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Father's Day 2002

"In their faces that still haunt us, we find the lines of the One
from whom all fathers take their name."

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This Fr. Gerry Creedon homily was delivered at St. Charles on June 16, 2002
[Note: A number of people have asked me for the Father's Day Homily. Unfortunately it was not taped, but here's my attempt to reconstruct it. - Gerry Creedon

Evangelica was concerned because she could not rid her mind of her Latin American mother, long since dead. She could hear her voice and her presence was with her like a shadow. Apart from the way distance complicates grief, I comforted her with the thought that we are all one somehow in the doctrine of the communion of saints. We celebrate that mystical union in every Eucharist.

Like her mother, my father has been on my mind with the approach of Father's Day, even though he died 16 years ago.

His Memory Remains

I was recently watching a rerun of a poignant film, The Remains of the Day. Anthony Hopkins played the part of an English butler who kept company with a librarian. He could never quite express in words his deep feeling for her. I called my sister Nora in Canada, who also happened to be watching the same movie. She said she had wept all the way through it. Whether it was the piercing blue eyes of Hopkins, his reticent sensitivity, the cock of the hat, or the way he pulled up his gray mackintosh for the rain, he was the image of Da, our father.

The following day I was having lunch with friends, who were discussing how much the same film had reminded them of ME! This surprised me. I had always thought that I had my mother's features, much as I admired my father.

This weekend I was remembering my First Mass Reception 34 years ago this time of year. The president of the seminary spoke: "Gerard, your father is not only a father to his large family, he is father to the village of Inchigeela and a large area of West Cork, by the way he affirms all he meets. The people will now call you 'Father'. If you are half the father that Johnny Creedon has been, you will be a half-way decent priest!"

On this Father's Day it is natural for all of us to recall the unique traits of our own fathers. My father was a businessman, running a hotel, a post office and a mill; but it was the mill he prized, and his own brand of meal, Creedon's Viking Pig Ration. I will read to you a recollection of my father written shortly after his death.

VIKING

I do not know where he got the name Viking Pig Ration.
Did he think the Creedons who followed O'Neill
From Antrim to Kinsale and fled to the hills
Of West Cork in confusion, were once the daughters and sons of Fins and Swedes?
Is that why he took to the water with such spirit?
Diving in back at the Rocks, breasting
The broad Atlantic with a child on either shoulder?
And he loved the boats of all description.

Meal clung like confetti on hairy nostrils
Whitening the baggy knees,
Mixing maize, molasses and the wheat of the barley
Swiftly rolled in the smoking kiln.
Pouring Creedon's Viking Pig Meal on the trough of many a farmer's byre
Brought the sows and bonhams running and grunting
To the joys of satiety
And the delight of Johnny the Miller."

Today let us acknowledge the many different ways those who gave us life and nurture, still influence us consciously and unconsciously through their values. In their faces that still haunt us, we find the lines of the One from whom all fathers take their name. "He fathers forth whose beauty is beyond fade, praise Him."

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Revised/reviewed July 9, 2002