Father's Day was inaugurated in the United States in the early 20th century to complement Mother's Day in celebrating fatherhood and male parenting Sonora Dodd was the driving force behind its establishment.
She initiated its celebration in Spokane, Washington at the YMCA in 1910. Having been born in Arkansas, Sonora Smart Doddborn in Arkansas chose June 19, 1910, even though initially she wanted it celebrated June 5, the date of his birth.
Her father, Civil War veteran William Jackson Smart, raised six children as a single parent. After hearing a sermon about Jarvis' Mother's Day in 1909, she told her pastor that fathers should have a similar holiday honoring them. The pastors did not have enough time to prepare their sermons, and the celebration was deferred to the third Sunday of June.
After a short hiatus from promoting the day while she matriculated as a student at the Art Institute of Chicago, Dodd returned to Spokane in the 1930s and started promoting the celebration again. Since 1938 she had the help of the Father's Day Council, founded by the New York Associated Men's Wear Retailers to consolidate and systematize the commercial promotion.
Americans resisted the holiday during a few decades, perceiving it as just an attempt by merchants to replicate the commercial success of Mother's Day, and newspapers frequently featured cynical and sarcastic attacks and jokes. But the trade groups did not give up: they kept promoting it and even incorporated the jokes into their adverts, and they eventually succeeded.
By the mid 1980s the Father's Council wrote that "(...) [Father's Day] has become a 'Second Christmas' for all the men's gift-oriented industries."
In 1957, Maine Senator Margaret Chase Smith wrote a proposal accusing Congress of ignoring fathers for 40 years while honoring mothers, thus "[singling] out just one of our two parents". In 1966, President Lyndon B. Johnson issued the first presidential proclamation honoring fathers, designating the third Sunday in June as Father's Day. Six years later, the day was made a permanent national holiday when President Richard Nixon signed it into law in 1972.
Several churches, ironically all Methodists, made early attempts to promote and establish Father’s Day. "Father's Day" service was held on July 5, 1908, in Fairmont, West Virginia, in the Williams Memorial Methodist Episcopal Church South, now known as Central United Methodist Church. Grace Golden Clayton was mourning the loss of her father when, on December 1907, the Monongah Mining Disaster in nearby Monongah killed 361 men, 250 of them fathers, leaving around a thousand fatherless children. Clayton suggested her pastor Robert Thomas Webb to honor all those fathers. Clayton chose the Sunday nearest to the birthday of her father, Methodist minister Fletcher Golden.
In 1912, there was a Father's Day celebration in Vancouver, Washington, suggested by Methodist pastor J. J. Berringer of the Irvington Methodist Church. They believed mistakenly that they had been the first to celebrate such a day. They followed a 1911 suggestion by the Portland Oregonian.
God and God’s love is ultimately illustrated by Jesus in the story of a father (representing God), whose wayward son (lost humanity) is fully and unconditionally embraced, after the son “comes to himself,” realizes that all he lacks or needs is with his father (Gospel of St. Luke 15:4-32). We read of God’s unconditional love as a father in verse 20ff, “But while he was still a long way off, his father saw him and was moved with pity, tenderness; and he ran and embraced him and kissed him.”
As we celebrate Father’s Day, let us be reminded that the essence of the Gospel of Jesus Christ is that God has sought us out, in Christ, while we were “still a long way off.” Secondly that God is love. Divine love is responsive to us in whatever circumstance of birth and life we find ourselves in.
Jesus said, “All who come to me, I will in no way reject (Gospel of St. John 6:37).” God is moved by our human condition, no matter what and whatever it is. God has nothing but compassion for us and longs to embrace us and be intimate with us. “Behold I stand at the door and knock, if anyone hears, listens, gives heed to my voice and opens the door, I will come in to him and will eat with him, and he/she with Me (The Book of Revelation 3:20)."
Happy Father’s Day!
