As the congregation moved from Mikell Chapel to the post-quinceañera reception, the young woman whose service we had just celebrated said to me, “Padre Bill, estás entre mis abuelos,” or, “Father Bill, now you are among my grandfathers.”
Each Sunday for 18 years, I could be found on the Cathedral Close of the Cathedral of St. Philip, where I was a part-time Associate Priest, and where I continue to see patients at the counseling center, a wonderful, sacred space so dear to me. Among the services in which I participated was Catedral de San Felipe, our Hispanic ministry held in Mikell Chapel each Sunday. During those years, my learning curve was rapidly ascending, both in terms of my language skills and my role in relation to the congregation. They had several names for me, including “Padre Guillermo,” and more recently, “Abuelo,” meaning “Grandfather.” The latter is perhaps my favorite name. On Christmas Eve 2018 our granddaughter Sophia was born, and in December of 2022, our grandson Georgie joined his sister. Our twin grandchildren Jack and Alice—age 7 (who call me “Granddaddy,”) were born in March of 2017, so I am now un abuelo multiplicado por quatro or, a grandfather times four!
Sophia and George Harkins
Jack and Alice Harkins
So, how am I living into this new normal of being a grandfather, and how has it changed my ministry, my perspectives on life—and perhaps my sense of self and “being in the world” or “Dasein,” as Heidegger called it?(“Dasein” for Heidegger can be a way of being involved with and caring for the immediate world in which one lives).
Erik Erikson’s stages of psychosocial development included the penultimate stage, or “generativity versus stagnation.” Typically, this stage takes place during middle adulthood between the ages of approximately 40 and 65, so becoming un abuelo is, in this sense, right on time for me.During this developmental stage adults strive to create or nurture things that will outlast them, often by parenting grandchildren, and hopefully contributing to positive, “generative” changes that benefit the common good. Vicky and I spent much of our married life raising our two sons amid busy professional careers, and now, to see them have careers and children of their own gives us a deep sense of joy. Yes, we’ve had deeply satisfying vocational journeys, but these cannot compare to the delight we find in bearing witness to the unfolding of the lives of our sons, and, now, to see our grandchildren being born, grow and develop their own wonderfully distinctive lives.
And this is not all. A subtext in Erikson’s developmental narrative is that we become more connected to those aspects of our world that allow for a “transcendence of self.” We become more deeply aware that we are part of something larger than ourselves, a kind of “operational theology of abundance.” Wendell Berry hints at this when he says:
“Ask the questions that have no answers. Invest in the millennium. Plant sequoias. Say that your main crop is the forest that you did not plant, that you will not live to harvest.” (”Mad Farmer Liberation Front”~ Wendell Berry, Collected Poems)
Indeed, nature can assist us with this journey of generativity. Each year I gather in northern Colorado for a week of trail running, hiking, and fellowship with friends of some 40 years. We reconnect with one another, laugh, hike, read, and write. And we do all of this deep in a sub-alpine forest, engaging in what the Japanese call “shinrin-yoku,” or “forest bathing,” now known to increase levels of serotonin, dopamine, healthy cellular development, and an awareness of connection to God’s Creation—giving birth to empathy and compassion. And speaking of empathy, perhaps we can learn something from trees about being in community during what some are calling an “epidemic of polarization and loneliness” in our culture. Trees live communally in ways we are only beginning to understand. In his remarkable novel “The Overstory” Richard Powers writes about what we might call “grandparent trees”:
“Before it dies, a Douglas fir, half a millennium old, will send its storehouse of chemicals back down into its roots and out through its fungal partners, donating its riches to the community pool in a last will and testament. We might well call these ancient benefactors giving trees…Trees communicate, over the air and through their roots…they take care of each other. Link enough trees together, and a forest grows aware. ”
In his recent book “The Second Mountain,” David Brooks says this about the cultivation of generative moments of transcendence: “The universe is alive and connected, these moments tell us. There are dimensions of existence you never could have imagined before. Quantum particles inexplicably flip together, even though they are separated by vast differences of time and space. Somehow the world is alive and communicating with itself. There is some interconnecting animating force, and we are awash in that force, which we with our paltry vocabulary call love.”
Becoming a grandfather has indeed made me more aware of the beauty of non-binary, liminal spaces, where we greet the other with dignity and respect, just as our Baptismal Prayer calls us to do, and where, as the philosopher Emmanuel Levinas said, we welcome the infinite mystery of the Face of the other. In becoming un abuelo, I see artificial borders become diffuse and disappear. As one of my Hispanic parishioners said to me, “Padre, quiero sentirme vivo,” or, “Father, I want to feel alive.” As the abuelo in me comes alive, my connection to all of Creation becomes more alive as well, with more clarity, urgency, and meaning. May our sense of “generativity” at Holy Family also continue to grow, evolve, and flow out into the community we are called to serve! May our Outreach and Parish Life Committees, among others, guide us in contributing to the common good in life-giving ways, extending love and friendship to one another, and to the communities we serve.
As Gerard Manly Hopkins wrote,
The world is charged with the grandeur of God.
It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;
It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil
Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?
Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;
And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;
And wears man’s smudge and shares man’s smell: the soil
Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.
And for all this, nature is never spent;
There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;
And though the last lights off the black West went
Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs —
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.
I’ll catch you later on down the trail, and I hope to see you in church on Sunday!
Blessings, Bill+