Why?

A chat about fatherhood quickly turns into a conversation about God

I interviewed my friend and fellow dad Andres about a year ago for season 1 of The Dad Bod. At 60 years old, he is ahead of me in life and in parenting, and so even though we've never lived in the same city and our actual contact with each other is infrequent, I've looked up to him for a long time. In our conversation, Andres unpacked his personal story of sonship, manhood, and fatherhood, but the topic that runs through them all is faith. This post is my personal reflection on that conversation, which you can also listen to via the embedded player below, on Spotify, here or wherever you get your podcasts.

At some hidden level of our interior, kids’ repeated "whys" start to sound more like rejections of our answers and our authority. But the most annoying thing of all is that they're right. Our answer to why just isn’t enough.

If I had to choose a single word that captures the essence of the father-child relationship, without a doubt, it would be "love." Pretty obvious.

But if I had to choose a second word - a runner up to "love" - it would be "why" for the way that it animates so much father-child interaction. It begins early, with the young child asking his dad, "why?" over and over again. It's a comedic trope that concludes with another comedic trope, the exasperated dad saying, "because I said so." And we laugh because it's true: our kids' curiosity is more than we can bear. It becomes part of your parenting intuition - the same part of you that intercepts the cup before it falls off the dinner table - that after the second or third "why?" our mind starts to search for the "why"-way exit ramp. But…why?

For starters, it's annoying, because at some hidden level of our interior, the repeated "whys" start to sound more like rejections of our answers and our authority. But the most annoying thing of all is that they're right. Our answer to why just isn’t enough.

Fortunately, we have people in our society whose job is to help us cope with this and all of our other failures: comedians. They write jokes to help us see ourselves. In his own rendition of the “why” joke, Louis CK concludes that the kid always wins. "They will why you into the core of the earth until you admit you know nothing."

It's a great joke, a funny wrapper around a solid core of truth, that at the end of every kid-series of whys, there’s a grown-up existential crisis waiting. But don’t blame the kids. Like comedians, they’re just helping us see ourselves. We, too, want to know the answer to "why?"

And then at some still-young age, "why" gets passed like a talking stick, changing hands from kid to dad. It's our turn now. We wield it with our words and our actions, not as questions but as statements, imparting to our children a "why" for everything we do and that we are trying to teach them. All of the whys, though crafted into unique lessons and lectures, all have the same underscoring: this is important. That's where the conversation with my friend and fellow dad Andres started, when I asked him about his dad, who passed away several years ago.

Andres described his dad as the life of the party who also minded his p's and q's and spoke articulately through a strong Colombian accent. With his old-world manners and mores, Andres' dad had a way of making everyone - rich or poor, sophisticated or plain - feel respected, so much so that his custom of inviting people into his office for a formal private conversation became a running family joke.

This anecdote makes me smile because it reminds me of when Andres and his wife visited us a decade ago as we were preparing to welcome our first child. On this occasion, Andres invited me to a formal conversation on a public bench made private by the smoke of our cigars. Like father, like son when it comes to this custom as well as the character traits of tenacity, intellectual curiosity, and talent for teaching.

Professionally, however, father and son took very different paths. Andres' dad was a scientist, an accomplished pathologist who went on to become the world's foremost expert in his field, career success that Andres attributes to his father's tunnel vision focus and dedication. By contrast, Andres had a meandering career journey well into his 30s before following a call to become a pastor, highlighted by the past 14 years working as the chaplain of an outpatient clinic for the medically underserved in North Philly.

Father, son; pathologist, pastor; science, faith. Reflecting on this contrast, Andres recites his dad's hierarchy of professions: scientists and doctors at the top; businessmen somewhere in the middle; and lawyers, all the way down at the bottom. "Pastors?" Andres laughs. "Not even on the scale!"

Yet Andres notes that his dad insisted he was not an atheist. If anything, perhaps he was a deist that imagined God as the clockmaker and the world as the clock; and though his theology may have been thin and informal, he helped a lot of people in his community in the self-effacing manner of a pastor. Andres, for his part, imagines that he might have gone into science had his dad not been so dogmatic; and ironically, as the chaplain ministering to the spiritual needs of doctors, staff, and patients of a medical clinic, Andres has spent the biggest chunk of his career working at the highest levels of his father's professional hierarchy. Father and son, inverted images but reflections of one other nonetheless.

Although I asked Andres to contrast his and his dad's careers, I can now hear that the comparison I was actually seeking was his career versus my own. What is it like for your vocation to be intrinsically tied to rather than separate from your faith? The question originates from an unsettled feeling in my own life that something as profound as faith should not be severed from something as dominant in life as work. Without realizing it, I was asking my friend Andres for some pastoring, which he gave me in two parables.

One was Jesus’ parable of the seed and the four soils. The seed takes root and bears fruit in the good soil but gets choked in the other three, thereby representing three categories of temptation in life: the deceitfulness of wealth, the anxieties of life, and the pleasures of life. Andres caps it off like a North Philly preacher who’s been rehearsing all week: “And man, that about covers them all.”

The other was a modern day parable about a flag football coach whose honesty reverses a penalty and results in 7 points for the other team. His players, including his own son, are disappointed, but the coach is steadfast in his conviction that life is bigger than football, and thus when the goals of the game conflict with the principles of life, the choice is clear. The coach explains this in football terms to his players, "It was a legal play, so I had to tell the ref, even if it meant that the other team got 7 points," and then on the drive home, he explains it in faith terms to his sons: "Before God, I knew what was true."

Based on the true events of his own life, Andres' admonition to his sons and to me is to look at life from God's perspective. He points in particular to 2 Corinthians 4, where the apostle Paul describes an invisible, spiritual, eternal reality that has ultimate meaning over the visible, physical, temporal reality. Paul's encouragement to the church of Corinth suggests that if football existed back then, he might have been a great coach: "Therefore we do not lose heart. Though outwardly we are wasting away, yet inwardly we are being renewed day by day. For our light and momentary troubles are achieving for us an eternal glory that far outweighs them all. So we fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen, since what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal."

Because we share the same faith, I recognize Andres’ message across these two parables: there is more to life than what is visible in front of us; there is more to life than just this life. But there's also part of me - the grown-up work-focused part of me I mentioned earlier - that shifts uncomfortably in his seat. I get what he's saying but I also don't, so I pivot to a topic that is neither work nor faith, but in the middle - parenting. "What are some things that you're trying to teach your boys?" I ask. Any hopes I had of recentering the conversation around more typical fatherhood concepts were quickly dashed. "The love of God, the love of Christ," he answers.

At this point, I'm starting to feel like a character in a parable myself, the parable of the earnest dad who started a conversation with his friend about fatherhood only to end up in a conversation about God. But then the kid in me takes the talking stick back and starts asking the questions.

"Why," he asks, "is it so important to impart on your sons an active, living faith?" Behind the grown-up-looking disguise, it's the typical kid "why" question, but for once, the grown-up offers a real answer.

"It comes back to the love of God," Andres says, "That's the most loving thing to do with a child. God is the center of the universe. God is the great reality. God is the invisible structure of all existence; the loving God, who most perfectly revealed Himself in Christ, is the greatest blessing that you can give to a child."

Good answer, but the kid's not done yet, so he asks, "What does knowing the love of God do for a person?" Andres answers calmly, "For some, it can be devastating. For others, it can be the greatest message they've ever heard. Either way, it calls the person to the true reality. It pulls back the curtains and says there is a larger reality that must be attended to, and this is the invitation to proactively pursue it."

The kid pauses. He's not used to getting an answer to "why" this big, especially from a grown-up: faith, God, love, and an invisible, sacred reality strong enough to hold it all. It's the kind of truth that a kid fits in the palm of his hand but a grown up can't wrap his arms around. For once, for now, the kid is satisfied.

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