In this series of reminiscences, I wish to pay a debt of gratitude to those who have gone before me but took the time to form me on my life’s way.
There are many things a son could say about a beloved father. Not because he was perfect (far from it), but because he owned up to his imperfections in time to be appreciated for his fathering and at peace with all five of his boys, and their wives, before his death. I mention the wives as well, because perhaps the greatest testament to the parenting he and my mother did was that all five of these marriages have endured: as with my parents’ marriage, not always rosy, but real through thick and thin. Yet this post is not primarily about filial affection, but rather about how as a person and pastor he formed me, first as a Christian, then as a pastor and theologian.
Dad was a Navy veteran of World War II and so as a young man he saw some awful stuff. For the most part, he never talked to us about it. He told us about his older brother, John, navigating a B-19 in North Africa and later from England over France and Germany. But about himself the only thing I remember him relating was a liberty visit to the secured Normandy beach a week after the invasion, and witnessing an Arab in Morocco being shot in the back as he fled from the military base with a stolen sack of flour– his testimonies to the sad cruelty of war.
Only after his death did we learn anything substantial. In his papers I discovered a typescript he made, apparently from handwritten entries, of a diary he kept of several convoy passages across the Atlantic to Africa and then to England, alternating boredom and U-boat terror. But an incredible story came from a cousin of my mother at my father’s funeral. He heard it as a teen from Dad’s own lips, when he was the vicar talking to the youth group in Streator Illinois, where he met my mother.
Docked in Naples Italy, their ship came under air attack. A Navy radioman, Dad’s battle station position was greasing the ammo into the antiaircraft guns. There he witnessed strafing, which mortally wounded the gunner. A chaplain was summoned after the attack, a Roman Catholic priest, to administer last rites, but in the emergency he simply spoke to the dying man about Jesus. According to the cousin, Dad concluded the story by saying that at that moment he said to himself, “This is what I want to do in my life.”
Dad never told us the story. He used to say that there are two kinds of veterans. Those who have been to war and never want to talk about it, i.e., to talk about it is to relive it. And there are those who haven’t experienced the terror, but cannot keep their mouths shut. I have no doubt now, in the reflective hindsight of many years, that he bottled up the trauma in the fashion of his silent generation and consequently suffered some version of PTSD, since he had dark and depressive moments in his life.
Prior to volunteering for the Navy after the attack on Pearl Harbor, he was a successful commercial artist working in the Chrysler building in Manhattan. When he was discharged, he returned to the potentially lucrative field. But his soul was restless. And when he told his own hard-working, but successful immigrant father that he wanted to be a pastor, he got the reply, “And what? Do you want to be poor for the rest of your life?” But Dad had learned from a neighbor how every evening during the war, in which his three sons were serving, my grandfather would go into his backyard to kneel at a rock, like artistic renderings of Jesus in Gethsemane, to pray for his boys. Reminded of this, my grandfather relented. This was a story Dad did tell us.
A member of the synod of Slovak Evangelical Lutheran Churches (SELC), affiliated with the Luther Church-Missouri Synod in the old Synodical Conference, Dad with many other vets headed to the “practical seminary” at Springfield Illinois. In his mid-20s already, he had some trouble adjusting to academic routine. He suffered from test panic, but caring professors coached him through it. He was a smart man with a heart for the underdog, the excluded and the hurting. How amazed I am, after all these years, still regularly to be contacted by people with testimonies to his compassionate pastoral care for them.
I was the precocious firstborn who wanted to be just like my father. He started a Lutheran day school on Long Island and I entered with the first kindergarten class. The church and school had a float in a parade, in which I was dressed in black gown and surplice as a future pastor. I guess you could say I was scripted from early on. But I admired my father. Around the age of six or seven I remember saying, “Dad, you’re going to be famous. Why, you have started the school and now you’re drawing a graphic catechism.” He continued his artistic interests like this as a hobby, often in service of the church’s ministry.
Once, when we were children, he was terribly stressed out by conflict in the congregation over the school. Next thing I knew, we all piled into the station wagon and drove to Florida to get away for a while. All I remember was the heat and the incessant fleas. We had stopped at a campsite on the way to Dad’s brother’s house in Maryland, but a tremendous thunderstorm struck and for fear of a tree falling and crushing us, he pulled up stakes to drive through the night to his brother. I remember being disappointed in Virginia that we were supposed to stop at Natural Bridge, but when we got there we couldn’t afford the tickets. My grandfather was right. In those days being a pastor meant being poor. Especially with five boys all under the age of eight!
The poverty brought domestic tensions. One of the worst fights my father and mother ever got into happened when I begged my mother to go to the school for parent’s day to see my work. She slipped out of the house, but a younger brother woke up early from his nap and started crying, and my father had to take care of him when he was supposed to be working. It was a nightmare when she returned that I can still flash back to. I remember once when he complained to my mother in the presence of us boys that maybe the Catholics got it right, that pastors should not be married and have families. Ouch. That was terrible sounding in my little ears. The same commitment to ministry which made him a good pastor to so many hurting people caused hurt to his attention-deprived sons, until Dad finally woke up and re-prioritized.
I can’t say I learned from this. I too spent all my energy on my work to the neglect of my son until I finally woke up. Like Dad, I can say at this point, thank God, not too late. But maybe that is the better lesson. I learned from Dad how to live as a forgiven sinner, how to swallow false male pride, owning the humility to reprioritize.
By the time of my teen years, my false pride took a new form, as I preened as a budding intellectual. In school we had read the dramatic version of the Scopes trial, Inherit the Wind. I rather abruptly and self-assuredly announced to my Missouri Synod father that I didn’t take the Bible literally. What a brouhaha ensued! I had not the sophistication yet to say with Reinhold Niebuhr, “seriously, but not literally.” I found myself parroting words from the play back to my father. “Why, if the sun had really stood still at Joshua’s command, the earth would’ve been blown off its axis and slung into the nether regions of the universe!” How ironic that decades later I found in this fabulous story from the book of Joshua, taken seriously but not literally, a Christological intimation of the man who commands and the God who obeys.
I was a teen in the 1960s, amid all the changes in the emergent youth culture, which greatly troubled my conservative father. I wrote a one-act comedy for a high school contest and won the right to put on the performance of it, lampooning the hypocrisies of affluent middle-class culture. My veteran father read it, and wrote on the cover, “Written by an ungrateful, sloppy, long-haired socialist hippie.” But he came to watch every performance of it to the rollicking laughter of my peers. In spite of disagreement and perhaps keen personal disappointment (to which I was oblivious), he stuck with me.
What I internalized from his liturgical practice was a love for our modest but traditional worship. I can still sing the old liturgy or recite the old prayers. Continuing a Slovak tradition, before every reception of Holy Communion, the pastor would individually lay hands on the communicant announcing the absolution: “Be of good cheer, child of God, your sins are forgiven you for Jesus’ sake and his substitutionary death upon the cross.” At the conclusion of the communion, Dad would say, “Now may the precious body and blood of our Lord Jesus Christ keep you to life everlasting. Amen.” I don’t know where he got the word, precious, from, but I have retained it and use it myself to this day.
And then there was his preaching in that serious law-gospel way that he had been taught. Often on Saturdays when he had finished writing a sermon, he would ask me or several of the brothers to listen to it in advance and give him feedback. In the congregation where he spent the last nineteen years of his active ministry, there had been a series of internal conflicts among members over various things. And what struck me and remains in my memory is how he repeatedly preached to the situation with the new commandment of Jesus “to love one another as I have loved you.” How often in later years have I come to some insight and realized that I’m just echoing what I once heard my father say!
When I decided to go to Seminex it was difficult and embarrassing for my father, who had been active in the Missouri-affiliated SELC off and on all his ministry. All the other pastors in the small Synod were relatives, friends and/or classmates. And now his son came to the Synod convention as a leading voice of the Seminex “rebels,” as we were called by one of the clergy there. “Love, love, love!” this pastor complained sarcastically, mocking us. “If they love us, why don’t they obey us?!” So I was unwelcomed from the fellowship. And my poor father had to live with these betrayals, one by his colleagues, but truth be told probably also one he felt from me, his son who was supposedly following him into the ministry.
After he retired early because of illness to his country property in upstate New York, he began to supply preach in ELCA congregations. I think the one beneficial impact I had on my father was to liberate him from the terrible scruples about “unionism” that had been drilled into him. Already at a teen coffeehouse ministry when I was 18 or 19, I got him to join hands with a Catholic priest for prayer. In retirement he was in demand as a preacher for small country churches that had no pastor, but also for a Slovak Zion Synod congregation in the city of Binghamton New York. When I was pastor at Immanuel, Delhi about 60 miles from where he lived, he would regularly supply for me when I was away, even though the congregation at the time was not affiliated with the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod. One of my older parishioners said, quite seriously, “So your father’s preaching again this coming Sunday when you’re away. That’s great, because he’s a better preacher than you anyway.” Dad did coach me on preaching. He taught me to find the key phrase in the sermon and to repeat it as a refrain regularly – a very effective rhetorical device which I still employ.
In all these later years, Dad was a talker. He loved to discuss, or rather, debate about any topic under the sun. We talked a lot of theology as I told him what I was working on. When I was the editor of Lutheran Forum, he read every issue cover to cover, so that when I visited we had to discuss it all. Later, he translated articles into Slovak for me and materials from Slovakia into English. There was always conversation about the nuances of translation. And politics, of course! There were endless evenings spent talking until I finally got up and said, “I've got to go to bed.” He kept talking to me all the way up the stairs as I climbed to the bedroom.
His great gift to me came when I was called to serve in Slovakia as a visiting professor of systematic theology. I had grown up in a Slovak immigrant ghetto, so I knew lots of “kitchen Slovak” and all sorts of little phrases that I’d heard my father and grandparents using. I knew some Slovak language hymns. But I had no idea how difficult it would be for a native English speaker to acquire fluency in this Slavic language. Dad helped me step-by-step along the way. Some years earlier, we had undertaken together a translation project from Slovak to English, which set the stage for this tutoring. By the end of my six years in Slovakia, Dad approved of my fluency.
“Opustila mi sila.” These were the last words of my grandfather to my father. “The power has gone out of me.” I had a similar farewell when my father was dying. All five of his boys, their families and some cousins had gathered for a service of Holy Communion in his hospital room. He wanted to be clean-shaven for it, so I gently shaved him before the others arrived. When I finished, I said I had something to tell him. I looked into his eyes and, for a time, lost my ability to speak. He said, “Paul, I know,” as if to release me from speaking. I replied, “No, I want to say this.” Summoning all my powers to contain my grief, I continued, “Whatever I have achieved in life or done for the kingdom of God, I have only stood on your shoulders. The boldest thing I ever did was to leave all behind to go to Slovakia. I couldn’t have done that without you.” He acknowledged my words and in the old Slovak way, which he had insisted upon from our childhood, I kissed his cheek and he kissed mine.
Dad rests in peace to rise in glory. Soli Deo Gloria!