(Amani Baby Cottage Photo)
(The Hamilton Spectator – Saturday, June 14, 2025)
Today, for Father’s Day, here’s something about a once-upon-a-time photo.
Of course, it’s easy to be leery of “once-upon-a-time” stories. We weren’t born yesterday, you know.
Even so, once upon a time there was a photo with no dad, but a girl named Hannah, a darling Ugandan girl, two years old, sitting tall and happy on the shoulders of an unknown white woman, a helpful volunteer at the orphanage Hannah called home.
Hannah, at that time, also sometimes looked like the saddest girl in all Africa. Having neither mum nor dad, Hannah lived in that void. Who wouldn’t be sad?
But shortly after that photo, Hannah, who’s allowed me to share, met and joined my family. Her striking Ugandan face has since been in many family photos, including in this space.
Hannah kept that old photo over the years, there on her nightstand or a nearby shelf, valued as an important thread, just a thread, to that life before we’d met. And the helpful woman with the good shoulders to sit on? Unknown. Until now.
This past Good Friday the children’s mother had one of those truth-is-stranger-than-fiction experiences. It was in Uganda at Entebbe’s airport, a chance encounter, just a conversation with a stranger, a British woman returning to her U.K. home, one Emily Henderson who, as the conversation went, shared about her time years earlier at a Ugandan orphanage.
This is the story. Emily, first unrecognized, was then discovered as the woman with the good shoulders to sit on. All these years later – Hannah’s now in university – this stranger remembered her and the photo. Really? Really. Emily has since sent many more photos, so priceless, of Hannah’s early life.
But really? Mister (Miss?) Universe. What’s your next trick? What’s your next surprise, so mysterious yet revealing, here on this spinning ball in space? What are the odds? What sort of story are we living in?
Now it’s Father’s Day weekend, time to celebrate the good things many fathers bring to our families. If you’re one of those dads, take a bow. Without you, things fall apart. Volumes of research show this, how children and cultures do better when fathers are honoured and involved in family life.
It’s why the Hannahs of the world – there are about 140 million orphans worldwide – need, as the expression goes, “love with skin on it.” Fatherhood with skin on it, included. Other men who are father figures to kids with other father voids are also helpful here. A brother. An uncle. A family friend. You also should take a bow.
Brokenness and dad voids will still be out there. It’s why some struggle with images of the ultimate dad, God. My own view is that if humanity’s “Abba,” the Aramaic word for “Daddy,” or “Papa,” is love, then it’s helpful to imagine any one of us like some kid jumping into his lap to talk about our day, or show him our hurts, or just enjoy the moment.
But consider this. About the time of that photo, “The Shack,” a novel by William Paul Young, was published. It characterizes God the Father, or “Papa,” as a black woman. Some 25 million books sold. (Young’s more recent “Lies we believe about God” is now on my own nightstand.)
So what if “Papa” has the skin of a black woman? No, really. Is offence taken? What if that dad is like an animal? Like a lion, or lamb, or mother bear? What if “he” is like an inanimate object, like a rock or fortress? Maybe, then, even incomplete images are helpful. It’s food for thought.
Because this is how much of life – your story and mine – is lived, with incomplete pictures in discomforting voids. It’s okay. This is why Hannah always valued her once-upon-a-time photo. She was at peace with what she had. Until, in the fullness of time, she was given more.
I, for one, as Hannah’s dad, think there’s something remarkable in this.
Thanks Thomas.
Harry, from Oakville, ON