Father and Son

Today would have been my dad’s 87th birthday had he not died 37 years ago on my 28th birthday.  He died just shy of age 51 after a grueling three-year bout with cancer.    

I spent my adolescence trying to excel in athletics in an effort to win his approval and gain his blessing. In seventh grade, I tried out for the basketball team but was cut. In eighth grade, I tried out for the football team as a halfback and got flattened by defensive linemen who were using me as a tackling dummy. I had my fill of that after two weeks and turned in my pads, which got me a lecture from Dad on how a Shirey never quits.

That spring, I went out for the track team. No one gets cut from the track team.  I was too slow for the sprints and not agile or strong enough for the field events, so I ran the distance events. I didn't run fast enough in eighth or ninth grade to qualify for the meets, but as a sophomore I qualified for the 2 mile run in the first meet of the year against our arch rivals. My parents came to watch my first race. Running against all those upperclassmen, I moved to the front of the pack at the half-mile mark and stayed in the lead for the next mile and a quarter. I was in the lead at the start of the bell lap, but was gassed. On the backstretch, two guys passed me. I held on for third, though, in my first high school meet, scored a point for our team, and went home elated.

The first thing my dad said at the dinner table was, "Why'd you let those guys pass you?"

I snapped, "Never good enough, am I?"

Whereupon, he slammed his hand on the table and yelled, “Go to your room!"

Which I did.

On the way out of the kitchen, I barked through clenched teeth, “Don’t ever come watch me run again!”

He didn’t.

I lettered in cross country and track my sophomore, junior, and senior years of high school, ran occasional races during my college years and early adulthood, and have continued to run recreationally for the past four decades. Dozens of races.  Thousands of miles.  But because of that clash at the dinner table between a headstrong father and his headstrong son, he only saw me run once.

There is one other thing to which I have given myself across my lifetime with the unremitting discipline and passion I gave to running: preaching. 

I preached my first sermon from the pulpit of Central Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) in Warren, OH, on Youth Sunday in 1975.  I was 16 years old. My topic was “God is love.” Dad was there for that first sermon.  His remark afterwards was, “You talked too fast.” He was right.  My stomach was in knots, my knees were trembling, and it was all I could do to read the manuscript that was in front of me. 

He was present for the next four sermons I preached. In the summer of 1981, between my graduation from Indiana University with a Religious Studies degree and my first year at Vanderbilt Divinity School, I was a student minister at Central Christian in Danville, IL.

I preached sermons 2 - 5 there.  Dad was there for all of them. Not a churchgoer, his presence at CCC on those Sunday mornings rather than on the golf course was not lost on me.  Neither was it lost on me that he didn’t say anything critical after those sermons. 

Dad was there for sermons 1-5, but didn’t hear 6 – 256.  Those five years’ worth of sermons were preached at Carthage Christian Church from 1982-1985 while I was a student at Vanderbilt and from 1985-1987 during my first two years at Compton Heights Christian Church in St. Louis. While I was acclimating myself to the pulpit in Carthage, he and Mom were acclimating themselves to cancer wards as far away as Boston. He was beginning yet another chemotherapy treatment when I was ordained in May of 1985, so my aunt and uncle represented my family on that landmark day. 

It was off to St. Louis after that, but with the cancer becoming more aggressive, Dad becoming weaker, and St. Louis being a three-hour drive from Danville, churchgoing was out of the question. Jennie and I made regular 500-mile roundtrips to visit Mom and Dad in 1985 and, after Will was born in 1986, we continued those road trips into 1987 so as to place 12-month-old Will in his grandfather’s frail arms. He didn’t ask about sermons during those visits.

Easter Sunday, 1987. Dad woke my mother at 5 a.m. and said, “Drive me to St. Louis. I want to hear David preach.” 

Disoriented by being awoken at that hour as well as by Dad’s unprecedented request, Mom says she cleared her head before asking how on earth she was going to transport his bed-ridden body on a 3+ hour drive.

“Call Ron,” Dad said, referring to a family friend. “Tell him we’re borrowing his van.”

Dad would lie down in the back of it for the three-hour drive, with my mother doing nursing duty at his side. My brother, 23 at the time, had gotten home at 1 a.m. after having spent the night doing who knows what. He was awakened at 5 a.m. by Mom, sent by Dad with the summons to chauffeur duty.

I knew nothing of their coming until I processed down the aisle singing “Christ the Lord Is Risen Today,” pivoted at the chancel, looked out over the congregation, and saw the gaunt man in the second pew from the pulpit wearing a collared shirt way too big for his thinning neck and a poorly knotted tie hanging limply down his front. He looked up at me with tired gray eyes, his mouth turned up ever so slightly. A smile?

It’s hard to sing “Alleluia” with a lump in your throat. 

When I preached, he fixed his eyes on me. When the communion bread and cup were passed, he communed.  When the service was over, he rose to his feet ever so gingerly, looked me in the eye, and extended his hand. Though he said not a word, what I heard loud and clear in a handshake and visage that rose above that scourge cancer was, “I’m proud of you. You have my blessing.”

Helped into the van by my bleary-eyed brother and weary mother, Dad told me he wanted to take his 15-month-old grandson home with him for a few days. So, we strapped Will’s car seat in the van within sight of Dad’s pallet and waved as they headed back to Danville. 

That was the last time my dad went to worship. It was the sixth and last of my now 2,000+ sermons he would hear. He died five months later. 

Each year on the day of my birth and Dad’s death, September 26, I remember his visit, visage, and affirmation and receive them with gratitude for the gift they were … and still are.

And on this day of his birth 87 years ago, I think of Dad. I do not think of him at the kitchen table asking why I let those two runners pass me, the day that divided us. Rather, I think of him in the second pew, leaning in and listening to the promises of the resurrection, the day that united us … and still does.