I just found this lovely article by a young Catholic priest, about his father, his deceased brother, and hunting. (No, the brother didn’t die hunting.) It is about the ways in which Father Figures help the development of young men through their time together in the wild. wordlessly. Fr. Patrick tells this story about himself as an eight-year-old.
At the end of deer season, I was confused as to why Dad only saw or harvested bucks when I accidentally slept in, yet when we hunted together, the most we would see were rabbits, birds, and does. He never told me, but now I know. It was those crackly plastic bags of Dorito chips I insisted on taking into the deer blinds! I was a bag crackler and chair squeaker! The worst kind of greenhorn! How could he have been so patient without ever saying a word of frustration or disappointment to me? How could he have sacrificed those many hours of “no luck” just so that I could sit with him over the hunting spot, him knowing ahead of time that my presence would guarantee a zero in the way of buck activity?
If hunting were simply about killing animals, then yes, they would have been pure wastes of time. Harvesting the animal is only part of hunting though. When thinking of the many deer hunts Dad and I shared, I think on God the Father’s Providence in each of our lives. Sitting next to Dad last deer season, I was first in spotting all the animals. I pondered how my five senses used for hunting were worthless twenty eight years ago, and how my Dad’s were superhuman.
He asks rhetorically:
During this time of crisis in Fatherhood and manhood in America, when more children are growing up without father figures than at any other time in American history, could one solution be the rediscovery of the outdoors, hunting, and fishing? Do we not need fathers and father figures willing to spend time with boys, doing the things which men did as a matter of course for centuries before these last fifty or so years?
Obviously, yes. I can’t teach my son to be a man, the way another man can. Read it all here.