fathers and sons – Thinking Pacifism

Ted Grimsrud—June 24, 2019

It is a kind of truism that we tend to see God in ways that echo how we see our own fathers. For some reason I was thinking about that the other day. I would tend not to think that way, but I was wondering if this truism is at all true in my experience. I would start by saying that in my sense of my own life, my mother played a much larger role than my father in my theological formation.

However, as I thought about it, I actually do think there may be parallels between how I think of my dad and my view of God. Let me suggest a motif. When I think of my dad, one element that comes to mind is what we could call “companionable silence”—the tendency to be in one another’s presence without saying much of anything out loud, but finding it enjoyable to be together. Is that same dynamic part of how I think about God? It seems that maybe it is.

Father’s day reflections

Our recent celebration of Father’s Day kind of snuck up on me this year—I suppose in part because it has been 36 years since I last had to try to remember to offer gratitude to my father, Carl Grimsrud, on the day (he died in 1984). So it was early Monday, the morning after Father’s Day that during a period of wakefulness I spent some time remembering my dad.

I have pleasant memories. In fact, I can’t remember ever having sustained feelings of hurt, resentfulness, anger, fear, or disappointment in relation to him. That’s not to say I never did, just that the negative memories don’t remain. I do have some regrets—mainly that there is so much I wish I could have talked with him about. Also, I feel that I can understand him a lot better now and can actually imagine his inner life a bit, so it’s too bad I can’t engage him in light of that understanding. And I would like to know many things about his life that I never learned about. I never knew his father, but I can now imagine a bit of what my dad’s relationship with his father was like. I would have liked to know more about that, though. Continue reading “Fatherly companionable silence (Theological memoir #1)” →

Ted Grimsrud—December 26, 2010

Several months ago, I embarked upon a big project of trying to make some sense of the moral impact of World War II on the United States. I have done quite a bit of reading, speaking, and writing so far—aided by the blessing of a sabbatical from my teaching responsibilities at Eastern Mennonite University. This lecture especially summarizes some of what I have been thinking about. Here is the link to the rough drafts of the chapters to this book.

One theme has arisen for me that I did not anticipate when I started. That is thinking a lot more about my own father’s involvement in this war and how that involvement might have had an impact on our relationship. I was the fourth of my parents’ five children, but the first and only son. On the surface, I can think of several ways the war shaped my life—I was named after a friend of my dad’s who died in combat during the war, my parents met each other because of the war, and the new medical technology that saved my life when I was born (blood transfusions) would likely not have been available had it not been for the war.

Something I had not really thought about until I started on my project, though, was the trauma the war inflicted on those who fought in it. It makes a lot of sense to imagine the terrible trauma on the people in the many parts of the world who endured the fighting first hand, and the trauma for those societies that poured heart and soul into the fight and lost, and the trauma for the loved ones of the millions upon millions who lost their lives in the war (including about 400,000 American soldiers).

But what about the soldiers who fought on the winning side, who returned home physically whole to a country largely unscathed by the conflict, and who went on to live successful lives? That is, what about people like my father? Continue reading “Our fathers’ war” →