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Thou mayest
Nobody chooses their inheritance.
Not the genetic kind. Not the emotional kind. Long before we're
old enough to consent to any of it, we receive temperament, patterns of anger
or silence, ways of loving or withholding love, entire postures toward the
world that were never ours to select.
Father's Day asks us to celebrate fatherhood. It rarely asks us to
examine what fatherhood actually transmits.
Some of what we inherit is wonderful. A father's patience. His
steadiness. The particular way he made a house feel safe simply by being in it.
Some of what we inherit is harder to hold. A temper that surfaces faster than
we'd like. A silence we learned before we knew we were learning it. A way of
loving that withholds as much as it gives.
Most of us carry some combination of both, whether we've ever
examined it or not.
The difficulty is that inheritance rarely announces itself as
inheritance. It feels, most days, simply like personality. Like the way things
are. It takes a particular kind of honesty to notice that a reaction we assumed
was simply ours actually has a much older source: a father, a grandfather, a
pattern handed down so quietly that nobody along the way ever thought to call
it what it was.
John Steinbeck spent six hundred pages wrestling with this
question in East of Eden, and he built the entire novel around a single
word.
The Trask and Hamilton families echo the story of Cain and Abel
across generations. Brothers competing for a father's approval, a mother whose
cruelty ripples forward into sons who never asked to inherit it. Cathy's
coldness reappears in Cal. The longing for a father's blessing reappears in
nearly everyone. By the time the novel reaches its third generation, the
question hanging over every character is the same one: does the past simply
repeat itself in us, whether we want it to or not?
Steinbeck's answer turns on a verse from Genesis. When God speaks
to Cain before the murder of Abel, He says that sin desires to have him but
that he may rule over it. Translators have argued for over a century about
exactly how to render the original Hebrew. Some versions render it as a
command: thou shalt. Others render it as a promise, almost a guarantee: thou
shalt surely.
Steinbeck's characters land somewhere different. Not a command.
Not a guarantee. Thou mayest.
The inheritance is real. The desire to repeat what came before
genuinely presses in. But the verse refuses to make that pressure into destiny.
It simply says: you may. You are permitted to rule over what was handed to you.
Nothing forces your hand in either direction.
That single word is doing an enormous amount of work, both in
Steinbeck's novel and in the lives of anyone who has ever wondered whether
they're doomed to become their father, for better or worse.
Scripture had already said something close to this, long before
Steinbeck found it.
In the book of Ezekiel, the exiles had taken to repeating a
proverb among themselves: the parents have eaten sour grapes, and the
children's teeth are set on edge. In other words, we are simply living out the
consequences of choices that were never ours. The sins of the fathers have
become the inheritance of the sons, and there is nothing to be done about it.
God's response, through the prophet, is direct. That proverb will
no longer be repeated. The soul who sins is the one who bears responsibility.
The child does not carry the guilt of the parent, nor the parent the guilt of
the child. Each person stands accountable for what they do with what they were
given.
This is not a small theological point. It is, in its own way, a
declaration of freedom.
Naming what was passed down to us, the good and the painful both,
is not betrayal. It is not blame directed at a father who likely received his
own difficult inheritance from somewhere too. It is simply honesty. And
honesty, as it turns out, is usually the precondition for freedom rather than
its enemy.
A person cannot rule over what they refuse to name.
None of this should suggest that every inheritance is something to
escape.
Paul wrote to a young man named Timothy about a faith that lived
first in his grandmother Lois, then in his mother Eunice, and now lived in
Timothy himself. That, too, is inheritance, not a wound passed down the
generations but a gift, carried faithfully from one set of hands to the next
until it found a place to rest.
Many people reading this had fathers who gave them something worth
keeping. Patience. Integrity. A particular kind of courage. A faith that became
their own only because someone else lived it first, in front of them, long
enough for it to take root.
The goal was never to reject everything a father gave. The goal is
simply to look honestly at what was received and to keep what was good, release
what wasn't, and recognize that the difference is something only the next
generation can decide.
Every father leaves something behind, intentionally or not. A
temper. A tenderness. A silence. A faith. Some combination the child never gets
to choose and will spend a lifetime learning to hold.
What Steinbeck understood, and what Ezekiel said long before him,
is that having of an inheritance is not the same thing as being ruled by it.
The patterns are real. The pull toward repeating them is real. But
standing over all of it is a single, almost unbearable permission: not a
guarantee that we'll rise above what we were given, not a command that we must,
but simply the chance that we might.
This Father's Day, that may be the truest gift available to anyone
holding a complicated inheritance: not the demand to be different from their
father, and not the certainty that they will be, but the door left open all the
same.
Some will spend this day grateful for exactly what they received,
with nothing to release and everything to honor. Others will spend it carrying
a more mixed inheritance, recognizing gifts they would never surrender
alongside patterns they hope will end with them. Both are honest responses to
the same reality.
What remains true either way is the permission underneath it all.
Not a verdict already decided. Not a future already written. Simply an open
door, and the chance to walk through it.
Perhaps that is the deepest meaning of Father's Day. Not merely
honoring what was handed to us, nor condemning it, but seeing it clearly enough
to choose what happens next.
Thou mayest.
