I didn’t expect the fatherhood of the priesthood to be so analogous to natural fatherhood. For instance, I feed my children while making faces to help them eat the Bread of Life from my consecrated hand…though without the airplane noise. My heart, like the sea, sloshes in worry for them. I get to offer advice for free, most of the time unsolicited. And I have the experience of the tug-on-the-shirt-can’t-wait-to-tell-you-about-this-incredible-life-altering-experience-that-really-has-nothing-to-do-with-anything-at-all-but-I-want-to-be-heard-by-you and I smile and say that’s great. And oddly, with a pandemic casting a shadow over the earth, I feel like an empty-nester. The vacuous space in my church echoes in my soul. And nature abhors a vacuum.

             Last week I walked into a funeral parlor. A young father had died. I had read in his obituary that he adored his child, a two-year-old girl. She greeted me when I walked through the door, her voice like the song of a meadowlark. “Hi! I’m Anna. What’s your name?” I bend down to see her face to face. She smiles, then darts over to look at some pictures on a glass table. “Come here.” She bounces on the balls of her 4-inch sandals. “Look at my daddy. I love my daddy. My daddy loves me. We play together.”

The ocean teems with the moaning of blue whales.

Her father, in a casket surrounded by flowers, a grieving wife stroking his bristling black hair. Anna vaults herself on to mommy’s lap, looks at her once-adoring daddy. “Daddy naps.” She taps his chest and tells him to wake and says its time to play monsters. “Daddy go ughrrrr.” Her arms curl downward, teeth shift from smile to clenched. The egg in my empty nest breaks.

            The funeral prayers fall from my lips as tears fall from rosy cheeks. I commend the soul of daddy, my son, into the arms of Abba.

            I bend down to the height of a two-year-old and meet her eye to eye. She begins to tell me something that is of utmost importance though it is far-fetched and dreamy and doesn’t make sense and involves unicorns. Though the CDC forbids it, my arms extend wide to her, and she dives with reckless abandon into the sea.

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