Witnessing

For My Father Charley, a Promise Kept

This is my season of witnessing.

Only months before my father died in Spring 2020, he was confronted by close family members in his house, a place he and my mother purchased as their retirement home, too large for a couple, but not quite large enough for their children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren all numbering well over thirty at the time of his death. The house was the place where we gathered, in small and large numbers, for holidays, funerals, and sometimes just to escape from our lives and release some of our burdens for a day or two in the company of our aging parents. Tucked into the woods, walking distance to a beach and parks, the house was chosen for family. And it was a place of faith.

The house was also a place of conflict.

My father was a practicing Roman Catholic his entire life. He was distraught over a period of close to three decades during which time he watched some of his kin abandon the church and the faith tradition he and my mother had been dedicated to for the span of their lives. That priests would remind him on his frequent visits to Confession that his family was not unlike many others who had experienced a religious cleaving brought him no comfort.  Dad tried to reason through ceaselessly what had happened to that one, then another, and another that drove them to a new denomination than the one they had been gifted.  

“What are you?” he would ask, and they would tell him they were “Christians,” and then one might also attack him, mocking my parents’ commitment to have the family and their home dedicated to the Sacred Heart and the Rosaries they carried in purses and pockets, asking for the intercession of Mary on their behalf.

And Dad would fight back, because he was not one to back down, and call them “Bible-bangers,” a phrase he used when they lectured about the meaning of the Bible and told him he was wrong to consider the “Word” AND Church tradition as working together as God’s revelation.  On both sides the battles were fierce: the arguments unending, and the personalities hot and intractable in the face of disagreements. No matter, everyone was always welcome and invited back.

And then one day I discovered the actual denomination my relatives were practicing but refused to name. One of them emailed me at my work and told me, among other things, that I needed to read John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress because it would change me and inspire me to grow closer with God. As an English professor, I immediately knew that this relative was on a path to a Calvinist affiliated denomination, and I returned the email requesting that they not contact me about religion at work but in my private emails only, and I wrote that I hoped this person was not giving up the Eucharist and the Catholic faith for the doctrines of the Reformed tradition. I had taught The Pilgrim’s Progress in American Literature courses, and I had read deeply and broadly on Calvinism and its influences in American history and literature. I had long ago experienced my own religious skepticism as a twenty-something that culminated in me affirming my Catholic faith.

I wanted no part in my relative’s conversion and their attempt to convert me—if that was the plan—and I confided in my husband that my parents’ longing to see my relatives return to the fold was never going to happen. But it was not my fight.

The Reformed denominations were not ones I would ever be a part of. My husband and I, not knowing that my relatives were Calvinists, had already been attacked in emails by one of them who told me I had a Biblical mandate to kill my husband’s brother who is openly gay. And if that was not horrifying enough, he also preached that my feminism, my desire to see men and women equal under the law, was an abomination, and that my husband was at fault for not controlling me. So I told my parents what I knew about our relatives’ religious conversions, and I left the battle for them to fight.    

And things might have continued in the way that family battles are waged over religion, with my parents holding onto a hope that was unlikely to be fulfilled. And the family unit might have lumbered along with disagreements and minor skirmishes over the Bible and its interpretation because that is how it is with thousands of loving families. You disagree and try to get along, because in the end, we are all Christians, right?  

But then my father started dying.

In the beginning, Dad experienced congestive heart failure and had surgery to have a stent placed in a coronary artery. And then he suffered bladder stones and his kidneys became compromised. Eventually, he was tethered permanently to a catheter, and he declined slowly but consistently from that point on, in and out of hospitals, rehabilitation centers, and nursing homes in what seemed like an endless cycle. He still had plans, he still thought he could recover if the catheter could only be removed. But the rest of us surely saw that Dad was not going to get better. And there were many close calls and countless late-night hospital runs before he eventually passed from kidney failure and an inability to tolerate dialysis. He went to Heaven on March 10, 2020.

Approximately six months before he died, these close family relatives, not yet born again in the Reformed Baptist Church they had joined, went into the home of my ailing father—a home they had lived in with my parents intermittently when they were in the middle of moves from place to place and going through various life transitions—and challenged him. The male relative did the confronting, as in the Reformed tradition, the male is the head of the household and the one who makes the decisions for everyone else. I was told that this man screamed at my dying father, saying that he was going to go to Hell if he did not convert.  And when he was done with his screaming, this male relative cried and kissed my father on the cheek.

My father remained Catholic. But he was shaken by this event.

I was not present for the screaming, and I learned only later from my father and my mother of the events that transpired, and from that moment of revelation, I have been trying to understand how someone would condemn to Hell my father who was a practicing faithful Catholic, who more than anything loved the sacrament of the Eucharist, who sacrificed for his children throughout his life, and who wanted more than anything for his family to be united in faith and love.

During my father’s funeral, two days before the country closed down as a result of Covid-19, I sat at Dad’s viewing with my husband and children and we were ignored by these relatives.  A day earlier, one of the family members who was present at the confrontation with my father had stormed out of the meeting with my father’s priest in preparation for his funeral, because the priest refused to let multiple people speak at the Mass for as long as they desired and instead offered just 5-6 minutes for the eulogy.

I pushed back against the eulogy’s brevity, siding with my relative’s desire to see more loved ones speak for a longer period. But I acquiesced when the priest emphasized that the Mass was the focus and family could speak at the luncheon afterwards for as long as they wanted. My relative got up and argued loudly, in front of the priest and the church’s office manager that they were not going to be a part of this request and stormed out. They said later that I was to blame for not remaining a united front with them.

My father’s priest was also my priest, and in the end, I realized the Mass was most important and the choice ultimately was not mine nor my relative’s; it was my mother’s choice. She knew my father best and could advocate for him and for herself and decide how to celebrate my father’s life and faith.

If I had not been overcome with my own grief and with the funeral events that were unfolding before me, I might have made more of the unfamiliar pastor and his wife who sat behind me and my family in the corner of the viewing room while people came to offer condolences and prayers for Dad. Only later did I learn that this was the pastor of the relatives who had verbally challenged my father’s faith, and that before this stranger left, he made sure to tell my mother, “I am sorry for your troubles,” which struck both of us as insensitive because it was a callous understatement regarding the loss of my father, and she had not invited him there. He said nothing to me.

About a year after my father’s death, I was notified that these family relatives had recently been “baptized” and “born again” and that there was a public video of the event on the church’s Facebook page. I downloaded the video, and then my husband and children and I all watched one of these relatives say that they never felt like they were “good enough” in the eyes of my father. They went on to deny their Catholic faith, and then proceeded to the front of the church with the pastor who had attended Dad’s funeral. This relative stepped into a tub filled with water, was dunked by the pastor, and then led by their pastor to the back of the church and out of sight. I realized in my watching and rewatching of the video that they were not yet formal members of their new church community when they tried to strip my father of his.

Today, I see the events of my father’s life and in turn my own life very differently than I did at the time many of these incidents occurred. I have reread the divisive letters, text messages, and emails from my relatives; I have devoured books about the schisms that develop in families over faith and now politics and faith. I have talked to experts about family shunning and ostracizations. I have shadowed my father’s path trying to understand why it was not enough for him and my mother that their kin was comprised of Christians, if not Catholics, and why my relatives’ Reformed faiths are dedicated to denouncing the practice of Catholicism, and tragically, damning my father.  

But more than anything, I cannot escape the reality that my father, approaching his final days in the home he and my mother shared with everyone, was told that he was going to go to Hell by people whom he believed loved him in that place. What am I supposed to do with that knowledge, that they used fear and threats to assault and insult a life of love for Christ? Where can I put it? Is there a tomb that will hold the anguish I feel for the imperfect father whom I know loved me and loved his faith?

Before he died, I told Dad I was heartbroken for him and that I prayed for a release from anguish. I told him he needed to let go of this desire to see them back in the Catholic Church. And I promised that I would not forget what I had seen and heard and witnessed. And this is my testament that I have not.