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The Echoes Podcast dives into real-world questions about community, faith, and human connection. Guided by hosts Marcus Goodyear and Camille Hall-Ortega, each episode explores personal journeys and societal challenges with inspiring guests—from faith leaders and poets to social advocates—whose stories shape our shared experiences. Through conversations with figures like Rev. Ben McBride, who moved his family to East Oakland’s “Kill Zone” to serve his community, or poet Olga Samples Davis, who reflects on the transformative power of language, we bring to light themes of belonging, resilience, and the meaning of home.
From the creators of Echoes Magazine by the H. E. Butt Foundation, The Echoes Podcast continues the magazine's legacy of storytelling that fosters understanding, empathy, and action.
When my older brother played high school football, we never missed a game. My dad was in the stands watching every play. It was the same for all of his kids. He watched my sister march in the band. He read my stories and help with my science fair projects.
Marcus Goodyear:And later, when I became a parent, he showed up for his grandkids attending my daughter's orchestra concerts and traveling with my son's robotics team. There's something sacred about the way my dad showed up for all of us, all of the time. But not everyone has a dad like mine. And of course, my dad was not perfect, far from it. And I've had other father figures in my life, some of those were very difficult.
Marcus Goodyear:Many of us have complicated relationships with our fathers, either actual fathers or father figures. Our dads might have been abusive or unstable or addicted or just simply human in ways that are hard for kids. Whatever kind of father you had, you did have one. Even if your father wasn't in your life, his absence was a kind of father. And if you're a father now, you probably know how hard it is to get it right.
Marcus Goodyear:Today, we're talking about fathers and masculinity and what it takes to begin repairing what's been broken. I'm Marcus Goodyear from the E. Cheebat Foundation, and this is the Echoes Podcast. Our guest today is Patton Dodd. Full disclosure, he is our boss and the executive producer of this podcast, but he's also my friend of more than fifteen years.
Marcus Goodyear:Patton's memoir, The Father You Get, just came out. It invites all of us to consider the fathers and the father figures in our lives. I'm here with my cohost, Camille Hall Ortega.
Camille Hall-Ortega:Hi, Patton. We're so glad to have you.
Marcus Goodyear:Thanks, y'all. So you open your book with a powerful story where you're in a bar and a stranger asks you, was your dad in the military? And you suddenly break down in tears. Can you take us back to that moment and what that question touched in you?
Patton Dodd:Yeah, those tears were surprising to me. It was really a story about encountering what is often an overused word these days, which is trauma. But yeah, we're throwing a goodbye party for a friend of ours and people are arriving and we're introducing ourselves to each other and someone asked me, Where are you from? Which is a normal question to ask. I talk about how I've always struggled to answer that question because we moved so much when I was a kid.
Patton Dodd:I went to six different schools, my first seven years of school, all over the country. And there's no easy way to say why. It wasn't because my dad was in the military. It wasn't because he was just changing jobs for better opportunities. It was because he was an addict, an alcoholic, and he kept burning bridges and running from things, we had to run with him.
Patton Dodd:So I did not feel like, even though I had a very troubled childhood, I haven't, through a lot of my adulthood, felt like I was really troubled by it. I felt like I had kind of put it in the past. And for some reason that night, talking to a stranger, he kept pressing me on, Why did you guys move so much? And at some point I decided to say, Well, it was because my dad was a mess, and when I did, I burst into tears. And Wow.
Patton Dodd:And it was really awkward and embarrassing, and I gathered myself and kind of avoided that guy the rest of the night. But yeah, it was a bit of a wake up call. I thought, I probably need to address this at some point. And eventually, started doing that by writing this book.
Camille Hall-Ortega:You say that that was kind of a wake up call for you and that you needed to address what was being brought up there. You started to write this book. What other things did you do to sort of start to address what was was being triggered there?
Patton Dodd:I mean, yeah, in some ways, like, you know, I it's not like I had never thought about it before. I had lost my mom the year before as well. There was a lot of kind of family grief. My sister and I had been processing for a long time. She was kind of a confidant and just fellow traveler with me through our family issues.
Patton Dodd:She's five years older than me. We're very close. We would talk about these things a lot. Therapy, spiritual direction, good friends. People who knew me knew these things were in my life, but honestly, I was avoiding digging deep, especially into who my dad was, why he was the way he was, what he had wrought in our family.
Patton Dodd:I thought I had thought about it, but that night was one of many indications I was getting that I had a lot more work to do to kind of understand my own story, understand the story of the family that I had come from.
Marcus Goodyear:In the book you talk about this idea of father hunger. Is that something that came to you through the process of the book or is that something you've been aware of for some time? Sort of looking for father figures?
Patton Dodd:It's something I would not have admitted that I had. Like this, in this book I'm sort of admitting finally that I have been hungry for a father figure, for father figures. I've been seeking them my whole life. I've been making them my whole life. But I would not have been able to admit that to you kind of plainly the way that I am now until just a year or two ago.
Patton Dodd:I kind of came to terms with that in the process of working on this. And now I actually, yeah, I think a lot of people have, sort of obviously a lot of people have father hunger. We're kind of born with it. We are wired for parenting. We're wired for nurturing, all of us.
Patton Dodd:We're wired for mothering and fathering. And there's a theological way of talking about that. There's also a scientific way of talking about that. I learned a lot from the evolutionary anthropologist Anna Machen at Oxford University, who has shown that we, like the primates, part of the reason the species survived is that parents stuck around with their kids, especially dads, to provide and to gather. And there's evidence of those small family units sticking together hundreds of thousands of years ago.
Patton Dodd:And so it's in our brainstems. Like we are literally wired for nurturing.
Camille Hall-Ortega:So important. You talked a little bit there about needing to kind of go back and understand your story. Why do you think it's important to kind of know story in order to or do you think it's important to know story in order to sort of move forward?
Patton Dodd:I think story making is a way of understanding, right? Our lives don't exist to us as stories in the way that we experience them day in and day out, but when we reflect on them, I guess I would say it be useful to turn your life into a story, to think about what was the origin, who were the major characters and influences, what's the rising action of my life, what are the climatic moments. And for me, story making about my father meant that I had to think a lot about who he was. Didn't know much about my dad. My dad raised me.
Patton Dodd:He was in our home. He was a major character in a way, but he was pretty vacant. He was an alcoholic. He was passed out most every night of my life, and he just wasn't present. We didn't interact that much.
Patton Dodd:Marcus talked about his dad showing up for stuff. That is not my story. My dad did not show up for things. Was there, but I say in the book he was present but absent our whole entire I
Marcus Goodyear:love the idea of tying your I'm hearing identity language here that you're saying in order to understand yourself and your identity, you wanted to understand your father and where you came from and shape a story with intentionality. On the one hand, that seems really hopeful because it means we can shape ourselves into new stories and we're not trapped by the patterns that come before us. I'm curious, were you that intentional about it or?
Patton Dodd:You know, I don't think so. I do not like who my father was. In fact, I tried to break up with He died in 2007. And the year before he died, through the advice of a therapist, I kind of broke up with him and told him, There's no more contact between us. There's been too much damage, too much pain.
Patton Dodd:I don't trust you. I don't trust you to interact with your grandkids. At that time, there was two grandkids on my side. So I had to cut him off. When he died, it was a relief to me.
Patton Dodd:And it's hard, just a hard truth. It was a relief to have him gone. So the horror to me, as I got older and older, was to find that I did resemble this man who I didn't like there. And he's in me, you know? I have some of his traits.
Patton Dodd:Some of it's I look a little bit like him. I'm 50. I think I look a little bit like my dad when he was 50. And I have some tics, some physical and maybe verbal tics that are like him, right? Just, we come from our parents, right?
Patton Dodd:There's just no way And around I tried to avoid that truth for a long time, but eventually thought, you know, there's no shaking this off. I am Bill Dodd's son, and I need to take a close look at that and understand better who he was so that I can understand myself.
Camille Hall-Ortega:Do you think that that's something that could be useful to everyone? And if so, what kind of other ways would that look like? Obviously, not everyone's a writer that's gonna kind of go back and tell those stories in those ways. What other ways can you imagine people sort of beginning to unpack the stories of their fathers or parenting that shaped them or just the history that shaped them?
Patton Dodd:Sure. I mean, you had a happy, vibrant childhood like Marcus Goodyear described, or one like mine, or anywhere in between, we all do have pain, right, that we have to deal with. We all have things that are mysterious to us about how we were formed. And I absolutely think that anyone and everyone should, could do the work of reflecting on how you were formed. What were the influences that made you into who you are?
Patton Dodd:And yeah, it does not have to look like writing a book. Lord knows. It can look like journaling. I think the main thing it needs to look like is talking, talking to your other loved ones, to someone that you One of the things that I arrive at, and as I thought so much about my father, one of the things that pains me for him is that he just never did that. He would not share anything about himself with anyone.
Patton Dodd:His wife of almost forty years did not really know much about him at all. And it would have done him a lot of good to talk about himself with her, with us, with a pastor, with a therapist, with one of the many people in Alcoholics Anonymous that he saw, or rehab that he saw over the years, I just get the sense that he never could quite work up the courage, I guess, to talk about who he was and the things that he hated about himself, the things he hated about his And I wish he would have had that kind of courage or temerity, because I think it could have brought some healing into his life. And so yeah, I think we all need some version of that, some version of truth telling about who we are.
Camille Hall-Ortega:Really good. I'm just thinking about how that's true in so many of our relationships and that we just see that play out, that as we learn more about the people in our lives and where they come from and their standpoint, it elucidates things that can be really valuable. And that kinda sounds simplistic, but but I just think about even in your friendships, which, you know, are low often lower stakes than a father daughter or father son relationship. Sure. Just learning about where someone came from can help us to relate to them in more healthy ways.
Camille Hall-Ortega:Even if you're like, okay. This doesn't excuse this bad behavior that I'm seeing, or this doesn't excuse, you know, whatever I might be having a problem with, but it's allowing me to do some sense making that goes,
Marcus Goodyear:oh, that
Camille Hall-Ortega:tracks a little bit, where you're going, oh, okay. Now I understand a little bit more about you. And in some way, that can help me relate to you in a in a more healthy way or love you better.
Patton Dodd:A 100%. There's always more going on in your interactions with people. They are bringing things with them to their interactions with you that they may not have even reflected on, but there is a story kind of trailing behind them that they're living through. And that, especially if you're in conflict with them, would do you both a lot of good to be curious about that context. What else are they bringing to bear in their everyday?
Patton Dodd:Yeah, I think we could all do to bring some more curiosity about each other.
Marcus Goodyear:Yes. And you have discovered some of those stories for us. So I want to highlight one and ask you about it and kind of I don't know if I'm like putting you on the couch here or what, but there's a scene in your book where your dad asks you for money. You've just I think it's one of your first jobs, maybe your first job. Don't remember exactly.
Marcus Goodyear:No, it is your first paycheck. That's right.
Patton Dodd:Yeah. First paycheck. Chick fil A. Chick fil A money. Yes.
Patton Dodd:Oh, gosh.
Marcus Goodyear:All right. Waffle fries. All right. So you already know what he's asking the money for.
Patton Dodd:Yeah.
Marcus Goodyear:And you kind of don't want to admit it to yourself. And I am curious for me as a man, money and making a wage, all of that stuff is tied into it. And so here's your dad sort of failing in this deep way and imposing on you. And I am really curious, how did that experience and experiences like it shape your understanding of fatherhood and manhood and responsibility and all of the ways we expect men to be breadwinners in our culture, for better or worse. It's just kind of the expectation.
Patton Dodd:Yeah. At one point I was tempted on writing this book just about money, just about my dad. Oh, wow. And what I learned about money. That would have been a very focused way into it.
Patton Dodd:And I wrote a lot about this that didn't make it into the book. And so I'm glad you asked this question. I I was all of 14, I think. Yeah, I think I was 14, 15 when this first interaction with my father happened. You know, I had no leverage.
Patton Dodd:And so I don't know. It's like, this is a long story. My father's relationship with money, how money worked in our home, we were at the edge of poverty much of my childhood. He spent everything that he got as soon as he could, and a lot of it went to his addictions. And we subsisted on help from churches and the government and other family a lot to make ends meet, to stay housed, to have food and clothes.
Patton Dodd:And unfortunately, I carried my father's money lessons with me a long time. I probably still do. Even though I knew that his relationship with money was broken, even when you know that they're broken, they can be hard not to repeat. And so, you know, my dad also, when I first began and I got out of college and began to got my first job, I would turn to him for, I mean, stupidly, turn to him for financial advice about buying a home and paying down my student loans and how to handle debt. I mean, who else was I going turn?
Marcus Goodyear:He's your dad. I mean, that's totally natural that you would do that.
Patton Dodd:Yeah, exactly. But it tripped me up for a long time. And, you know, all I can say is that, and I have definitely done this imperfectly in my own family with my own children, but all I can do is, and I remain imperfect with money, but one sort of step of progress that I'm trying to take is to talk about it. Talk about it with my kids, to be transparent about it, to be specific about dollar amounts, salary amounts, spending, and all that sort of thing.
Camille Hall-Ortega:And there's a part of your book where you describe a poem written by your father that your mother had printed and framed, and then she would hang it in all the houses that you guys would be in. And I would just love to hear more about that. You describe it. You say it's a poem, but really it's a prayer.
Patton Dodd:Lord, make me a man.
Camille Hall-Ortega:Lord, make me a man. I'm just gonna read a couple lines here. O Lord, make me a man one of integrity, love, and devotion. O Lord, make me a man who yearns for the highest determined to offset mediocrity. And it goes on in in that fashion, and I I can totally hear it as a prayer like you describe it.
Camille Hall-Ortega:Can you talk to us more about what this poem meant as you saw it constantly as a presence in your homes, but also as you saw a pretty sharp juxtaposition of what you were experiencing with your father.
Patton Dodd:Yeah. It was like this icon in our house. As I said, we move all the time, and it was always put it was always put on the wall somewhere. Like it was often in a prominent place, like near the phone when we used to hang our phones on the wall. So I passed by this Lord Make Me a Man poem written by my father probably in his mid to late 20s.
Patton Dodd:It was in calligraphy on pretty paper in a kind of a plain black frame, and it's just this, the image of it is just part of the images of my childhood. And it wasn't until many years later that I realized just how ironic it was. My dad never talked to me about how to become a man or the values of being a man. He certainly didn't model them. But as I began to reflect on him when I first started working on this book, I went and I realized that poem must be somewhere, and I went and found it.
Patton Dodd:And in reading it and rereading it, I realized there was a moment for this guy who drank his way through life and eventually developed a drug addiction, carried a ton of debt, was a cheat and a liar. But there was a moment for this guy where he gathered his thoughts and he sat down and he wrote out these feelings and hopes in his heart and in poignant language. And it clearly touched my mother, who was a young woman in a very troubled marriage. I mean, she knew from her honeymoon that she had made a mistake marrying this guy. But she was touched enough and probably also maybe aspirational enough to sort of maybe it'll hold him to account if I remind him he said these things and prayed these things instead of put it on our wall.
Patton Dodd:And I don't know, Camille, I guess it's just the tension between we all have a version of this really, who we aspire to be and who we really are.
Marcus Goodyear:As I was reading your book, you talked about, you know, Lord, make me a man. And I found myself really reflecting on manhood, on masculinity. And that may be the moment that we're in is part of why my mind went there. Of course, I also reflected on my own father and my own actions as a father, but I was especially struck by your descriptions of broken masculinity. And it made me think about the ways in which it feels like masculinity is broken in our culture.
Marcus Goodyear:And I wonder, could you just talk about that a little bit? What are some ways in which you are repairing masculinity in yourself and trying to live into that poem that your mom put on the wall for your dad? Maybe she put it on the wall for you.
Patton Dodd:Well, one thing I'll say is that I've always been turned off by the culture of masculinity. Like, you know, I was raised in a world where movies like Braveheart and Gladiator were really important, not only beloved, but just important depictions of what it meant to be a man, and not for me. I can't stand that stuff. Don't feel drawn to it and never have. And not because I don't like a lot of regular guy stuff.
Patton Dodd:I'm really into sports. I'm really into athletics. I'm not super athletic, but I do a lot of athletic stuff. And it's not that. It's more about I feel like there's two kind of dimensions of masculinity culture that I think are problematic.
Patton Dodd:One of Trying to keep it simple, but I would say they're isolation and performance. You know, masculinity culture is a lot about singular identity, one person's kind of formation and way of being, individual strength, individual triumph, heroism, leadership, but leadership where you're at the very top of the pyramid with everyone else below you or behind you. So you're essentially we idealize, yeah, individuality and really being alone, of being a leader with followers, a king, you know? And then performance. Is so much about masculinity culture.
Patton Dodd:It's about appearance. It's about showmanship. It's about, yeah, physique and bluster. Yeah, bravado. Bravado, yes, exactly.
Patton Dodd:Yeah. So, yeah, I mean, both of those things are ultimately cheap and illusory and not real goods. And so the men that I have always valued the most that ended up shaping me are men who, now they may be masculine, physically speaking they may or may not be, but they've all had in common really is that they live in a network, that they're connected to other people. They're not alone, and they're not drawn to performance and microphones and stages as much as they are to dinner tables and living room couches and barstools. Those are the men that I think I've benefited the most from, men who live in a network, men who are themselves in the variety of environments they find themselves in.
Camille Hall-Ortega:Really good. What you said about isolation and individualism is making me think about our conversation with Doctor. Warren Kinghorn on a previous episode and about a piece, which we'll put it in the show notes, I believe it's in the times, but that talked about this loneliness epidemic Mhmm. And how it is prolific, but even more specifically for boys and men, and how there's this difficulty for many young adult men and adolescents to name three close friends or to name people that they can count on that are not family. And if we're connecting that with some of the expectations of masculinity, we can see how that sort of warped definition of masculinity could be problematic.
Camille Hall-Ortega:So I think that's huge and really important.
Patton Dodd:Yeah, maybe the day that I learned one of the most important things about my father, I mean, knew this already, but the day that I kind of had the goods in some ways in who he was was the day of his funeral, to which no one came. No one showed up for him. Mean, we were there as his family. My sister had some friends come in support of her, but no one who knew my father as a friend, a pastor, pastor, a colleague showed up for him. That was
Marcus Goodyear:Did still they know? Did they know he had died?
Patton Dodd:Some family knew, yeah, for sure. There were no friends really to reach out to. I mean, literally zero. I met one of his friends through the reporting on this book and I ended up talking with an old drinking buddy of his who was a sweet man who gave me a lot of stories to share that are in the book. But yeah, for the most part, my dad's last, I don't know, a couple of decades, three decades, he had no one.
Patton Dodd:That's the thing about isolation and the kind of leadership that I was bemoaning a moment ago. Ultimately, you're not in network, if you're not in community, yeah, it's all very fragile and it can end. Kind of the way that it did for my father. He wasn't a leader, but he had the of the same problem of being so isolated and I think it was his ruin.
Marcus Goodyear:So the book is actually a delightful read. We're making it sound kind of heavy.
Patton Dodd:Yeah, we are.
Marcus Goodyear:So I want to make sure people know that this is a it's really engaging and exciting in some ways and thoughtful. And I'd love to hear you share, why do you think people should read this?
Patton Dodd:I appreciate you pointing that out, Marcus. I wrote a pretty dark, reflective and pretty, but kind of dark somber book. And then I was like, I don't want to publish this. This is really sad. And I wanted it to be funny and I wanted it to be a bit of a page turner.
Patton Dodd:So I revised it. Revised it, and everyone can be the judge of whether I did that well or not. I
Camille Hall-Ortega:That's good stuff.
Patton Dodd:That was my intent is to It is a
Marcus Goodyear:page turner. Yeah. I read it in two sittings, which is really unusual for me.
Patton Dodd:Two or three sittings is what I kept saying to myself. I want this to be able to be read in two or three sittings. And so I feel like it was important, you know, at some point, it's a family story. It's not just about a destructive father. About, really it begins with my own family, which is, I'm grateful to say, a delightful family.
Patton Dodd:Mean, family has problems, and we certainly do too. But I love my kids, and they love me, and I know that. And so that's a place of joy I can write out of. And so I sort of, you know, was able to sort of start there and end there, the gift of my own becoming inside of my marriage and my relationship with my own children. And that allowed me to bring in, yeah, a lot of delight and humor.
Patton Dodd:They make fun of me all the time. And so all the best jokes in the book are about me from them.
Camille Hall-Ortega:Patton, I really enjoyed the book. And what I thought about when I was reading this book was some of the differences between how my upbringing and my father and how he was very present and what characteristics I see of him in myself. My dad is a pastor, and he has been for most of my life since I was nine years old. And I see so much of what that brings to a family in myself. He's a communicator.
Camille Hall-Ortega:I'm passionate about communication. He's a speaker. I enjoy speaking. And he taught us a lot of lessons, obviously, about faith, but a lot of life lessons. And what I think about that I kind of mentioned earlier is just about relationship to other people and how when that pivotal of a relationship is very different from the one you experienced, what does that mean in relating to those folks?
Camille Hall-Ortega:And even for me, even with my husband, my husband did not grow up with his biological father. He grew up not knowing his biological father. He knew who he was, but he didn't have a relationship with him. And he has met him, but there's no interaction. There's no relationship whatsoever.
Camille Hall-Ortega:He grew up later with a stepfather, and then with a lot of father figures. And my husband, Mike, talks about how he had grew up with a wonderful mom that was very present and fulfilled a lot of things for him. And that throughout his life, he would often use the term of affection with other women, older women in his life as mom. His friends' moms, he would say mom, mom, but he would never call a man dad because it was this very heavy weighted thing for him of that's a different animal, right? That's a different thing.
Camille Hall-Ortega:And so it was very meaningful for me when he became close with my family and, spent time and then we got married and that enmeshing to hear him start to call my dad dad. He just noted for me how meaningful that was. And so I just think about the fact that this book really is for everyone, and I don't say that lightly, that it's such a great read, and it really does produce this reflection that is so valuable in just a number of ways. I think a lot about some of the ways you describe fatherhood and some of the things that feel like responsibility for fatherhood. I often was reading them as leader because you and I was seeing some overlap even with things like a father needs to know how to say, I don't know.
Camille Hall-Ortega:And we heard that same line from a guest, Todd Bolsinger, about leaders, about a leader needs to know how to how to be able to say, I don't know if you don't know the answer. How do you think fatherhood and this idea of head of household overlaps with just this sort of general category of leader?
Patton Dodd:Yeah. Maybe a little bit like your husband. I've struggled with the category of father a lot throughout my life for reasons described. And so a dad or a husband being a leader, which is something that you hear a lot about, especially in evangelical circles, is something that I've always kind of resisted, to be honest. Leadership can come from so many sources.
Patton Dodd:Leadership is wisdom and direction, and it can come certainly from fathers. It can come from mothers. It can come from children. That's part of what happens in the stories that I tell in this book. My children sometimes are leading me to places that I need to go.
Patton Dodd:I think that sometimes too much emphasis can be placed on individual people, or types of people like fathers needing to take up the mantle of leadership. I think the reality is that we all need leadership and we all can lead. In a family, yeah.
Marcus Goodyear:Underneath the answers to several of these questions, I've been thinking about, Lady Lodge has this retreat every, maybe not every January, but often in January, the men's retreat. And so these topics come up there a lot and people are thinking about what does it mean to be a man, to think about myself as a father, especially in relationship to God, especially in relationship to some of the ways church leadership gets talked about and some of the ways that male leadership gets talked about in the church. And so I'd like to bring another voice into this conversation. This is Father Thomas McKenzie. He was an Episcopal priest.
Marcus Goodyear:He has since died, but in 2013 he was speaking at a Lady Lodge men's retreat about the strangeness of calling God Father.
Father McKenzie:There's something really weird about a God who calls Himself Father. And the thing that's weird about that is that fathers are all over the map. There are churches in this country now where they don't even like to use the word Father. Know, are people who like they they say the lord's prayer. It's like our creator, you know, or mother father or something.
Father McKenzie:Like, I wouldn't do that personally. It's not what what I want to do but it makes sense to me and the reason it makes sense is because we come like fatherhood is so screwed up and it's not just in this country today, it's always been screwed up. It's weird. The relationship between fathers and their children and the it's weird that we often see god in terms of who our father is. Like, that's the way we we often see god.
Father McKenzie:So, to this day, I would say that when I see god, he sometimes is there for me and sometimes isn't. Where did I get that from? Got that from dad and so it's just so bizarre that God would dare to use that word for himself. I'm your father.
Patton Dodd:Does it
Marcus Goodyear:seem bizarre to you, Patton? What do
Patton Dodd:you It totally does. I'm actually glad he calls it bizarre, because it's so normative in the Christian world worldwide to call God Father. I mean, it's an old tradition. Jesus did it. He may have invented it, calling God our Father.
Patton Dodd:There's not a lot of references to God as a Father in the Jewish scriptures, in the scriptures that Jesus read. God is a Messiah, maybe, a King. He is I am. He is referred to in all kinds of ways. He's also referred to as a mother at times.
Patton Dodd:God our Father is really a Christian tradition that I think, again, Jesus really catalyzed and modeled and invited us certainly to see God in that way. And so I feel like it has become, though, so familiar and natural and sort of obvious to think of God in that way. And I appreciate that this excerpt from Thomas McKenzie invites us to make it weird again, like to defamiliarize the concept of God as Father. One of the things that I struggled with when I was a new Christian, there was a lot of pressure I felt like put on me to imagine God as the Father, and I really resisted it for the reasons that Mackenzie is describing. I didn't want to think about God that way.
Patton Dodd:I had not yet had a good experience of an older man really in my life, and so that was not a natural move for me to make. That invitation didn't sit right with me. I liked thinking of God as a savior, as a comforter, as a friend. But Father was tough. I do want to say that, like, I don't think it's, he says God calls himself Father.
Patton Dodd:I don't know that God is always the one who is doing the naming of himself as Father. It's not like he's Darth Vader saying, Luke, I am your father. I don't think that's in the scriptures. I think, again, I think Jesus does it. I think Paul does it.
Patton Dodd:I think we have done it within the tradition of Christianity. But I know that we have to receive that as a mandate from God to think of Him that way.
Marcus Goodyear:Interesting.
Camille Hall-Ortega:This clip was very interesting to me, especially when I was first hearing it, because I just thought that for me, God's word is really clear that God is not just a father. Right? He is the perfect father. And I think that's why it's not hard for me to get there that when I think of our human flesh fathers, they are human and not God. And so for me, of course, they would not be perfect.
Camille Hall-Ortega:There would be some difficulty imagining how can God be father? Because mine is sometimes absent or mine was this way or mine hurt my feelings. And you go, well, is making it really clear that he's not a father here. He's that all knowing present father, that he is if God is love, that I can imagine us going in a place going like, well, okay. Well, I've experienced love in this really warped way.
Camille Hall-Ortega:Isn't it so bizarre that God's saying he's love? Like, let me tell you about this toxic love situation I've seen. It's like, well, no, no, he's perfect love. He's not just love. He's the way it should be.
Camille Hall-Ortega:And so for me, clip was really interesting because I thought it's not hard for me to get there. God is called a lot of names in the Bible that we know. He's a lot of the Elohim, Emmanuel, Abba, Father. And so it's saying this is how it should be. And even if we don't experience it that way, in our human nature, it's because of exactly that.
Camille Hall-Ortega:It's human nature. It's flawed.
Patton Dodd:Well, I think what I appreciate about this conversation and what Mackenzie is saying is that it's just the acknowledgment that it's that it for some of us, no matter sort of no matter what the scriptures say, it can be hard to receive that because of what we've experienced. Think the best story Jesus tells is the story about the father who welcomes his wayward son back. And what's so moving about that story isn't just the open arms, it's the running down the road to the son who's returning home after having ruined everything. And even though this person has demolished me and my name and all my investments in him, when I see him appearing on the horizon, like I'm going after him. And if that's the image of God as a father that we're meant to kind of cultivate, yeah, it's really beautiful.
Patton Dodd:And even if it's hard to imagine that it's true or to have faith in, it's a really beautiful idea that can draw us in.
Marcus Goodyear:For me, part of what he's getting at is God is huge. This is what I hear underneath what Mackenzie's saying. And so any way in which we talk about God or any image that we bring to understand God is always by just sheer reality going to be an analogy. Either God is bigger than anything we can describe and can't fit into any one bucket or in my opinion, I'm just really not interested. And so when we talk about God as Father, that is analogy.
Marcus Goodyear:God is like a father in certain kinds of ways that are helpful. But then he says like, I understand why they're trying to resist these analogies. These are not the only analogies we have for God. We don't have get trapped in them like you were saying, Patton. This may be more about the church's language about God, the New Testament's language about God, than God's language about himself.
Camille Hall-Ortega:Really good. Can you talk more about that and just kind of the journey that you experienced and what that journey taught you and what you wanted to hand to your kids?
Patton Dodd:Sure, yeah. My mother is the reason I survived my father and she was the, yeah, she was the shelter from the storm. And we always experienced her as calm and as strong and as consistent. And later in my life though, I was really troubled over choices that she had made to stay, to stay in a relationship that was really abusive and damaging. And I have a lot of questions about why she felt like she had to do that, why she felt like she couldn't leave, she felt like she didn't have any options to leave.
Patton Dodd:I meant to write a section on Father God that was really about kind of what we've been talking about, the history of this idea of where it comes from, kind of the intellectual history of God the Father. And instead, I ended up just reflecting a lot on how I think about God and my own troubled and tricky relationship with faith over the years, but the reason it has persisted as much as it has is because of my mom. Mom just was, again, consistent and modeling it. And I started to look into her own life and who she was, and I started to read her Bible, which is this Bible full of information about her and about our lives in the margins and in her underlinings and in things that she wrote, notes that she wrote. And her way of being, I don't know, I guess I would say just a person of prayer.
Patton Dodd:Like prayer was really her lifeblood and her breath. And I think her faith was problematic because I think she had some bad ideas that kept her stuck in a situation that she probably should have left, and so I wrestle with the reality of that, but I also think her faith helped her get through. She was married to a troubled guy for forty years until she finally kind of worked up the courage to walk out the door.
Marcus Goodyear:So she did ultimately leave them?
Patton Dodd:She did ultimately
Marcus Goodyear:Yeah, that's important to say I think.
Patton Dodd:Oh, absolutely, yeah. And it was a great cost. What I would say though is that I have had a tricky relationship with Faith my whole kind of life through. It doesn't come natural to me. But the faith that I do have is due to my mother and the model that she created in our home.
Marcus Goodyear:So hearing you talk, Patton, I can hear you as you're telling the story, like it'll get dark and then you'll turn it. You'll shape that story into a story of hope. You'll bring the hope back into it. And I would love to hear just like, where are you seeing healing in your family? How are you passing that healing on to your kids, your son Maybe especially just a glimpse of it.
Patton Dodd:That's a beautiful question. Yeah, I mean, see it all over the place. I see it in the fact that I have a family, that I have a marriage to a woman that I love very dearly. We have three kids, and we enjoy one another a great deal. My kids and I can talk about just about anything, I think.
Patton Dodd:I mean, sometimes you learn later on that there were things you weren't talking about a few years before. But ultimately, I think we have the context for relationships where we can really know each other and be known within our family. And my wife and I have that too. Then to me, there's a lot I could say here, Marcus, but probably the most pointed answer to your question is that one. I think that we have somehow ended up having a family where, yeah, you can know each other and you can be known.
Patton Dodd:There was a lot of hidden things in my family of origin, as I think there are in a lot of families. In the family that I'm a part of now, yeah, there's a lot of truth telling, I think, and honest conversation. Doesn't all come out at once. Sometimes it trickles out over time. But ultimately, I think we have created a place of emotional safety for each other, and I'm really grateful for that.
Camille Hall-Ortega:And I have about a million more questions, actually. I think that's a good place to end it on this idea of hope. We're so grateful for your time. Yes.
Patton Dodd:Thank you guys. This has been wonderful to talk to you about this. Thank you.
Marcus Goodyear:I also think we should point out that Patton, we had to twist his arm to do this. That he is here as a bit of a reluctant person. Not reluctant, but he is here at our request. We wanted to have this conversation with him. We love Patton.
Marcus Goodyear:Yes. And we love this book. And we really, we think a lot of other people should too.
Camille Hall-Ortega:Oh yeah, wait, let's not close without saying, when does the book come out, Patton? Yes.
Marcus Goodyear:Tell us,
Camille Hall-Ortega:where can we get this book and when does it come out? Please, wait a minute here. Yeah.
Patton Dodd:Yeah. It's available now. It's been available since September 23. And and, yeah, you can pick it up at your local bookstore, at any of the outlets, and audible.com, your library, from a friend who gives it to you for free, whatever. Just read the father you get.
Camille Hall-Ortega:Yes. Thanks again, Patton. We appreciate it.
Patton Dodd:Yeah. Thanks, Paul. Thanks very much.
Marcus Goodyear:The Echoes podcast is written and produced by Camille Hall Lartega, Rob Stennett, and me, Marcus Goodyear. It's edited by Rob Stennett and Kim Stone. Our executive producers are David Rogers and Patton Dodd. And of course, today, Patton Dodd was also our guest. So thanks for that, Patton.
Marcus Goodyear:Patton subscribes to Echoes Magazine, and you can too because it's free. Go to echoesmagazine.org to subscribe, and you'll receive a beautiful print magazine each quarter. And did we mention that it's free? It really is. You can find a link in our show notes.
Marcus Goodyear:The Echoes podcast and Echoes magazine are both productions of the HE Butt Foundation. You can learn more about our vision and mission at hebfdn.org.