在父亲的眼泪中

This I Believe. For Christians, this is the season of advent, a period of preparation before Christmas. It’s a time of prayer and

fasting and an opportunity to reach out to others with good works and charity. That last part is what This I Believe essayist Lawrence Kessenich thinks of when he remembers his father. They were often at odds with very different ways of looking at the world, but Kessenich says his father’s piety taught him that religion can transform not just one life, but the life of an entire community.

My father and I disagreed vehemently about politics and religion in the late 1960s. He was a World War II veteran and a colonel at Wisconsin National Guard. I was a long-hair student at the University of Wisconsin Milwaukee, helping organize anti-war demonstrations. He was about catholic. I was agnostic. My younger siblings remember all two vividly the violent arguments he and I would have. There was nowhere to hide from them in the small home where we lived. Once my father ended up chasing me around the kitchen table, intend on hitting me for his first time in his life, and then he broke down crying.

The memory of those tears says more to me about who my father was than the memory of our arguments. He was a man who cared passionately about the people who he knew and loved, but also about the people in need he didn’t know about all. He taught me to care with the same intensity. I never doubted that he loved me, even in those moments I felt least understood by. And his life spoke eloquently about how much he cared for the less fortunate. He and my mother always did charitable work, preparing and serving meals for homeless people at St. Ben’s parish in Milwaukee in the city for example.

But after my father retired, he took his social action to a new level. He was admitted to a late ministry program sponsored by the Milwaukee Arch diocese, a program that introduced him to contemporary theology and the history in Catholic social action. It was heady stuff for a man who had gone to college, one of the greatest regrets in his life by the way. Suddenly my conservative father sounded like someone from Dorthy Day’s Catholic Worker Movement of the 1930s. He became incensed about how unconcerned the wealthy people in suburban parish were, about the plight of the less fortunate. When he graduated from the program, he became the social program’s coordinator for his parish. And until he died at 81, there was a thorn inside of his fellow commissioner continually exhorting them to give more to and do more for those in need. It is in large part because the example set by my father, Arthur Kessenich that I believe I have a responsibility to give off myself, not just to those I know and love, but to those I would never know if I didn’t seek them out, the poor, the disable, the imprisoned. It is because of his example that I tried to tie to give 10% of my income to the charity, that I spent 2 hours a week assisting a blind man, that I helped lead alternatives to violence in workshops and prisons. I don’t do it out of guilt or fear of damnation, but out of love. Because I saw love in action, in my father’s tears, and in the way he lived his life. Because of him, I believe in love.

Lawrence Kessenich is a writer living in Watertown, Massachusetts. His essay was produced by John Gregory and Dan Gadon. And he’s featured in the new book--This I Believe on Love. Next week, finding grace in Utah. If you like to write an essay about the core believe that guides your life and submit it to our series, go to the website thisibelieve.org