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TOPIC: Gordon, Samuel Dickey - Quiet Talks on Home Ideals (Other Topics in this Collection)
SUBJECT: 39. A Mothering Father.
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A Mothering Father.
What is the holiest, the dearest word in our tongue? You think a while, and likely you will answer "love." Yes, but love is a sentiment; it is an impersonal word. You never know love except as you know someone loving another. What personal word embodies this word "love" most and best? And most hearts, the world around, will answer "mother." And as a sentiment embodied in a person is always more and higher than the sentiment itself, "mother" is commonly reckoned the holiest and dearest word in our tongue.
That is to say, it is so far as our experience goes. And yet there is another answer that is true, too. Ideally there is a word, holier and higher and deeper in its significance, and that was meant to be sweeter than "mother." That is the word "father." It is not so in man's common experience. That is true. But it is in the thought of God, and in the plan He meant us to fit our lives into.
For "father" includes all that "mother" does, and something more. It is not actually so with most people. But originally it was, and ideally, in God's plan, it still is. Sometimes it is so actually. Sometimes it stands on a level with "mother;" but commonly it falls behind. That the actual does not measure up to the ideal here, tells how much more woman has filled up the measure of God's plan than man, and how far man has fallen behind.
Father means mother, too. It doesn't mean it in common use. We think of "father" as being masculine; and mother as feminine. The one stands distinctively for the strength traits, and the other for the love traits. Though as we think into that distinction we know that it isn't really a very sharp one. For the two meanings cross over the line between them. We can call to mind fathers who have shown a good bit of skill in mothering, too, when the need called for it.
A minister was preaching to his home congregation on Sabbath morning. His son of five years sat in the minister's family pew, with others there. The strain of life had been too much for the mother's strength; the tether of life had worn thin, and ravelled out, and then parted, and she had slipped away. It was said, in an undertone, among the families of the church, that the father of the boy, broken-hearted over his loss, ministered with his own hands to the little fellow's needs, doing what a mother's hands commonly do. But he went quietly on his way in his church ministrations, seeking to hide his grief.
He was preaching as usual this Sabbath morning, and in his sermon spoke of a mother's care, and said "Who can take the place of a mother?" His little son, listening intently, spoke out, with the unconscious artlessness of a child, and with the slow speech and the thin treble of childish lips, that could be distinctly heard in the quiet of the church, he said, "I think a father does very well." A sudden hush cast its soft spell over the church, as the father swallowed something in his throat, and with glistening eyes smiled bravely down into his little son's face, and then went quietly on with his sermon. All unconsciously the boy was bearing tribute to the real fatherliness of the father who was mothering his motherless son. But in actual experience this is very rare.
We can more easily think of mothers who have been fine fatherers, too, in the absence of the father, and the results of their work have not seemed to show any lack of "strength" traits, either.
That distinction between "father" and "mother" is an old one. It reveals itself in the language. used long ago in the old Book. Moses said to Israel in the Moab Plains, "Thy God bare (or carried) thee as a man doth bear (or carry) his son, in all the way ye went, until ye came to this place." (Deu_1:31 <http://www.crossbooks.com/verse.asp?ref=Dt+1:31>.) Here is the common thought of a father's distinctive trait of strength. "As one whom his mother comforteth," (Isa_66:13 <http://www.crossbooks.com/verse.asp?ref=Isa+66:13>.) brings out the tender heart-meaning we usually associate with the word "mother."
Yet even here the meanings cross over the line between, and help to rub it out as they cross. For "as a father pitieth his children" (Psa_103:13 <http://www.crossbooks.com/verse.asp?ref=Ps+103:13>.) is a putting of the distinctive mother meaning, the love meaning, into "father." Pity is love moved by weakness and need. On the other side, after a great victory in Israel, the woman leader sang
"The rulers ceased in Israel, they ceased,
Until that I, Deborah, arose,
That I arose a mother in Israel" (Jdg_5:7 <http://www.crossbooks.com/verse.asp?ref=Jdg+5:7>.)
Here was not simply a woman, but a mother acting the part of strength and of leadership, because there was no father, with a father's distinctive traits strong enough to make him a father to his nation. The meanings of the two words constantly blend.
We are apt to think at once that "father" can't, mean "mother," too, because in our experience it hasn't been so, as a rule. Or, at least, the other commoner thought stands out so strongly that we don't think into how far this other can be true. Yet "father" means not only strength as we are apt to think of strength, but as strength really is ideally. Strength includes love, and love at its best of being tender and gentle. And "mother" means "father," too. For love is strong. Its strength to rally its powers and do man's work is marvellous. There are probably many more mothers who have been good fathers too, than there are fathers who have also been mothers.
Yet a father can be a mother, even though it is so exceptional. And that mothers have been fathers less exceptionally brings out the fine fact that the two words blend in their meaning. The words mark a very real difference between the two, and yet it is a difference that is meant to be a disappearing one in real meaning, even while the distinctive traits of each remain. For fathers were meant to take on, and reveal, more and more, the mother's traits of love. And mothers were meant more and more to grow in the father traits of strength. Contact was meant to grow a likeness.
It is not that the distinctive traits of each disappear, but that each takes on the distinctive traits of the other, in addition to his own. The father living with the mother in the constant touch of life should grow in strength as a father, and yet he should be absorbing into his make-up the fineness and gentleness and tender touch of the mother, too. And she cannot be less a mother, seeing she has the heart she has, but she can absorb into her finer being, though all unconsciously, more of the good independence and self-reliance, and leadership of him who is by her side.
Father means mother, too. And mother means father, not in the mere words themselves, nor in our common use of them, but in the traits of character for which each was meant to stand by Him who taught us to talk.