Bill Russell, an old friend and former colleague, has sent out a copy of his homily for Father’s Day. Now working in Kingston, Jamaica, this Jesuit priest is a person of unusual ability and special charm. His legion of friends, me among them, have come to admire his personal gifts, and I have wondered how he can be so attractive a personality. Thanks to his Father’s Day sermon, I now understand better. I would like to share some of it with a wider audience.

Father Russell recalls his father teaching him how to swim when he was hardly more than a foot tall. His father dipped him into a shallow lake, while supporting him with his arms under his son’s back. Like other young children first in this situation, the boy was terrified that he would sink, and balanced on the verge of tears. In soothing response, his father kept reassuring him that he would never let him go.

His father taught the boy his prayers, reading them from a printed card. The man also taught the child his catechism questions and answers, though he understood little of it himself, since he was not a Catholic. He took the lead in saying grace before meals, asking God’s blessing on the food Bill’s mother had prepared for her family. And, before Bill and the other children went to bed each evening, the father would bless each one of them.

While still a child, the boy was allowed to sit in his father’s lap in the driver’s seat of the family car, and turn the steering wheel and honk the horn. When Bill got his first summer job, at age 12 or so, his father informed him he had to give back to his family, to defray the family costs of  room and board, 25 of the 27 dollars that he was paid each week.

Years later, when Bill went off to college at Holy Cross in Worcester, his father gave him back all the money, and with interest, telling his son to feel free to spend it in whatever way he wished. As his father dropped Bill off at his dorm, he sat down on a bed and told his son how proud he was to have him in college. Even though, as he explained it, he would be paying one-fifth of his salary on one-eighth of the family, this father told this son he was worth every penny.

Bill’s father also drove his son to the novitiate in Lenox, Massachusetts, when the young man first entered the Jesuit community. In those days, 50 years ago, that meant almost total isolation from face-to-face contact with parents and other family members. As the son recalls, it was a highly emotional occasion for his father who “hugged me one last time as I waved goodbye from the seminary door, watching him wipe away the tears from his eyes –  the one and only time I ever saw him cry.”

When his wife died, Bill’s father told him there would be no stone to indicate her grave. She had been too frail to support a heavy stone, his father explained; in any event, she would not be there because “she would go straight to God.”

When his own turn came to die, the father informed his children that he had nothing left, all his resources having been spent on them. For his children, he continued to have the warmest feelings. “He was the one who was so proud of all of us,” says this son, “who spoke of us as if we were unbelievably precious in his sight.”

The preacher ends with a simple sentence from the heart: “I cannot begin to tell you how proud I am to be his son.”

Only twice in this homily does Father Russell use the word “God.” But he does not need to because he finds in the person of his own earthly father so much of what his spiritual tradition attributes to God.

The heart of it is unconditional love. The son recalls his father as a man who loved him without any hedging. This father was a giver of himself to others; in fact he  found his greatest gratification in spending himself for them.

Does this not suggest the divine Father for whom, in the Bible, lovingkindness is what distinguishes him most?

Richard Griffin