This fall marks the 20th anniversary of the Million Man March on Washington, D.C., when Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan called on African-American men to come together to promote family values and strengthen black families. But any father, even those not aligned with the politics of a Louis Farrakhan, would do well to read Prodigal Father Wayward Son: A Path to Reconciliation, a new book co-written by Sam Keen and his son Gifford. The book finds a fresh way to address the pain of broken bonds between fathers and sons, which is the central crisis driving most of the social and cultural problems in the Western world. Fathers are like the alternator in a car; when they break down, the entire family system collapses. And in the last five decades the alternator has broken down.
Prodigal Father Wayward Son is a series of exchanges between father and son Sam and Gifford Keen. The men recall family history, including many of the events and episodes that mark the ruptures and highlights of their relationship. The book is a model for the kind of healing exercise many men and their sons would benefit from replicating. Having both parties to an experience write their own version of events requires patience and deliberation; it’s a meditative alternative to the hair-trigger explosions that are a sign of broken trust.
The father, Sam Keen, is a writer (Fire in the Belly: On Being a Man) and lecturer who is best known as an enthusiast of the men’s movement of the 1990s, which sought to rediscover masculinity through myth, ritual, and literature. Sam Keen was raised in a strict Calvinist household in Tennessee, and after going to school at both Harvard and Princeton he became a popular college theology professor at a seminary in St Louis. Keen got married and had two children, son Gifford and daughter Lael. In the late 1960s Keen did something that would devastate his family and permanently damage his relationship with Gifford: He abandoned Presbyterianism to go to California and explore the “human potential movement” that was flowering at the time. Keen left his family to pursue an affair with a woman he met in Big Sur, California, which at the time was ground zero for hippies.
Gifford Keen did what most boys do when their fathers reject and abandon them: He got into drugs, almost flunked out of school, and tried to lose himself in the popular culture of his youth. It’s difficult to overemphasize the spiritual and psychological power that fathers have over their sons, or the depth of the rage that occurs when a son is abandoned by his father. Validation from a father offers sons a sense of self-respect that drugs, therapy, and women can never replicate. Sons will do anything to impress their fathers. When they don’t get that respect, they often wind up with anger issues and even in prison. Simply put, lost, absent, and uncaring fathers account for a large share of the social pathology in Western society.
When he was in his early twenties, Gifford Keen spent several years building a cabin from scratch on a piece of land his father owned in northern Washington state. With no experience as a builder he endured hunger, floods, and self-doubt just to erect a structure that he would quickly abandon. He had been driven by the need for approval from his father.
Suffering from a guilty conscience, Sam Keen eventually tried to repair his relationship with his children. Gifford went on to work in the biotech industry and made a lot of money. Still, the Keen men could not fully reconcile. With his 1992 bestseller Fire in the Belly: On Being a Man, Sam Keen became known as a leader of the men’s movement. Men like Keen and poet Robert Bly offered far-ranging criticisms of the path to manhood in contemporary society, arguing that technology had driven men far from home to work, and that politics (and early iterations of political correctness) had made men, in Bly’s phrase, “unable to lift their swords.” Feminism, often offered as a solution, simply wasn’t effective in harnessing wild young male energy.
Yet even while preaching the virtues of manhood, Keen never repaired the breach with his own son. Gifford would watch his father mesmerize an audience at sold-out lectures, amazed that his father could connect with each person individually but could not give the same kind of attention to him. The struggle between the two men eventually came to a head during an argument outside a restaurant. Attempting reconciliation, Sam and Gif both wrote accounts of their personal histories and how those histories might have affected the other. To their credit, both men write with absolute honesty. Sam Keen does not excuse his bad behavior. Gifford admits to his own mistakes, although he is clearly the victim of his father’s narcissism. The very act of writing these things has a healing affect: What son would not be moved by an account of how his father decided on what to name him, for example?
Prodigal Father Wayward Son is a wise and essential book. Reading it may not repair every rupture caused by absent fathers, but it might bring solace to men suffering from the pain of absent fathers, and give those fathers the courage to admit where they went wrong.
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