you had failed to reform him, you were not sad because of who he was. You were sad because you knew that you did not truly love him, and never had. And only by letting go of your desire to change him, and accepting him as he was, could you ever fully, truly love your father. The same is true of yourself, and your wife. You cannot truly love yourself if you do not love your flaws as well, and you surely cannot love your wife if you do not love yourself, your father, or certain aspects of her. You must accept all the flaws, the whole package, and choose to love. Not to love “anyway” or “despite,” but to love, “including.”

Hatred of laziness, hatred of unfulfilled potential, hatred of your father, these are horible sources to draw upon for a work ethic. A love for your work, a love of achievment, these are the sources you should seek. Stop hating yourself. Your father was not despicable, he loved you. Stop despising him, stop hating, accept, love, move on.

“He loved his father – and his wisdom, culture, and virtue – but he had a religion which treated all of those things as ultimately irrelevant.” The religion is the problem. Your words in defense of the religion in question are sickening. That anyone could defend such a religion offends me. For the young man in that story, the Abu Hudhayfa your spoke of, it is entirely impossible that Islam had been necessary for him whatsoever. Islam, like Cathlocism, Christianity, and nearly all organized religion, is inherently evil. It necessarily leads to judgment, violence, hate, conflict, and away from love and purity. Whatever ailed him, the medicine and it’s side effects was far worse than the sickness. Discipline, honor, purpose of clarity, abstinence from alohol, all of these can be achieved without bringing the evil of religion into the equation. Establishing independence from your father, also, can be done with or without religion, and without is preferable.

Children need rules. I agree. Religion is a terrible means to achieve this end. Good parenting, education regarding ethics and morality, these are tools to use in creating rules for children. I might define a child as someone too young to manage, wield or otherwise fully possess the legal rights and responsibilities granted to an adult. Subscribing to a hard or limiting religion, whether as a child, a young man, or an adult, is not appropriate. And you seem to be aware of this, for, in your own words, you were “aware that there were good things – and more than that, good people – who lived outside this religion, and who did not live up to these demands.” Fortunately, you came to the eventual realization that your love for your family outweighs your religion. Love far outweighs religion. Religion inhibits love.

Do not cram yourself into the box of religion. Do not allow your love, your highest values, the “religion that is in your heart” be crammed away and hidden deep inside, to wither and rot. Those who weep are not blessed, those with no need for tears are truly blessed. Do not sit in the box for years, then be broken open, exposed for the fraud you have lived, and weep at the rot and decay inside. You cannot live the double-life of hypocrisy, you cannot leave pieces of yourself unintegrated, you cannot leave out “all those loves that don’t fit into one’s actual lived life.”

I have not had the dream you speak of. The intruder consists of those pieces of yourself you have chosen to exclude, the parts of you that you don’t love, and if you love yourself wholly, there are no pieces to build him from, and there will be no intruder.

There can be no “guilt that has finally been acknowledged” if you never break yourself into pieces and feel guilty about some and proud about others. Love yourself as one whole creature, your base instincts, your “lower animal nature,” (or is it your higher animal nature?), your impurities, your good, your evil. Love and accept it all from the beginning. Do not attempt to be entirely good, for you will only isolate and amplify your evil, letting it fester and rot and become worse. Do not strive for purity. Love yourself as you are. Do not divide your two households.

“But now I know what mature, second-stage Christianity really is. I know what it means to be called to love something I wanted to good enough to despise.” –Please clarify, is the double “to” a typo?

I like this paragraph a lot, the whole piece seems to pivot around it:

“Because ultimately this generosity with others is reflected in and symptomatic of a generosity with yourself. And it should arrive as soon as you are able to dispense with your own intense self-judgement – which at some point you can in fact do. I have many vices, some of them from my father, some of them from my mother, and some all my own. But I know now I cannot grow anymore by suppressing them. I grow only by living with them in some kind of harmony, by being openly wounded: by striving no longer to walk perfectly, but to limp with the wound that is mine.”

However, who wants to walk with a limp forever? One must never begin with the intense self-judgement, one must never consider the various parts of themselves to be “vices,” one must never subscribe to the religion in the first place. Only by steering clear of religion entirely can one avoid ever suffering the wound. And one might not walk perfectly just the same, for you may be born imperfect, but if you love yourself and the way you walk, you will never suffer the self-inflicted wounds of self-judgement. Never cram yourself into the box to begin with.

You said that

“Jesus said, “Be perfect, as your heavenly father is perfect.” But it is surprising how he defines perfection: “He causes his sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and unrighteous.” This is no young man’s ideal of perfection.”

What Jesus said there was true, what you said was false, for I am a young man and this is my ideal of perfection. To love yourself, all of yourself, good and evil, and to love others, the good, the evil, the in-between, wholly, their good parts and their evil parts all accepted as one. Although I phrased it differently there, I believe that the ideal of perfection he described in the quote is the same ideal I live by.

At the beginning of your essay I felt strongly that I had to explain how and why you were wrong. By the last paragraph, I find we are in agreement.

I would not use the same phrases, but I believe we have very similar meaning.

In the end, life and death, light and dark, high and low, good and evil meet, one does not win out over the other, one need not fear the other. They meet and embrace as brothers, and we love them both, and this is the victory of the life and light and goodness.

How do you reconcile this “acceptance” of self that you talk about, with the utter rejection of self that is the epitome of sainthood?