Priestdaddy: Summary & Key Insights

There’s a particular kind of humility that comes with knocking on your childhood door as an adult, suitcases of failure in hand. For me, the move back to my parents’ Midwest rectory was a kind of religious experience in itself—though one composed more of Wi-Fi passwords and microwave dinners than incense and hymns. The house—sprawling, loud, draped in both icons and old guitars—wrapped itself around us like an eccentric aunt.

My father greeted us with his characteristic holy flamboyance: shirtless, liver-spotted, quoting both Aquinas and Eric Clapton. He occupied a strange liminal space between the sacred and the absurd—ordained yet ordinary, a priest muttering about politics while eating a cheeseburger. Returning to him was like reentering a myth I had outgrown but never escaped. I realized then that home is not a place we revisit for comfort; it’s a crucible where we are melted back into our rawest form.

In witnessing his contradictions up close again—his brashness, his childishness, his impossible faith—I began to see how my own writing had always been orbiting his uncontainable energy. That house, cluttered with Bible verses and dirty jokes, was my first creative workshop. It taught me that reverence isn’t silence. It’s the decision to look at everything, divine or derelict, without flinching.

My father’s existence as both priest and husband is the axis upon which *Priestdaddy* spins. His ordination was a loophole in doctrine—a kind of ecclesiastical clerical error that persisted into myth. He had converted from Lutheranism, and Rome, in an uncharacteristic moment of leniency, allowed him to remain married. This duality made our family both a curiosity and a scandal. Parishioners would whisper, amused or dismayed, that our house was a theological impossibility.

But within those contradictions lived a kind of truth that organized religion rarely admits: that faith and flesh are forever intertwined. My father’s priesthood was loud, sweating, alive. He blessed the Eucharist with the same passion he played power chords on his guitar. And under his bravado was a genuine belief—unshakable, maddening, magnetic. To grow up with that was to learn that holiness could shout, and that redemption sometimes wore denim shorts.

For me, understanding him was like trying to translate a language that had no word for doubt. I envied that certainty even as I mocked it. Yet through the humor, I loved the myth of him—the absurd devotion, the unrepentant humanness. It was in his contradictions that I came to see the Church as less a structure of rules than a theater of yearning, where we perform our imperfect reach toward the infinite.