'Cause Every Bone's Tethered

A roundabout reflection on the 4th commandment

Sitting with my dad watching my son play ball, I can see my dad looks more like his dad every day. I’m not with my dad that often — every few months or so. But when I am, I can see he’s becoming my grandpa who has been dead for eleven years. My grandpa lives on in my dad somehow.

I see this in myself, too. I have become more aware of it as I’ve gotten older. Though I’m my own man, so often I’m my father. Said another way, the flip side of the fact that I am not my father is that I am my father’s son. Interactions with my own children betray this fact. There are some deep, visceral parts of me that are my dad’s, too. How I react to certain scenarios, my slumped posture in the car, what I say — and how I say it. I hear it in my voice when I tell my kid “not this time” when he offers to help with a project, or that I’ll be out “in a bit” to play. I see it in my withdrawal from social settings and my sheepishness around recognition. I see how I am cool, calm, and collected until that one little thing pushes me over the edge and I snap, just like dad — grit teeth and all. More often, it seems, I find myself thinking, “my dad did that,” or “my dad said that.”

You know, it’s all the stuff you hated about your parents when you were a teenager. It’s the stuff you tried to escape, tried to rebel against. And here it is. It’s me. I am it, too.

But that’s not all.

As I watch my son on the field, the dusty dirt from the infield blows my way. I smell it. It’s the same dirt from my boyhood ball games my dad coached. I watch my boy pop stale sunflower seeds in his mouth. I, too, can taste the salt mixed with sweat. I can smell the cheap leather smell of the damp batting glove. It’s the same salt, the same sweat, the same dirt. I watch him smirk as he reaches base safely, knowing it was a job well done. It’s the same smile.

It’s me out there. Not me, but part of me somehow.

I see myself in all of my children, but I see me in my boys, most clearly. Though they are their own persons with their own agency (clearly), I see their successes as my own; I see their failures as my own. As a friend of mine put it bluntly when he said, “when you get angry with your kids, you’re really just angry with yourself. When you’re disappointed, at the bottom of it, you’re disappointed with yourself.” Angry at yourself in them. Angry at yourself in you. Disappointed, too.

For a long time, I’ve lived a certain denial. Trying to make my own path. Convincing myself I’m different from my dad. And, in truth, I am. I think differently and act differently, sure. But uniqueness has tethers. Parts of my personality are his personality. There are undeniable ties, inescapable sinews. Reminds me of some lines in Stephen Wilson Jr’s song “Father’s Son:”

Yeah I tried to be different
Tried to go against the grain
Didn't make no difference
I just ended up the same

In this same song, Stephen sings that the “the tree don't grow very far from the apple.” True. So, what is one to do? Resent and reject or love and accept?

Self-acceptance and the Acceptance of One’s Parents

To accept myself is to accept my history: past, present, and future. Self-acceptance, in some way, involves accepting self, son, father, and grandfather, despite the rough parts of our collective character. Flannery O’Connor gets at some of this when she says in a letter addressed to “A”, “accepting oneself does not preclude an attempt to become better. It is, in fact, primary to that effort as the Church has always taught. Self-torture is abnormal; asceticism is not.”¹ Asceticism is born from acceptance, not denial. And it’s not an acceptance of the isolated “I” — the isolated self. The self came from somewhere, and that must be accepted, too.

So, I’d like to extend this reflection, here. Specifically, I am concerned with the manner in which self-acceptance necessitates the acceptance of one’s parents, one’s ancestry, one’s history.² My past is part of me — most of me, even. There is more past in my being than my own past. The bulk of me is history. My father represents this to me in his person. His being reminds me of it. He embodies my ancestry in a way that helps me to see it when I’m prone to forget it. To resent my father is to resent my grandfather, myself, and my son. To renounce my dad is to renounce my past, present, and future. Acceptance of myself must to some degree account for my history, which my father makes concretely present to me. Following Flannery’s logic, then, self-acceptance must account for the whole self, including its history, while the rejection of such amounts to some form of self-torture.

Modernity and the Rejection of One’s Parents

In a real sense, the kind of distancing of oneself from one’s parents has likely always been part of the human experience. Our literary record indicates as much. However, I believe it takes on a new tenor in modernity — a more aggressive one and one that can play out on a panoramic landscape previously unimaginable. I want to explore a few ways in which modern thinking justifies and perpetuates the rejection of (whether implicit or explicit) and distancing from (often literal, in the geographic sense) one’s parents. What makes such rejection acceptable?

Individualism

Jason Craig describes modernity as “the exaltation of the individual as an autonomous and self-determining being.”³ In fact, the word “individual” didn’t exist prior to the 17th century. Rather than one’s identity and place in society being given by one’s family and community, the modern man can strike out on his own and make himself, make a name for himself. Far from plying the trade of one’s father that fulfilled a necessary role within a community, now one pursues a profession of one’s own choosing, a distinctive career path for individual fulfillment.⁴ In such a setting, education becomes the new daddy — providing skills and education in areas of expertise that is often far beyond that of one’s own father. Education’s promotion of progressive liberalism drives a wedge between one’s new trajectory and one’s conservative past (insofar as the family exists to create and conserve life). It’s a Wonderful Life does a pretty wonderful job of depicting the tension created by modernity for the individual in George Bailey’s inner conflict regarding “the old building and loan.” Will George leave to “see the world” and make something more of himself by going to college, or will he ply his father’s trade within the community that raised him? Will he make something new of himself or acquiesce to who he is?

Time

Next, I want to note that the way we think about time, as late moderns, makes a certain parental rejection or distancing possible. (The whole moral movement of postmodernity that touts detraditionalization and individualization practically requires parental rejection and the “making of one’s own way” — i.e., “you doing you.”) Modernity, has reduced time to metrics, to distinct and discrete units of measurement. It’s a kind of “spatialization” of time. Think of a timeline, for example. A timeline is a spatial metaphor for time. One moves from one point in time to another in an atomized way, from one circumscribed moment to the next. It’s as if this unit of time occupies a certain fixed space and one that is a distinctly different space than the one that came before it and what will come after it. Or, we can think of a statement like: “I’m finally feeling like myself.” This implies that one wasn’t himself, somehow, in all the time leading up to this particular moment of feeling. Not discounting the feeling of wholeness or peace that lies underneath this statement, still. the language is telling. Yet, in all reality, the self prior and who is the self now is the same person who was there all along. Not to mention, the current “self” who “feels” him or herself wouldn’t be here without all the build up till now.

Canadian philosopher Kenneth Schmitz notes that the modern approach can be helpful for seeing distinction within succession (e.g., generational differences), but it is limited.⁵ It attempts to see time in terms of number, fixed points in space that can be counted, separated, and moved-on-from. However, Schmitz goes on to conclude that time is fundamentally qualitative and not primarily quantitative, such that the “inter-connectedness of the moments of time is to be accounted for…in terms of their actuality (present) and inactuality (past, future).”⁶ Past and present are part of an organic whole, like the notes of a melody flowing one into the other in such a way that eliminating even one of them impacts the whole.

Along this line, Matthew Crawford notes that “moments interpenetrate one another, and can be isolated from the whole only by abstract thought.” Time is not discrete, “it is something that flows, with the past having a continuing influence on the future.”⁷ The past is part of the present and the present depends wholly upon what has passed. It would not exist without it. Rather than a quantitative and negative view of time (i.e., the present is not the past and not yet the future), this qualitative view understands time as an enfolded (i.e., whole) reality that is unfolded (i.e., made explicit to our minds in the present and upon further reflection on the past).

Viewing time as siloed units, or in a spatialized way, makes it appear that we can “move on from” a certain time and “become my real self now.” This is modernity’s “plot of progress” — progressing, as the description of Andrew Willard Jones’ Two Cities puts it, “from superstition to science, from poverty to wealth, from darkness to enlightenment. This is modernity's origin myth.” The myth of progress, catalyzed by the spatialization of time, makes it appear that we can wage war on our past — box it up, reject it, renounce it. Parents embody our past, our childhood, our most insecure years in a particular way, making them an easy target in this process of temporal progress via revolution. In the end, however, the spatialization of time is an illusion. Instead, time is an inescapable part of me. I wouldn’t be me, who I am now, if it weren’t for who I was then. To think I can separate out parts of my past and suppress them, move on from them, or to think I am “nothing like my parents,” is to live an illusion. My past is my present is my future. It is all part of the same flow. It is one.

Control

“The driving force of that form of life we call ‘modern’ is the idea, the hope and desire, that we can make the world controllable.”⁸ German sociologist Hartmut Rosa continues, “Because we, as late modern human beings, aim to make the world controllable at every level…we invariably encounter the world as a ‘point of aggressions’ or as a series of points of aggression.”⁹ According to Rosa, making the world controllable consists of four dimensions:¹⁰

• Making the world visible — expanding our knowledge of what is there

• Making the world physically (or psychologically) reachable or accessible

• Making the world manageable — bringing it under control with the use of technology, etc.

• Making the world useful — instrumentalizing it and making it the object of our own projections and desires

These dimensions are made possible through advances in science and technology, which are, of course, intertwined with economics and politics. Rather than relating to the world as situated beings capable of resonating with it (a naturally passive and responsive position), taking an aggressive posture causes the world to move away from us and become increasingly foreign and our “new world” we’ve created for ourselves increasingly artificial. Hannah Arendt characterizes this as “an existential relation of relationlessness,” where “we may have any number of relationships to the world — a job, strong family ties, maybe political affiliation, religious faith, volunteer work, hobbies — without necessarily feeling alive or connected to them.”¹¹

Applying these basic observations to our topic at hand, is it not the case that we can see the hermeneutic of control at play in the contemporary parent-child relationship? Parents try to control their kids, and vice versa. So often, this power struggle — shrouded in entitlement, individualism, and psychology — results in a mutual sense of alienation and relational apathy. People walk on eggshells in their own home, and are relieved to not be there as they pursue a thousand of their own interests outside the home. Or, they isolate themselves in their own corners of increasingly expansive homes where they hover over the light of the screen. Of course, we can fight fire with fire. Because we can’t bring the world (or our parents) under our control, we spend thousands of dollars and hours upon hours in talk therapy where we expand visibility only into subjective emotions, and often identify the source of those problems in our parents’ problems (thus legitimizing them as points of aggression), and managing those triggering relationships through various psychological tools so as to make the relationship useful or at least less personally harmful. In the process, we are empowered in our victimhood and released from responsibility, and thus justified in fetishizing individual fancies under the auspices of “self-care” that’s often a cover for drawing hard boundary lines around selfishness. None of this is to say clinical counseling is unwarranted, that therapy is not necessary, or that mental health isn’t a real thing. It’s just to say that, broadly-speaking, it can operate within the worldview of rejection and progress and denial that, I believe, plays some role in creating the whole mess. In other words, it can perpetuate the whole notion of “self” as the “relation of relationlessness” that started all the self-torture of alienation to begin with.

Rosa goes on to explain that modernity has exacerbated what he calls an “aggressive-distancing relationship” with the world. He says, “the cultural achievement of modernity is that it has nearly perfected human beings’ ability to establish a certain distance from the world while at the same time bringing it within our manipulative reach.”¹² To be sure, this capacity for an “aggressive-distancing” is simply part of who we are as human beings. Rosa describes it as anthropologically innate. Scripture calls it “dominion” (see Gen 1:26). Rosa continues:

The aggressive aspect of our relationship to the world becomes a problem, however, when it begins to permeate every aspect of life, when we forget that subject and world do not simply exist apart from each other as independent entities, but rather emerge first from their mutual relatedness and connection to each other.¹³

I believe one could substitute “child” and “parent” for “subject” and “world” here, and it would read rather accurately. Human maturation necessitates a certain distancing from one’s parents so as to establish self, agency, and whatnot. Within the extreme context of modernity, however, this aggressive distancing can go too far, establishing a “safe” distance and maintaining it through psychologically manipulative techniques.

Here we come to my basic point: the modern-postmodern context of the West plays up control and aggression in such a way that many child-parent relationships fall under its sway. Modern thinking dismantles these relationships and pits child against parent and parent against child for the sake of individuality, such that a new, willful forgetfulness emerges — a forgetfulness of the deep existential bond that once connected them.

Recovery

We could diagnose these symptoms (i.e., individualism, quantification of time, and exaltation of control) as nothing more than a ostmodernity’s war on givenness. If modernity surfaced the individual and agency, postmodernity has empowered the individual with its emphasis on detraditionalization, deinstitutionalization, and individualization. Modernity revolted against traditional, religious givenness and put huge rational and scientific systems in place to propel the individual (or a whole society) to secular success. Postmodernity has (tried to) revolt against all of the modern systems while, purportedly not being a system itself. This, of course, is not true. Regardless, the basic movement of the “self” during this time goes from self-centered to self-made to self-drift. It goes from “I might be given but at least I make myself,” to “I am not given and I make myself.” This is the general arc from modernity to postmodernity. In small (or big) ways, all of this contemporary history, too, appears in the rejection of one’s parents and the givenness they represent. The result is a kind of alienation of the self from the self that is, as Flannery puts it, self-torture.

No wonder everyone needs a therapist!

Rosa proposes resonance as the antidote to modernity’s fixation on control and progress and aggression — attitudes that result in a certain alienation from the world (or one’s parents). In describing resonance, Rosa builds on French philosopher Maurice Meleau-Ponty’s observation that “I recognize my affinity with [all beings]. I am nothing but an ability to echo them, to understand them, to respond to the them.” Rosa continues:

Responsivity or the capacity for resonance is, in a way, the “essence” not only of human existence, but of all possible manners of relating to the world; it is the necessary precondition of our ability to place the world at a distance and bring it under our control. A capacity for, or rather a dependence on, resonance is constitutive not only of human psychology and sociality, but also of our very corporeality, of the ways we interact with the world tactilely, metabolically, emotionally, and cognitively. The basic mode of vibrant human existence consists not in exerting control over things but in resonating with them, making them respond to us — thus experiencing self-efficacy — and responding to them in turn.¹⁴

He goes on to say “resonance always has the character of gift, of something that is bestowed upon or befalls us. The inherent uncontrollability of resonance implies exactly this.”¹⁵ To be able to resonate with reality is a gift. To be able to receive and accept the world as it is and to respond to it as I am is a gift. To be disposed to being changed by the world around me while being able to change it, that is a gift.

In my mind, Rosa’s observations strike right at the heart of the family tension created by modern and postmodern ways of thinking. We no longer think in the category of gift or grace (a word which comes from the Greek word meaning “gift”). Rather, we think in the categories of make and take: make for ourselves, take for ourselves. We aren’t concerned about resonating with a meaningful world that presents itself to us, but in manipulating and making the raw material of the world mean something for us. We aren’t concerned about resonating with our parents, but pushing past them and taking something for ourselves. But, resonance challenges all of this and invites us to see parents as a gift — indeed, the givers of our own life — and to receive them as such. And, as receiving them in this way, we come to accept ourselves in new ways. If this is true, then accepting the gift of one’s givenness (i.e., to “resonate” with reality), embodied in one’s parents, is therapeutic. The self-torture caused by rejecting one’s parents as they are results in a certain self-alienation that can only be remedied by accepting one’s parents as they are, receiving them as gift, and interacting with them as such.¹⁶ This means, of course, receiving them with the gratitude due a gift and the customary surprise that comes in receiving one.¹⁷

Recovering the gift-nature of reality, of the human person (in general), and one’s parents (specifically), reminds me of a fantastic observation by St. John Paul II in his essay “A Meditation on Givenness”:

“God has given you to me.” … God does indeed give people to us; he gives us brothers and sisters in our humanity, beginning with our parents. Then, as we grow up, he places more and more new people on our life’s path. Every such person, in some way, is a gift for us, and we can say of each: “God has given you to me.” This awareness becomes a source of enrichment for each of us. We would be in grave danger were we to be unable to recognize the richness in each human person. Our humanity would be in peril were we to shut ourselves up only in our own selves and reject the broad horizon that opens out to the eyes of our soul as the years go by.¹⁸

Stephen Wilson Jr. expresses the movement from rejection to acceptance in a few lines: “I wear his blue jean jacket and his name like a badge of honor / I used to hate being called Junior / But I don't mind any longer.”

Conclusion

While not exhaustive in any stretch, I attempted to look at the manner in which modernity plays into parental resentment or the repulsion one feels when they act just like their mother or father did. Rather than perpetuate the illusion that rejection is the way to genuine selfhood, I attempted to argue that genuine self-acceptance as I am requires, in some way, the genuine acceptance of one’s parents as they are. To embrace my father is to embrace my past. To embrace my father is to embrace myself. As I learn to embrace myself, I have to accept my father, my past, and my future. Affection for my father is affection for my children, and affection for my children is affection for my father’s father — and his father. All of it helps me to be more receptive, more affectionate, more merciful — to myself, my parents, my children, my neighbor.

My dad looks more like his dad every day. I suppose I do, too. My jet black hair has gotten blacker. Then it will go gray. My deep Slovak features get deeper and more slavic, my personality more broody and melancholic. I can feel my finitude. I can see it in my skin. Lately, something has changed with all this. Those similar parts of my personality that are my dad’s, those parts that once repulsed me, I’m beginning to see these in a sacramental manner. They point to something else. On the one hand, they remind me that “every bone’s tethered.” They remind me that I am my father’s image and likeness, as he is his father’s, and on and on — an unbroken chain that goes all the way back to Adam, God’s son (cf. Lk 3:38). On the other hand, I realize that in receiving my image and seeing it, it’s like I’m looking in a cracked mirror. Broken branch after broken branch in this family tree. I can feel, in my bones, my need for healing, for redemption. And, I can see that this must be how God redeems me. He does it by entering into this flesh of mine, tethering my bones to his, and joining me to his offering to the Father. Jesus, “the image of the invisible God” (Col 1:15), the one who makes time and enters time and who has time, is with me in all of it and makes me new. He makes my dad new and my son new. He makes all things new if we allow him to, if we learn to accept all of ourselves and let him work with that.

1. Flannery O’Connor, The Habit of Being (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1979), 458.

2. Notwithstanding the natural separation that happens as a child becomes an adult, detaching from one set of attachment figures and attaching to a new one (e.g., spouse).

3. Jason Craig, “Should Men Retire?” New Polity, March 29, 2021.

4. Wendell Berry captures this phenomenon in his novel Hannah Coulter, for example.

5. Kenneth Schmitz, “Temporal Integrity, Eternity and Implicate Order,” in Beyond Mechanism, ed. David L. Schindler (New York: University Press of America, 1986), 99. The reduction of time to metrics, which has a long history, and the failure to perceive time as one of God’s creatures, plays a large role in our culture’s tense relationship with time.

6. Schmitz, “Temporal Integrity, Eternity and Implicate Order,” 104–105. We see this interconnectedness, for example, in the Roman Rite in a profound way during the Evening Mass of the Lord’s Supper when, in the Eucharistic prayer, we hear “On the day he was to suffer, for our salvation and the salvation of all, that is today, he took bread…” (emphasis added).

7. Matthew Crawford, “Anxiety and the modern compulsion to control the world,” Archedelia on Substack, April 6, 2025.

8. Hartmut Rosa, The Uncontrollability of the World, trans. James C. Wagner (Medford, MA: Polity Press, 2020), 2.

9. Rosa, The Uncontrollability of the World, 4. Speaking of aggression in relation to time, John Mark Comer tackles this particular issue in The Ruthless Elimination of Hurry (New York: Waterbrook, 2019).

10. This list is a summary of pgs. 15–17 in Rosa’s book.

11. As quoted in Rosa, The Uncontrollability of the World, 27.

12. Rosa, The Uncontrollability of the World, 30.

13. Rosa, The Uncontrollability of the World, 31.

14. Rosa, The Uncontrollability of the World, 31.

15. Rosa, The Uncontrollability of the World, 59.

16. Obviously, I am not speaking here about complicated, painful, and traumatic circumstances involving parental abuse and so forth. That said, I do think JD Vance’s The Hillbilly Elegy presents a compelling case for the self-acceptance that can only come about through accepting one’s parents as they are, despite traumas caused by them.

17. Even if the surprise comes from finding the gift inside of you, in your own genes, and those parts of your personality you share with your parents. Stephen Wilson Jr. captures this very surprise in his song.

18. John Paul II, “A Meditation on Givenness,” Communio 41 (Winter 2014): 873–74.