"Lucky Me:" Michael Chabon and me on Father's Day

A Father’s Day quote from Michael Chabon. This one comes from his amazing volume of essays, Manhood for Amateurs: the Pleasures and Regrets of a Husband, Father, and Son. In lamenting the low bar for fatherhood in our culture, he homes in on the humility of the work:

“The daily work you put into rearing your children is a kind of intimacy, tedious and invisible as mothering itself. There is another kind of intimacy in the conversations you may have with your children as they grow older, in which you confess to failings, reveal anxieties, share your bouts of creative struggle, regret, frustration. There is intimacy in your quarrels, your negotiations and running jokes. But above all, there is intimacy in your contact with their bodies, with their shit and piss, sweat and vomit, with their stubbled kneecaps and dimpled knuckles, with the rips in their underpants as you fold them, with their hair against your lips as you kiss the tops of their heads, with the bones of their shoulders and with the horror of their breath in the morning as they pursue the ancient art of forgetting to brush. Luck me that I should be permitted the luxury of choosing to find the intimacy inherent in this work that is thrust upon so many women. Lucky me.

When I read this, I thought first of my own experience over the last 10 years and the marvel of my wife and children. But close behind, I thought of the mystery of the Incarnation and what it says about the fatherhood of God. That he would choose to enter this world in all its follies and failures and so bind himself to our blood and bone to redeem every inch of it – surely, surely this whispers the truth of the word: Father.