Family

There’s nothing like the smell of home.

If I had written the greatest book, composed the greatest symphony, painted the most beautiful painting or carved the most exquisite figure I could not have felt the more exalted creator than I did when they placed my child in my arms.

Now it came as a searing revelation that his father had not felt safe enough to live by that same simple proposition, that he had kept his heritage hidden painfully away, a secret to be ashamed of, even in America, even from his own beloved son.

“I just don’t understand why you don’t get angry.” Joe continued to stare ahead through the windshield. “It takes energy to get angry. It eats you up inside. I can’t waste my energy like that and expect to get ahead. When they left, it took everything I had in me just to survive. Now I have to stay focused. I’ve just gotta take care of it myself.”

For it is true we can seldom help those closest to us. Either we don't know what part of ourselves to give or, more often than not, the part we have to give is not wanted. And so it those we live with and should know who elude us. But we can still love them - we can love completely without complete understanding.

As time passed, my father struggled for more to hold on to, asking me again and again: had I told him everything. And finally I said to him, 'maybe all I know about Paul is that he was a fine fisherman.'

'You know more than that,' my father said; 'he was beautiful.' And that was the last time we spoke of my brother's death.

U.S Airways Capt. Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger Pilot during the “Miracle on the Hudson River” In the final analysis, it is not what you do for your children, but what you have taught them to do for themselves that will make them successful human beings

When they went home that night, he put his arm around Ove’s shoulders and said: “Ove, only a swine thinks size and strength are the same thing. Remember that.” And Ove never forgot it.

Then Mum died. And Dad grew even quieter. As if she took away with her the few words he’d possessed.

Ove had never seen a man as proud as his father was that night. He was eight years old and decided that night he would never drive any car but a Saab. Bookmark - Page 43 · Location 561

Had Ove been the sort of man who contemplated how and when one became the sort of man one was, he might have said this was the day he learned that right has to be right. But he wasn’t one to dwell on things like that. He contented himself with remembering that on this day he’d decided to be as little unlike his father as possible.

It’s a strange thing, becoming an orphan at sixteen. To lose your family long before you’ve had time to create your own to replace it. It’s a very specific sort of loneliness.

He hoped this would make his father more forgiving about Ove losing his job, once they were reunited. He had to sit on the wooden

Rolf Backman. My father. Because I hope I am unlike you in the smallest possible number of ways.

We create matrices and atmospheres of moral evil and bequeath them to our descendants. By habitual practice, we let loose a great, rolling momentum of moral and spiritual evil across generations. By doing such things, we involve ourselves deeply in what theologians call corruption. CHAPTER 2 - Spiritual Hygiene and Corruption

Discontent, ingratitude, perversity, stubbornness —these attitudes and dispositions pollute filial loyalty to Israel’s Creator, Deliverer, and Keeper. Ungrateful and refractory people at once foul their own character and their relation to God. They are like a child —willful, resistant, and adroit in self-defense by appeal to various legalisms —to whom an exasperated parent finally says, “Don’t be that way!”

Youngsters eventually discover what the wise have known for millennia: people rarely commit single sins. Thievery and lies and lies about lies, macho pride and mockery and assault, laziness and snappishness and cheating, and alcohol abuse that empties back into laziness —these sins and products of sin keep on replicating and bunching together like clusters of grapes on the vine. The clusters show up in individual persons but also in groups (in family systems, for instance) and in the places where groups and individuals meet. Hence the corruption of persons, of communities, and of whole cultures.

Sin is fruitful just because, like a virus, it attaches the life force and dynamics of its host. 139 Sowing and reaping, human longing, children’s natural trust of their parents —such things belong among the springs and roots of a good creation. Sin does not remove these things; it attaches them and converts them to new uses. A faithful father, for instance, accepts his small daughter’s trust and love, strengthens them, and tries to extend them toward God and out toward the world. A sexually abusive father also accepts his daughter’s trust and love, but he uses them to bind his daughter to his lust. Sooner or later, he converts trust to fear and love to resentment. He strengthens these emotions with each episode of abuse, and, whether he wants to or not, may extend them toward God and out toward the world. The parasitic nature of sin accounts for the fruitfulness

A family is one of nature's solubles; it dissolves in time like salt in rainwater.

In families, there are no crimes beyond forgiveness.

We can love completely what we cannot completely understand.

It is those we live with and love and should know who elude us.

In our family, there was no clear line between religion and fly fishing. We lived at the junction of great trout rivers in western Montana, and our father was a Presbyterian minister and a fly fisherman who tied his own flies and taught others. He told us about Christ's disciples being fishermen, and we were left to assume, as my brother and I did, that all first-class fishermen on the Sea of Galilee were fly fishermen and that John, the favorite, was a dry-fly fisherman.