How to buy it
“Father Love: The Powerful Resource Every Child Needs” (194 pages, $18.99, self-published by the author through Xulon Press) is available online. After selling out its first order, Beacon of Hope and Kairos Koffee in Springfield’s Park Shopping Center expects to receive more copies this week.
The Greek word pronounced uh-GOP-ay refers to a greater love of others than of self – the kind of self-sacrificing, unconditional love many associate with the love of God.
Its spelling in English is the same as the word agape, as in a mouth that’s gaping open in wonder over the jaw-dropping power this kind of love has to transform lives.
In his book “Father Love,” released in time for this Father’s Day, the Rev. Eli Williams, examines both the gaping hole that absent fathers have left in the lives of children, families and communities and the potential agape love has for helping to fill that hole and making whole the lives of children, families, communities and fathers themselves.
Well known in Springfield as the founder and leader of Urban Light Ministries, Williams’ work with fathers grew out of the Sonshine Clubs that his organization established to help children in Springfield elementary schools and, specifically, the troubled lives of the most seriously challenged of those children.
“In each case,” Williams writes, “there was a missing, unskilled or irresponsible father figure.”
His goal is to re-establish what he calls the “gold standard” for families in which a father and mother are fully committed to their children’s care.
To underscore the importance of the return of prodigal fathers, he turns to social service data that children in father-absent homes are four times more likely to be poor, nine times more likely not to graduate from high school, at dramatically higher risk for alcohol and drug problems and constitute 63 percent of youth suicides.
He opens a discussion of the financial cost to society by noting that 10 years ago, the federal government spent nearly $100 billion in a single year helping to support father-absent homes, then points out the figure doesn’t include state and local expenditures, nor the cost of building and maintaining the prisons those children are more likely to inhabit.
The fact that fathers are absent in two of three African-American homes – double the overall rate in the United States — Williams says represents a worse manifestation of father absence he says is a problem everywhere it exists.
He also quotes President Barak Obama, whose father was largely absent from his life, as saying that, social programs notwithstanding, “the hole a man leaves when he abandons his family is one no government can fill.”
The author’s lofty goal: “I want to see every child blessed by the powerful resource of fully developed and fully engaged father love.”
In a book organized around passages about love found in St. Paul’s Letter to the Corinthians, Williams shares a series of stories of father’s he’s worked with through fatherhood programs at Urban Light Ministries.
One involves a young father raised in a father-absent home whose life was transformed while at the same time being part of a 12-step program to manage his addiction and a fatherhood class.
One of the man’s remarks clearly belongs in any book on fatherhood: “I learned that if you try and fall short, it’s OK. And when you don’t try, it’s not OK.
Other stories involve a man who vowed and kept his promise never to be the kind of father his father was and another who modeled himself after an initially irresponsible stepfather who became a model father after becoming a Christian and connecting, writes Williams, with the love of the Father.
Williams also confesses his own shortcomings as a father, a regret about not developing an intimate enough relationship with two sons because of other demands on his time.
“Intimacy with them had been sacrificed in deference to earning a living, building a career, serving the Lord, the church and the community. Those are not bad things, but I had my priorities out of order and didn’t realize it until they were fully grown.”
As an advocate for the troubled fathers he has worked with and the progress they have made, Williams says, “I don’t believe we should give up on men who have made mistakes. We should do everything we can as a community and a society to support fathers and their commitment to children.”
He adds that fathers of that sort who “have tried to step up” find themselves “blocked at every turn” by a variety of forces: mothers of their children, by some family courts and by a court administrative system that, while requiring child support payments does not as vigorously enforce visitation rights.
“As a society, we have fumbled the father football. By not providing support to struggling fathers and offering disdain instead, we dishonor fatherhood and anger well-meaning non-custodial fathers.”
“We do ourselves a great favor by supporting fathers that have made genuine commitments to their children. Even those that have made bad choices in their past, are estranged from their children’s mothers, are in recovery from addiction, or have been incarcerated can develop a strong Father love. We should encourage and empower them to spend time with their kids.”
But therein lies the hard-nosed practical rub:
How does one determine when fathers have “made genuine commitments” or “their hearts toward their children,” as Williams puts it?
It is one thing to say, as Williams does, that father love is “powerful enough to draw the workaholic away from his desk home to his children or a the sports fanatic away from his children, the party animal away from his club back to his children to be the best dad he can be to his kids.”
But in the face of more challenging problems involving addiction and recidivism, the question can become immensely more complicated.
It can involve balancing not only what is best for the aspiring or recovering father but of the child, measured not against the ideal of the agape love of a father but the flesh and blood of the recovering father.
It also can involve gaining the cooperation of mothers and others who may have struggled in the prodigal fathers’ absence and have a sense that they themselves were disdained and dishonored along the way.
It is at this point that the very hole created by the more serious forms of father absence – or fathers’ “fumbling,” to use Williams’ term – poses a significant obstacle to the restoration of father love his book’s subtitle describes as “the powerful resource every child needs.”
To Williams’ great credit, a part of the answer is embodied in the fatherhood programs he has worked for years to develop at Urban Light Ministries, most recently the Fatherhood Institute recently launched in conjunction with Clark State Community College.
In exchange for the promise of instruction on fathering and relationships, long-term mentoring and assistance in employment and job placement – the kind of “wrap around” support Williams advocates – young fathers are required to make a 12-month commitment to creating a plan to address all those aspects of their lives in working toward the goal of becoming the sort of father celebrated on Father’s Day.
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