When I was younger, I always felt a bit sorry for speakers who had to follow after my father at the pulpit. I confess to feeling totally inadequate in trying to follow up his life with mere words. And though I teach and write for a living-- I’ve struggled tremendously to find a way to express my emotions.
My father, as you all know, was a jovial, warm soul. He loved to laugh--talk over a plate of Mexican food, share his cilantro salsa, kiss and embrace friends who crossed his path. He showed affection freely and he was sincerely interested in other people. He was a natural born leader with spellbinding oratorical skills. He was an optimist, a dreamer (sometimes to a fault), a man of hope….
If I have one goal here it is to celebrate my father’s life, and in the process shed light on the supreme love of God. In celebrating Dad, I want to bring hope to those who feel hopeless. I want to help doubters see the face of God; and for those of us who have lost our moral imaginations---to learn to imagine again. I can think of no greater or more fitting tribute to my father….
But to do this, I feel I should speak plainly and tell you about a side of my father that many of you do not know. If you will stick with me for a moment, I promise that by honestly discussing my father’s life, we can begin to glimpse the miracle of God’s grace in our ordinary lives—and how God works through the weak—that is you and me—and that despite our flaws---through Christ—we can be transformed.
Just as it is for so many of us here today, my father’s early life was a great source of sorrow. Among his personal papers, and notebooks, we found a poem written by him sometime in his teenage years, with these plaintive words:
"I do not know what love is
but I do know what it is not."
I won’t read the entire poem; for now, just one more line should suffice: “[Love],” Dad wrote, “is not being told you are too little, too slow, or not pretty to look at
It is not being told that you are dumb or not to talk too loud or not talk at all.”
Whatever it was that Dad was responding to in that poem, it’s something that he trucked around with him from his childhood to his final days. I recall my dad confessing to me on more than one occasion that he wished that just once his biological father would have expressed his love for my dad; that is, Dad wished that his father would have just uttered the words “I Love You”. This isn’t to say that my father had no loving memories---or that those who raised him failed in all things, but instead that like many of us here there was a gap between what we claim the family provides us, and what we really get. Like so many of us here, he simply yearned for more love. One thing that I think particularly hurt my father was when, much later in life, when his father Vincent died (though they had developed a more meaningful relationship over the years), Dad learned that Grandpa Vince, for reasons that remain unclear, had removed his only child (that is, my father) from his (Vince’s) will.
I did not share this so you’d pity my father. He doesn’t need pity, and he wouldn’t want it either. But I thought it might cause many of you to wonder how it is that someone who seemed to be searching for love had so much of it to freely give away. For me, this is a question that gets at the real meaning of Christian discipleship. And it points to the miracle of God’s grace in the life of my father—and the miracle that awaits each of us.
Dad was something of a broken man who spent much of his time mending the lives of others. As my mother will attest, he never learned to take care of himself—to address his psychological and physical needs--- though he wore himself thin providing solace for the lonely souls around him.
From my earliest memories, I recall our house as a place of refuge for others. Nephews, step-brothers, cousins, frightened women and other wearied souls at the end of their rope, coming in and out of our home---sleeping in our extra beds, or parking on our living room couch. When my father loved he often supplemented the counseling and listening by breaking bread, including them in our family Christmas celebrations, and offering a place to rest.
Let me quote something from a letter he wrote Eileen in the mid 1990s:
“Dear…. Perhaps some of the most beautiful feelings that we have shared have been when we have reached out as a couple and given ourselves to [others]. I must admit that most of the time I am the follower and you the leader when we are doing good. I guess that not only do I garner wonderful feelings from the doing good but I also love you more for the goodness that you have always shown to those in need. I believe that doing things for others is a vital part of our philosophy of life and that it is a compliment to our choices to do those kinds of things together. I think of all the people that we have aided in some way by taking them in our home and it is only good feelings that I have for those times. Even the painful times still reward me with a feeling that we were trying to do the right things. [I won’t elaborate here, but sometimes the ghosts that haunted these individuals became psychologically taxing on my parents—ending in increased sorrow.] My feelings overall are ones of gratitude for what we have and [the ability] of sharing with others our good fortune. That is, not only in material things, but also in things of the heart. Finally when we do those things together it reinforces the fact that we are really two people that are one. Our coupleness is very important to me. I am really incomplete without you….”
As many of you know, the Pharisee, and lawyer, tempted Christ with this question:
Master, which is the great commandment in the law?
Jesus said unto him, Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind.
This is the first and great commandment.
And the second is like unto it, Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself.
On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.
In other words, no matter how many times we follow the laws of God—if this obedience fails to move us toward love, if the rules don’t transform us into lovers of fellow humans—and through them, God---then we have become little more than slaves to the law.
In John 4—we read
'Beloved, let us love one another: for love is of God; and every one that loveth is born of God, and knoweth God.
If a man say, I love God, and hateth his brother, he is a liar: for he that loveth not his brother whom he hath seen, how can he love God whom he hath not seen? "
And this commandment have we from him, That he who loveth God love his brother also.
Americans love individualism and self-reliance. And we spend a good deal of time talking about these things in our church. And while both can be virtues—indeed we are commanded to be agents acting, not acted upon—individualism and self-reliance too often blind us to the central message of Christ, and to the ways in which each of us is dependent. We are, more than we admit, dependent beings. God designed it this way. Lest we forget, we all begin and most of us will end our livers in absolute neediness. We start life helpless and end it the same. And it is from others that we learn the story of life. As a middle-aged father, I feel like I am finally beginning to glimpse the narrative of life, now that I have seen both my father and children helplessly cared for, spoon fed, and cleaned by loving hands. Sometimes my own hands. Much more often hands that have comforted or healed me in my own hours of need. For many of us, it is from our children we learn what it is to be born, and from our parents we discover how it is we die. And it is through another soul—to whom me are married—that we learn about the gift of sexuality—the exquisite gift of the self to another. And even in our gospel family, there is no ritual, no ordinance, no sacrament that we can give to ourselves. At every point along the line-- from baptism, to healing, to temple marriage, we literally need the presence of others. From Joseph Smith’s divine revelation about temple work for the dead, we know that not only are we dependent on the living, but the living and dead are dependent on one another. When Joseph Smith first introduced temple marriage, he did not imagine couples and children living as nuclear families throughout eternity (something that we often imagine today), but instead he saw a thick web of humanity—a great chain of interlocking families welded together by Christ. Relationship is so central to the LDS gospel that even our unique conception of God points to it. Unlike most of the Christian world, we believe in and worship a Godhead made up of three distinct beings—who are separate as fingers on my hand, yet that are so profoundly, intimately united that we refer to them as being one. In a very real way, we don’t just worship God the Father, Jesus Christ and the Holy Ghost—but instead we worship their unity, their divine togetherness; that is, our God—the one we worship---is a relationship.
It was the flawed, rough-and-tumble farmboy, Joseph Smith, who introduced to the world many of these beautiful if shocking truths about our connections with one another and how through these connections we can commune with the Godhead. My father, as you might guess, was one of the first to tell me the strange and magnificent stories about Joseph Smith. But even more, it was through my father’s actions, that I came to see the ways in which God is found through loving community—through relationships. It is to a large extent through my father that I learned what Christ meant when he told us that loving God and loving one another are inseparable. And that loving our immediate family is important but must NOT stop there. As Joseph Smith put it “a man filled with the love of God, is not content with blessing his family alone, but ranges through the world, anxious to bless the whole human race.”
Actually, blessing one’s family and “ranging through the world” to bless others are not so mutually exclusive. My father spent many evenings counseling broken couples, administering to the confused and lonely. But even if I missed my father’s presence all those evenings, I learned in my marrow the meaning of Zion. I watched him as he administered to and defended the interests of single adults in the gospel, trying to change a culture in our church that makes unmarried members or the divorced feel incomplete or out of synch. Though I was just a baby, I know from stories how much he relished his years in the Spanish (Mexican-American) branch where he learned to see God in the faces of the dispossessed. I remember as a young man I witnessed how my father personally served and administered to homosexuals. During a time of HIV-paranoia and homophobia, my father worked closely—that is, he listened to, comforted, touched, hugged, and loved men dying of AIDS—who, partly through my father, tasted the sweetness of Christ’s love. And he did all of these things while playing the romantic to his wife—he was always her biggest fan—and maintaining friendships with each of his children. I don’t ever recall him prodding, coercing, or threatening me into being a certain way. Instead he listened and waited. I have many memories of him driving in his car with me, listening to my rap music on a cassette tape—trying to meet me where I was coming from. In short I witnessed how he spent much of his time with people of different backgrounds, tastes, and needs---whether in his larger community or sitting beside his son.
I want to end with two brief stories that I think give a glimpse into my father’s soul.
During my mission I worked closely with a family led by a single father named Juan. Years before, Juan’s wife died of cancer and left him with five young children. Together Juan and his wife had built their home with their own hands, and when she died soon after, she left Juan in a house haunted with daily reminders of her absence—from the stonework to the faces of his children. And Juan took to drinking. He seemed to drink the heaviest on Sundays and the times he anticipated spending with his family.
When my parents came to visit me after my mission, we attended a lively farewell fiesta in a member’s home. During the festivities my father noticed Juan’s occasional lonely expressions between the laughter. My dad asked me if I would ask Juan to come with him outside to talk. On a narrow dirty street of cinderblock homes, with music coming from the fiesta, my father spoke to Juan through me.
“Juan, I can’t help notice that you have sadness in you….?”
“Juan, are you sad?”
Juan’s eyes narrowed a bit and he silently nodded. I don’t remember if my father already knew that Juan had lost his wife, or if he learned it right there through subsequent questions, but by the end of the conversation my father knew that Juan had lost his wife and that we was missing her amid the merriment.
“Mike,” my father continued, “please tell him this…Juan, in the name of Christ, I promise that you will be with your sweet wife again.”
After I translated what my crying father had just said, Juan began sobbing too. Years later, his daughters asked me what happened outside the party that day, as every time they tried to pry it out of Juan, he would leave the room weeping.
In the summer of 2003, my father came to me one morning and asked me to take him to the hospital (and when Dad offered to go see the doctor, we knew it had to be serious). In the emergency room that day he was diagnosed with congestive heart failure; and as his friends know, since that day, he was never the same—as something inside him died and he began slipping away from us by increments. But the night before he was admitted (Mom was away with her mother at a family reunion) I was working upstairs remodeling my mom’s bathroom. Dad had been complaining of his health—weakness, dizziness, shortness of breath. He could barely make it up the stairs. As I worked on my knees, I had heard someone come to the door and knew that dad had let someone in. I remember later that evening walking down the stairs. The sunlight was almost gone and there was a dim light over the dinner table. I could see, seated at the table, a needy member of Dad’s old ward (congregation). He had showed up at the door unannounced as he occasionally did at my parents’ home and at my father’s shop downtown. He was a gentle man with a dark past and profound mental deficiencies. He was also a drifter. He slept in an auto salvage yard where he pulled engine parts in exchange for a place to sleep. [My father had once set him up in a rented house with two other struggling young men; but like many of the things my father tried to do for desperate people, this strategy only worked temporarily as the essence of poverty and mental illness challenged some of his most sincere efforts]. That evening my father’s guest had walked, as he always did, dozens of miles on his bare feet. Standing on the stairs I noticed that the furniture was covered with bed sheets. I surmised that because the visitor showed up with grease and mire all over his clothes and hands, Dad had spread them over Mom’s new furniture. I stood at the bottom third of the stairs and could partly see my father, in the kitchen, slowly shuffling over to bring his guest a bowl of soup. It was quiet. My father asked a few questions. His visitor responded in only partly coherent sentences. The kitchen light seemed so strange to me. Everything seemed still, with the visitor huddled over his bowl, the twilight coming through the windows. I went back upstairs with wet eyes, and strapped on my knee pads. The next morning he struggled up the stairs and opened my door: “Mike, I think something is wrong with me. I need to go to the hospital.”
My father was a flawed human. He consistently made mistakes—though they were usually errors of not taking care of himself. But in ordinary ways he showed me how Christianity is a crutch and a cop-out if it is not anchored in relationships. The gospel cannot save us, in fact it will only frustrate us, if it does not transform our daily interaction with others—especially the marginalized and needy. My father’s life reminds me that Christianity, at root, is a test of the human imagination---that is, it is a call to envision the face of Christ in others---and to imagine ourselves into a web of humanity, to imagine our way out of our narrow, sorry, self-serving lives. The last line of my father’s pitiful poem pleads to God with these words:
"Now that I know what love is not, please God
may I just have a moment with someone who will show me what love is."
Dad found much of that love in Zion, and in his beautiful marriage. But I also believe that now that he has passed, he will find it in the bosom of God. Daddy, I have seen the face of Christ, but only because you have seen it in me first, and in so many around you.
In Christ’s name
Michael E. De Gruccio
March 2009
Our Family
Mike's Graduation May 2008
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