This past Sunday, our church hosted a service called “Our Fathers: Our Teachers.” I was invited to speak as part of that, which was both an honor and a good chance to re-visit the zoomed-out picture that I’m trying to paint with my individual posts here on Substack. After I spoke, I realized that it’d be nice to type up what I had to say and share a lightly edited version.
I’d apologize for getting this out a few days after the holiday, but Dad would wave that off as annoyingly subjective. After all, he had a habit of giving us our Christmas presents on New Year’s and leaving the tree up until April. As far as he was concerned, the date was not the feeling.
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Hey there. My name is Jonathan Neeley, and my dad’s name is Mark Neeley.
I’d like to say a few things about him and some of the ways he makes me smile:
My dad was an incredibly warm person. He did not ever meet a stranger that couldn’t be his best friend within two sentences.
Armond [the person who spoke before me] talked about his dad loving music, and mine did, too. He exposed me to everything from Pink Floyd to Madonna, which I’m very grateful for.
He was a very gifted florist. His garden was always beautiful.
And he was really, really eccentric. He had his favorite restaurants, but he’d go to those restaurants with the tomatoes that he preferred and ask for a knife and plate so he could cut them up and put them in his food because what they served there was not to his liking, and he wasn’t afraid to make it clear.
I love that stuff about him.
I also share it because I’m going to talk a little bit about a low point in our relationship.
In my late 20s, I came to understand that my dad had used the information that a father has about his son to take out a few credit cards and rack up the kind of debt that, as the song goes, no honest man can pay. It was a lot of money that neither he nor I had.
It was a really, really dark time in my life. It was an hour of real betrayal. I came to know anger and rage in a way that I had not before.
How can the person who is supposed to take care of me do this to me?
I really had to wrestle with what I was going to do about all that, and what I was going to do about our relationship, because he was not particularly willing to be accountable. He had a whole lot of reasons for why he had done what he had done, why it was ok, and why, if I would just chill out a little bit, he’d make it right. And it was very apparent that that wasn’t going to happen.
I remember hearing Steph Curry, of all people, quoting Martin Luther King, Jr., saying essentially that the measure of any of us is what we do at our lowest moments and how we carry ourselves through our darkest times1.
That was a real inspiration to me. I asked myself, when I came to the other side of what was going on, would I be able to look back and be proud of how I had handled it?
The years that followed brought a lot of working through some stuff. A lot of facing some things and asking what we wanted our relationship with one another to look like.
One of the lessons that that period of my life taught me was choice. I understand faith as a matter of knowing that whatever the situation I find myself in, I’ll have what I need to move forward, and doing so will be a matter of the choices I make. This whole situation really brought that home.
The credit card thing set off something bigger. It brought on some personal revelations about boundaries. It dug up and laid bare a good amount of trauma. It shed light on all the yelling and screaming that was just part of conflict in our house. It made it clear how many behaviors—compulsive buying, for example— we use to avoid the excruciating emotional work we are tasked with. It brought me to the word “abuse,” which is one that we really don’t want to touch.
It made it clear to me that I went through a lot, and I have some real healing to do.
After my dad died, a social worker at the University of Washington offered some grief counseling to my siblings and me, and I took them up on that. A woman who I consider a friend, and a colleague at this point, told me this:
“Death ends a life, but not a relationship.”
That’s been a big one, and my dad and I are still learning it together.
One of the biggest things has been seeing the ways in which he came at his behaviors honestly.
My dad was mistreated, too.
He wanted love, acceptance, peace… and it might have been misguided, but he was searching for that, just like any of us.
His parents were the same way, and their parents, and their parents, and so on.
My wife Katharine read a passage about forgiveness to me last night, and the gist that I remember was that if you’re interested in forgiving, it’s helpful to ask yourself: am I ready to let go of this feeling? When might I be ready to let go of this feeling? And what might it take to let go of this feeling?
I have found that the insight, compassion, and understanding that can come from looking at the roots of my father’s behavior can be awfully informative to that last question. It’s a big piece of the puzzle.
The last thing I’ll say is that one of my spiritual guiding lights is Thich Nhat Hanh. Those of us who practice in his tradition of Buddhism, called Plum Village, call him “Thay,” which means “teacher” in Vietnamese.
Something that Thay says is that by healing ourselves, we are healing our ancestors. That means an awful lot to me as Katharine and think about starting our own family, where I will no longer be the iteration at the forefront of this lineage.
My understanding of what he means when he says that is that when we learn to transform our pain and walk with it differently, our ancestors become different. Because something changed, the next generation knows them as different people.
I look at that as what it means to heal ourselves and heal our ancestors, and to give the gift of a healed reality to the descendents.
Through transforming what was passed to me, I change my father because my children will not know him as a source of pain. They’ll just know that their grandfather is the reason they’re lucky enough to know the magic of listening to Madonna.
I can feel my dad here with us. I know that we are so much bigger than our physical bodies. On the surface, this stuff can be really hard to dive into and talk about. But deeper down, there’s a soul in him and in me and in all of us that’s so ready for it.
I’ll end where I started: it’s a blessing to be here with you all. I wish you all a happy Father’s Day.
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If you want to watch, this link will take you to the video.
You Have a Story
So much of what I shared on Sunday, and what I write in general, started in a journal. It’s how I step back from my thoughts and actually see myself.
If you’re looking for a way to process your own life, whether it’s your past or your day to day, my writing groups— which are called You Have a Story— provide a great space for that.
Registration is currently open for the following groups:
Mondays, 3:30-5:30pm EST – 6/26, 7/3, 7/10, 7/24, 7/31, 8/7
Fridays, 2-4pm EST – 6/30, 7/7, 7/14, 7/21, 8/4, 8/11
You can read reviews of this experience here.
Much love,
Jonathan
Apparently, the direct quote goes like this: “The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy.”
No long comment from me this time. Just sending a big hug. Most people can't break the cycle. Kudos to you for putting in the work. Stay inspiring!
I love the idea that we can heal our ancestors somehow with our own healing. I'm going to be pondering that for a long time.