In the garden, in the cool of the day, God had the habit of visiting Adam and Eve. God didn’t live there, it was the couple’s home. God dropped in, every day. (In another real sense, God is everywhere – but the details of the biblical narrative are important and tell us real things about God.).

So Fathers seek out their children each day. It’s what makes a father a father. Fathers find their children each new day and give gifts. The presence of the father and his showering of gifts are the same thing; the father’s presence is itself a gift because giving is his nature.  God is love.

This giving is not for any purpose.  The father has no particular end in sight, except the flourishing of the child. 

We shouldn’t bring our impoverished vision to the word “gift”. A father’s gifts are anything that adds to the child. Maybe a physical gift, but often not an object, but an ability. An insight. A power. A skill, knowledge, sensitivity, perception. Or, money, or a new pocket knife, or a book. There is no limit to the list, for the source of all the gifts is the father’s material life plus his mind and his and values. This list, insofar is the father is a father, is unlimited.

Since all gifts are an actual addition to a particular child, who has a name and a birthdate, all true gifts are personal and customized. And the father, the giver, gives something personal from himself. To receive a gift is to participate in the personhood of the giver. Yet each gift frees the son ever more to be himself, since his own personhood is bigger now, and not at all a reduplication of the father, but rather a variation on the father, subsuming all that the father is, and then more, because the gift in the son is now the father/son, what I’d call a “we”, a defined other realm, in the son.

Don’t fret over all this theory. The father who seeks his child every day will figure it all out. Desire comes before knowledge.

Every time I try to express this I remember my dad showing me how to sharpen a pocket knife on a whetstone. Another time he showed me how whittle a whistle out of a twig – an actual whistling whistle. That’s what fathers do, they add to the son’s storehouse.

It matters not at all that I don’t own a pocket knife now, and I couldn’t make a whistle if I were lost iin the forest – what matters is that I remember that he cared that I know how to do things. This is what fathers do.

Many times I’ve thought “where is Isaac, what is he doing” and I went to find you, with nothing prepared to give you or tell you, other than my determination to – pay attention to the word – find you. The father finds the son, not just physically, but “where is his heart and mind today?” Because there’s no way to give a good gift to someone you haven’t found, in this deeper meaning of the word.

The Genesis story doesn’t say this outright, so this is my embellishment, but I think God came to the garden each evening (“the cool of the day”) to see the day’s gardening work. Remember, Eden was a work project. The couple were put there to tend it.

So the father’s gift is something the child becomes accountable for.

Not all gifts are physical objects, but all gifts are given in this physical universe and are associated with physical objects. All gifts, then, carry both personal connection and a physical correlative. These physical correlatives are not distinguishable from the gift, though they may not be synonymous with the gift. They are symbols. A symbol participates in that which it symbolizes. Which means the phrase “only a symbol” is nonsense. No gift is only itself.

Each friendship, then creates its own sacraments, things in which reside the Real Presence of the giver — not as simply a subjective reminder, but as an actual piece of the giver’s person, living in the relational space between father and son, though the father be long passed away.

Hollow gifts are gifts not connecting the father and the son. They then function as mere debris in the life of the son. This is where we get clutter – the actual household clutter that suffocates so many families after years and years in their homes. Clutter is usually gifts long dead.

Sentimentality is clinging to hollow gifts because of the factual knowledge that there ought to be a connection with the giver, even though there is not. Many people have nothing but sentimentality. They are impoverished without knowing it, having never received a true gift. The mark of this form of dead gift is that the physical object can neither be disposed of nor used, so they sit around the house as weight on the living. A person raised in sentimentality will hate and be unable to discard the mementoes of his ancestors. This is the root of clutter, and the even the sickness of hoarding.

In contrast, the home is meant to be Eden, an indoor forest of sacramental objects, not heavy, but light and life-giving, in perpetuity.

Some gifts are alive but both people eventually die and the physical objects fail to be passed on as living symbols, and then become dead and heavy gifts. So a great sadness haunts museums and art galleries. A gift gone dead can be something of great beauty, but it cannot be truly touched, because we don’t know what energy it hummed with between giver and lover, and so any touch would mar it.

Physical objects and actions that used to be gifts fill the universe in various forms: religious forms that are just liturgical debris, kitsch, museum pieces, sentimental knick-knacks, curios.

All things should last forever; no gifts should ever become such debris. All should be passed on forever, each time augmented in an eternal growth. This is the living meaning of tradition. All of life should be tradition, newly received from the father but from his father before that, but new with the father because he truly received the gift, and thus unavoidably made it his own.

Back to the point: the father seeks out his son every day and gives him a daily gift.
This daily gift from the father is the daily bread of the son, a meal that outsiders can know nothing of.