I knew, from the time I was a little girl, that my Dad was a zealot. Not the sort of Zealot I learned about in Sunday School. The ones who loved their neighbours and hated their enemies. Not the Jewish kind that fought with holy zeal against the Romans. He was the sort of zealot who burned with a passion for God, he ached over the struggle of the human condition, he longed for the time of the end when this dispensation (I loved the sound of the word dispensation long before I knew what it meant) would give way to the kingdom when Jesus would return and recreate the world into its magnificent rightful glory with lambs and lions sitting down together—in my child mind the sky would always be blue, everyday would be sunny, the grass would always be green, and the stream, there was always a stream, would be more green, more blue and more sparkling than I had ever seen yet.
In the church congregation of muddy grey and insipid beige people I saw my dad as sizzling orange and pink and red…almost fluorescent. He drew people to him like an incandescent light bulb. He smiled wider and laughed louder. He sung with every word falling with a chord of conviction. His sermons pulled you in with his stories of love and acceptance and had you completely convinced with his reasoned arguments and then they stung with his warnings of human failure. And they always left the stinger in.
My dad was Jeremiah warning the Israelites that they would be destroyed because of their wickedness…wickedness like celebrating pagan feasts like Christmas, cutting a tree down and worshipping it. Wickedness like setting a television in your living room and allowing ‘the world’ to stream into your house, into your mind. “Television will corrupt the children. They have no filter,” he would say…”and once the world has seeped deeply into their minds they will not know what is real, what is not real, what is truth and what is manipulative deception.” He warned of wickedness like serving the almighty dollar instead of the almighty god.
The room of grey and beige people didn’t like his preaching. They liked Christmas trees. They liked television. And most of all they liked the almighty dollar.
That’s where he lost people. They didn’t like to be told. But he was Jeremiah and he had a calling.
And, at the same time, he was Jesus. Teaching love and acceptance. His love flowed bigheartedly to his family and beyond to the milk man, the paper boy, the gas station attendant and when he died in his late eighties hundreds of people came to his funeral, people we had forgotten but who had never forgotten my dad’s generosity. A job. A dollar. A ride. A meal. Who amongst us is without sin should cast the first stone, he would say.My Dad understood ‘the weaknesses of the flesh’ because he was a man of the flesh. Women loved him. Children loved him. Animals loved him. He cried at funerals. Not a polite tear on his cheek. A sobbing. A chest heaving. A moan.
My dad preached like Jeremiah. He loved like Jesus. He believed like Abraham, Issac and Jacob. He fascinated like David and he struggled like Job.
The little girl in me thought my dad was always wonderful. After each time he offended the church people my mom harangued him “Why can’t you just tone down your preaching? Now you are going to have to apologize.” And I defended him. “He’s the only one keeping people awake.”
It wasn’t until I was in grade seven, thirteen years old. We had moved so I was a new kid, in a new school, working hard to figure out how to fit in. That’s when I really came to know what it meant to have a dad who was a zealot.
My house was between the school and the home of the popular girl. I was walking with a crowd of popular kids. Trailing somewhat behind but also wishing I could keep up.
As I quietly left the group and walked down the driveway towards my house one of the boys circled back. “Hey cool is this where you live?” Later I would find out that he thought I was a lot cooler than I thought I was.
The crowd of kids followed me down our long driveway and behind the hedge where we met my father and his yellow pickup truck. In the back stood a towering plywood model of Nebuchadnezzar’s image. Erected with the help of 2X4s and sand bags. Both sides were painted gold on the head for the Babylonian Empire, silver on the shoulders for the Persian Empire, bronze on the belly and thighs for the Grecian Empire, iron-grey on the legs for the Roman Empire and conglomerate stone on the feet.
The kids went quiet. In the moment that followed my dad saw the perfect opportunity to demonstrate the bull horn he had set up on the top of the cab. He jumped in the truck and found the mic. I can still see his face beaming as he invited the kids to come to a lecture about the time of the end. “It’s coming,” he said. “A rock is coming and it will strike the image on its feet and this dispensation will be over. All the empires of man will fall.”
The kids stayed quiet. I don’t know what stopped my dad from talking. I don’t know how long he carried on. A minute? An hour?
I don’t know how that moment was resolved. I don’t remember the kids leaving. I don’t remember my dad getting out of the truck. My ears were ringing. My knees were watery. My lips were dry. I think the lump in my throat went down not up but I can’t be sure.
That encounter didn’t ruin my life. Perhaps my dad’s craziness made me more interesting to the boy.
I don’t want to wrap this up…there is no bow on this story. And as you can imagine there were many many more stories like it. But there’s so much to remember and in spite of it all my dad was and still is my bright star.