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Show HUMAN RELATIONSHIPS To fathers and others By Erma Jean Lee "Every man is valued in this world as he shows by his conduct he wishes to be valued. " Bruyere. "Society is the master man is the servant; it is entirely according as society proves a good or bad master that man turns out a good or bad servant." ser-vant." Sala. "They that deny a God destroy man's nobility, for man is of kin to the beasts by his body, and if he be not kin to God by his spirit he is an ignoble creature. "Bacon. By 1924, the third Sunday in June was established as Father's Day around the nation. Mrs. John Bruce Dodd spurred on the movement in tribute to her own father who had raised his children, orphaned or-phaned of their mother. Almost any man can sire a child, but only a superior man will be its father in patience, love, good nature, support and encouragement. The ideal father is one who is like God, but who has clay feet and arms we can feel. Father is a word-symbol, according to Dr. A. H. Chapman. Says he: "Father's kindness, playing, patience and firmness are all mixed up in a child's vision of the word. ...each time a child sees his father or thinks about him, he cannot say 'This is the person who did a thousand things with me, which I shall now remember.' Instead, all these experiences are encapsulated in a mental picture of what father is." This word-symbol-picture "embraces the love or rejection, security or desolateness, and reassurance or dread that the child has experienced with hisher father." Think about the word. What does Father mean to you? Does it invoke a cheery home situation? A father who travels, or is seldom home and you miss him? It is a person who puts bread on the table? Fear in your heart? Is he a deeply ingrained image resurrected in memory? A feeling of loss for someone who left, or died, when you were very young? Or is he a mystery man you never met at all a brief encounter in your mother's life? Dear Ones, whichever image is yours, remember that your spirit or your Heavenly Father desired .you here. Your wish to be born may have been greater than the circumstances of who, what or how. As long as you're here, why not make the best of it? Earth is a schoolroom for the spirit. A mother fashions the infant's clay temple, tem-ple, but its sire indelibly stamps his imprint im-print on the genes that grow into a child. Even in the best environments, parental or ancestral error may" sometimes bear its unripe fruit. If woman's occupation is to be motherhood, surely men can at least pursue fatherhood as an avocation . Today it is sometimes mothers .who run away from home, and fathers who keep their children together, raising and working with them. Who can sav that the tragedies of divorce, death, loneliness, war, bio-excesses, male menopause, sorrow and diseases are not valuable psyche experiences for those being raised in grade and knowledge? We learn to overcome our imperfections as soon as we realize without a shadow of doubt what they are. We learn by trial and error how strong gentleness is, and how gentle is real strength. No amount of exhortation, religious or otherwise, can raise the grade of a blind society which sows wild oats' and expects a 'reasonable harvest'. The family is projected as a romanticized vision of related people living together in perfect harmony and love and sharing. shar-ing. Too many families are less than ideal. Some are prisons; some are battlegrounds; bat-tlegrounds; some have little guidance, if any; and still others make children slaves, or objects to fulfill lusts of familial libido. God is not blind. Why else do we have schools, law agencies, protective and social servies, courts, health institutions and social counselors to help families sort out the chaos from the order? Media reports of juvenile crime, runaways, status offenses, child and parent abuses, and hundreds of other problems of unevolved human behavior or relationships should prove to thoughtful leaders in social institutions and churches that the young need training train-ing in successful marriages. In skills for parenting allowing for the uniqueness uni-queness of each child, and even for a meaningful understanding of self and God. Reality exposes the myths of the past and exhorts a future that is not yet. Nature is fair! Carlyle said: "There are depths in man that got the lowest hell, and heights that reach the highest heaven, for are not both heaven and hell made out of man, everlasting miracle and mystery that he is?" There is nothing more equal than the desire of all people to forge ahead in using us-ing their talents or searching their genes for every bit of mental, emotional and spiritual maturity they can muster. For those who cannot go forward, their unseen "equality of likeness' may spew havoc over the land, and plow both wheat and tares into the ground of unfair un-fair 'authorities.' A mansion without love is miserable. A hovel with affection affec-tion can be like heaven but the worst and best families need spiritual improvement. im-provement. Some of us come from the hovel, some from the mansion. ..some from despair, but it is up to all of us to understand the rest of us that we may each pass our respective grades and goals in life When father stands erect on is own merit, the family will succeed to a higher ideal. HAPPY FATHER'S DAY! . "Thank you, father, now in spirit, for caring about your children ! " THOUGHTS: If the only gift a child can afford to give his father is a hug, it is a noble father who can accept this tribute of love. "Father may not always be a hero, but he can always be a man." Goethe. "The way of a superior man is threefold: virtuous, he is free from anxieties; anx-ieties; wise, he is free from perplexities; perplex-ities; bold, he is free from fear." Con-fucious. Con-fucious. "The test of every religious, political, or educational system is the man that it forms." Amiel. |