Guys and Dads

Donald Miller’s hit book, Blue Like Jazz, has sold hundreds of thousands of copies to non-traditional, spiritually seeking Christians. In his latest book, To Own a Dragon, Miller discusses the epiphany he had that growing up without a father affected him in myriad ways long after his childhood.

What was your experience growing up without a father?

My dad left before I remember anything. There were early memories of my mom interacting with my dad occasionally, trying to get a credit card back from him, but I don’t have any memories of my dad. It all seemed pretty normal. It wasn’t until five or six years ago that I even began to process the fact that something in my life had been missing. There were a lot of the things I didn’t know. By know I mean that on a holistic level I didn’t know that authority equals love, those sorts of things. I always felt like I was ten years behind in terms of the way I was living my life. I attribute that to not having a father.

It was watching a documentary about a group of orphaned elephants that helped you see the need for a male authority in your life.

Without the presence of older elephants in their lives to mentor them, these elephants remained in suspended musth cycles, which essentially is like a puberty phase. With an older male elephant there, their musth cycle will only last about three days. It’s a very uncomfortable time, but it’s eased when an older male elephant is in their life.

But for the elephants on this reserve, with no older males, their musth cycles did not end. They basically began to lose it. They acted out aggressively and violently toward other creatures. They began to withdraw from their tribe. When they introduced older male elephants into that community of orphaned elephants, their musth cycles ended. They were able to be normal.

It was very interesting to me that there is evidence in the animal kingdom that you are changed biochemically by your relationship to something outside of yourself. Young men are changed by their relationships with older men. There is evidence of that. So I began to wonder, what am I missing? How am I being affected by not having a dad? It was very eye-opening to me.

Just as the elephants acted abnormally, you were always worried that somehow you would end up in prison.

I have this fear. I’ll drive by a prison and there’s part of me that just knows that someday I’ll be in there. That’s my destiny. It’s crazy, because there’s nothing illegal going on in my life. Nor has there ever been, save for the occasional driving without car insurance when I was 19. I think it goes into this idea that you’re destined for failure. Without a dad, there’s never anyone telling you you’re going to make it. You’re going to succeed.

Your friend John MacMurray invited you to move in with his wife and kids. That experience taught you a lot about family life.

That was the first time I’d seen a family with a husband and wife and kids. It was very odd to me for the first year. From my perspective, it was a perfectly normal family with a woman and three kids, and then there was this man who kept spending the night. It was an odd sensation, but it was in that process that I began to see how beautiful a family really is. That was where I learned what I had really missed.

Why is it important for a guy to know what it is to be a man? And does that mean playing sports and fixing cars?

It’s also important for a woman to know she’s a woman, for a father to know he’s a father. This isn’t just an exclusive thing among men. But there is an identity that a man feels intrinsically. Somebody like John Eldridge would say the dominant question is, “Do I have what it takes?” For years, growing up in the church, manhood was elevated, and there were communication tools that were used that felt excluding to me. The mantra was real men love Jesus, or real men do this, or real men do that. A guy who didn’t have a dad is at a disadvantage. When he hears that real men love Jesus, he assumes that if there are real men and not real men, I must be one of the not real men.

I wanted to say in the book that I had to learn that if you have a penis, then you are a man. God has spoken. Nobody’s going to take that away from you or use manipulative tools to get you to respond. That was a really affirming epiphany to me. God says I’m a man, but because I grew up without a dad, it just stung when they’d say only real men did certain things.

So why did you keep going to church? What kept you there at a time in your life when many guys tend to stray?

There were years when I didn’t go to church at all. But whatever happened to me in terms of encountering God really happened. It was not something that I wanted to get away from. I rebelled, but I continued to follow God, and he continued to father me, even though I didn’t realize at the time that’s what he was doing.

Church and faith were pretty different to me. I don’t know that that’s a good biblical model, but that’s how it happened in my life.

We talk about God being our father. Yet he can’t replace an earthly father.

And he’s not meant to. God’s good at playing his role. We’re given metaphors in Scripture to help us understand who God is and how to relate to him. There’s sheep to shepherd, king to subject, brother to sister, bride to bridegroom, and a dominant metaphor is also father to child.

In our culture, we interact with God like he’s a slot machine or like he’s a computer. It’s the dominant way we interact with God, but it’s not a biblical way. The biblical way is that we interact with him as a father. There were things I learned with John and Terry MacMurray that were pretty remarkable epiphanies in terms of understanding that Jon as an authority figure in his children’s life would often withhold things that they wanted in order to better them.

In our culture, if you pray a certain prayer, you expect to get what you want from God. That’s voodoo. That’s not God fathering you.

You talked to a bunch of guys at a frat house about not seeing women as sex objects. For those guys, being a man meant having sex. What did you say to them?

One of the things that I wanted to communicate with those guys is that because we live in a commercialized society and women are beautiful, their bodies are often associated with a product. It gives a sort of positive feeling about what we’re seeing, and it’s then associated with dish soap or something like that. Because of that, we’re being trained to see women as less than human. They’re just images.

It’s important to interact with a woman in order to become a man. It’s part of how we become who God designed us to be. I feel like our culture just wants us to be isolated individuals fulfilling our sex drives with images. It’s sort of a mantra in the Christian culture, but I’m happy to step on to that.

What is the Belmont Foundation?

We’ve started a foundation here in Portland that is taking care of the needs of single moms. First, we want to take care of their needs to relieve the stress in their lives to free them up to spend more time with their children. Second, we want to provide mentors to guys growing up without fathers. Eighty-five percent of guys in prison grew up without a dad. We think the church is in a place to be able to make a pretty big dent in this crisis. We’re modeling that at our church, and then we’re going to clone it at churches all over the country.

Related Elsewhere:

Also posted today is an excerpt from To Own a Dragon.

To Own a Dragon: Reflections on Growing Up Without a Father is available from Christianbook.com and other book retailers.

More information is available from NavPress.

Miller’s website has more information about his books and his speaking schedule.

Past Christianity Today interviews with Donald Miller include:

Finding God in Odd Places | There’s more to faith than grids and logic, says Donald Miller. (Sept. 14, 2005)

The Dick Staub Interview: Why God Is Like Jazz | Donald Miller, author of Blue Like Jazz, talks about why Christians need writers who honestly deal with their faults and why penguin sex is an apt metaphor for believing in Christ. (Aug. 5, 2003)

Other reviews and excerpts from his books include: