Peter C. Wilcox: Walking Each Other Home
Peter C. Wilcox: Walking Each Other Home—Reflections about Living a Christian Life from an Older Dad to his Daughter
As a writer, my goal is to put words into the world that are meaningful, that help us along that moral arc of the universe. As a parent, my goal is to raise children who can inherit that better world and make their own contributions to it. In both instances, as a writer and as a parent, I want my life to mean—to have meant—something.
That is also Peter Wilcox’s desire in Walking Each Other Home: Reflections about Living a Christian Life from an Older Dad to His Daughter. The title grabbed me right away because a) my husband and I are also older parents with young children, b) I write about trying to live a faithful life in the midst of what often feels mundane and c) I work with a nonprofit organization whose mission is to help fathers become great dads—especially those men who didn’t have a father in their own life. Plus, it’s just a great title.
The book is very readable and oftentimes a sweet meditation on the author’s most central ideals. He is writing to his young adult daughter who is not part of a church community now that she is on her own. You can tell this grieves Mr. Wilcox greatly; indeed, the main premise of the book is to explain why a life embedded in a Catholic parish has been so fulfilling to him. And why he wishes her to have the same fullness.
It’s a perennial parental lament isn’t it?
When I became a Quaker after growing up in the Presbyterian church, my parents made excellent cases for how church and tradition meant so much to them. But they weren’t convincing for why it needed to matter to me in the same way. We have to come to meaning our own way, and in its best moments, Walking Each Other Home is a love letter to a daughter who is cherished and, ultimately, trusted to make her own way.
In fact, what is most convincing in the book are the sections in the chapter “On Becoming Your Own Person,” including the importance of choices. Mr. Wilcox offers insights from his years as a psychotherapist and spiritual director, and it is with these anecdotes that he lessons come alive. Oddly, or perhaps not so oddly, it is his clinical observations of human nature that ring universal, whereas the personal observations of spiritual rootedness are more easily glossed as particular. And therefore less convincing as an case for needing a church home.
Here are some of the lines I love:
Our vitality is rooted in our integrity.
Few perfectionists can tell the difference between love and approval.
Courage always involves a choice…the choices we make will help determine kind of person we will become.
Integrity rarely means that we need to add something to ourselves. Often it is more an undoing than a doing, a freeing ourselves from beliefs we have about who we are and ways we have been persuaded to fix ourselves to know who we genuinely are.
And my favorite favorite:
I think, that in some sense, prayer may be less about asking for things that we want or are attached to than it is about relinquishing our attachments in some way. When we pray, we don’t change the world, we change ourselves.
Changing ourselves, I think, is what changes the world.
Walking Each Other Home is a lovely gift to a beloved child, and I felt honored to be invited to eavesdrop. May every child have such a gift. May every parent offer one.
Julia Sibley-Jones, January 2021
Disclosure of Material Connection: I received this book free from the author and/or publisher through the Speakeasy blogging book review network. I was not required to write a positive review. The opinions I have expressed are my own. I am disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR,Part 255.
