Bonds Books

"Between Fathers and Sons: A Program for Sharing Faith, Strengthening Bonds, and Growing into Manhood" by Michael Smith SJ, (Notre Dame, Indiana: Ave Maria Press, 1997). 125 pp. $16.95

Frontiers are sometimes physical borders and sometimes spiritual or even mystical boundaries. Adolescence is both. Every person has to live on both sides of it as it rolls through generation after generation. Perhaps the older and the younger in the golden past related across that rolling frontier amicably. Not today, and particularly not among males, as the shapes and forms of fathering have disintegrated one after another.

Commentators have given a name to this social illness: nonfeasance-the omission of an act which ought to have been performed. Fathers today are not sufficiently active in rearing their children, sons and daughters alike. And commentators have a partial cause of this illness staring up at them from their statistics: because marriage has somehow lost its bite, four of ten American children fall asleep at night in a house bereft of their biological father. Even where father lives with his family, pressures from gender role shifts, work patterns, urban mobility and anonymity, the drug culture, and a lot else have contrived to turn male adolescence into a fairly wild frontier. The pressures have made the father-son relationship arguably the grittiest and tautest frontier in society.

Michael Smith, S.J., now Director of Campion Retreat Center in Melbourne, Australia, has boldly moved onto that frontier equipped with sound psychology and solid theology. He has created a series of group spiritual exercises that bring a father and his son together not at high noon-to put it this way-but in the cool of the evening where God walks. He has conducted the program in the United States and in Ireland as well as in his native Australia. It works.

In "Between Fathers and Sons" Fr. Smith outlines, as the book's subtitle puts it, "a program for sharing faith, strengthening bonds, and growing into manhood." The book lays out a program of six three-hour sessions, done on a weekend or spread out. Each session, grounded in an event from Jesus' life, incorporates brief input from the facilitator, individual reflection, group work, and time during which fathers and sons speak personally to each other. The topics cover the field by having the generations meet at the crossroads: the father-son relationship, becoming a man, dealing with anger and aggression, friendship with girls and women, the quest for identity. The program ends with a moving ceremony during which each father blesses his son and washes his feet.

Fr. Smith's expressed conviction is that a son must learn to believe in Jesus Christ autonomously, but he will believe much more wisely and well if he witnesses his father's faith. Grace, we have learned, builds on nature; Fr. Smith is strengthening both grace and nature in this program for fathers and sons.

Designed for adolescent males between thirteen and eighteen and their fathers (or someone who takes the father's place when he is not available to his son), the program is an excellent resource for pastoral teams in high schools, parishes, and retreat houses. "Between Fathers and Sons" offers much to pastoral counselors and even to groups of fathers who wish to deepen their relationships with their sons. The program's process is crisply laid out, practical, and penetrates intimate and personal issues without too much pressure or too much thrashing about. Plainly written, the text includes full directions to conduct the program and useful tear-out forms to photocopy. Facilitators do not have to belong to a helping profession to use it.

The focus of "Between Fathers and Sons" raises some tangy questions about other relationships in the family: What about mother and daughter, for instance? Does that relationship need a program? For that matter, what about mother and son? While fathers and sons enhance their mutual relationship, do they leave mother out, or do they heighten all family relationships? Probably most of us would judge that in general, mother-son and mother-daughter relationships are in better shape than father-son or father-daughter relationships. Yet daughters need their fathers as much as sons need them. Perhaps therein lies Fr. Smith's next task: to apply the fine combination of gifts and skills he shows in this program to write a similar book for fathers and daughters.

Joseph Tetlow SJ