A month ago on Mother’s Day, I wrote on my lingering affection for John Lennon’s “Mother,” as a refreshing corrective to all of the faux-profound Freudian nonsense that had permeated so many of his “Classic Rock” peers (e.g. “The End” by The Doors, “Mother” by Pink Floyd, “Mother” by The Police, etc.). I appreciated how Lennon cut through all the ridiculous intellectual posturing and silly Oedipal overtones to instead express, simply and without affectation, that he loved his mum, and was sad that she died.

That song, not-coincidentally, also expresses his hurt that his father abandoned him as a young boy. Hence the sad irony that Lennon had, by then, already perpetuated the same cycle with own son Julian^[1]you know, the child he actually named for his dead mother Julia, when he left him and his first wife Cynthia for Yoko Ono in 1968. Paul McCartney had famously written “Hey Jude” (working title “Hey Jules”) to try and console young Julian when his parents separated.

But Julian himself finally got his own jabs in when he came of age and released his first hit single “Too Late For Goodbyes” in 1984.

Although the lyrics are just vague enough to apply to any run-of-the-mill break-up, that ultra-famous surname–along with its music video, which features a silhouetted flower-child-era John dancing in the background–made it pretty much impossible to mistake for anything other than a kiss-off to his dead (and deadbeat) Dad.

It was very much the sequel to “Mother” that John so richly merited: He’d left only a pittance to Julian and Cynthia in the divorce and in his will; had gone years without talking to him^[2]ironically, it was John’s next girlfriend May Pang–whom he dated while him and Yoko were briefly separated–who urged their reconciliation; had described Julian as being born “out of a whiskey bottle” in a callous ’70s radio interview; and had written one of his final songs “Beautiful Boy” solely for his second son Sean, not Julian. If anything, Julian pulls his punches here, more than John deserves.

But then–as his own father had done on “Mother”–Julian’s goal here was not only to express his hurt, but also his regret, that he never really got to know his absentee father.

Such, in fact, is par for the course when it comes to most Rock songs about Dads, I’ve found. Whereas most the Mother songs (as catalogued earlier) all have this weird Oedipal complex coursing through them, most of the Father songs by contrast all eschew Freud entirely^[3]no one outside Jim Morrison ever sings about killing his father and marrying his mother, to express only their hurt at their abandonment. These include, in no particular order: Harry Chapin’s “Cats in the Cradle,” Cat Stevens’ “Father & Son,” Harry Nilsson’s “Daddy’s Song,” Bruce Springsteen’s “My Father’s House,” the bridge to Weezer’s “Say It Ain’t So,” Everclear’s “Father of Mine,” even Arcade Fire’s “Everything Now”^[4]which is a notable reversal; 10 years earlier in 2007, they’d sung “I don’t want to live in my father’s house no more” on Neon Bible‘s “Windowsill”.

I’m tempted to say that this desire for one’s particular father is symbolic of our collective desire for the Universal Father–what we essaying to be Latter-day Saints have termed the “Heavenly Father.” But I’ve come to lose patience with symbols as I’ve gotten older; if Freud was right about anything at all, it was when he said, “Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar”–and by comparison, sometimes a yearning for one’s Dad is just a yearning for one’s own earthly Dad, nothing more. And it doesn’t need to be with anyone more.

But then again, perhaps we can still say the exact same thing about our Heavenly Father, as well: our yearning is not for some universal archetype, after all, but for a particular person, as well. When we pray to, worship, and/or seek out a personal relationship with our God, is not with an abstraction, but a particularity–a particularity that, yes, fills the immensity of creation with his power and is endowed with the riches and omnipotence and omniscience of eternity, but still a particular individual.

LDS theology has taken a fair amount of flack since 1830 over the fact that we worship a conception of deity that is embodied, anthropomorphic, human. “As man is now God once was…” and all that. But again, maybe that is as it should be: we worship not a vague, amorphous energy field that exists outside of time and space, but an individual, with a personality, a background, a history–much like our earthly parents.

That is not to say that love of our earthly parents is metaphoric or metonymic for worship of our Heavenly Parents, no: it is to say that the way we love our earthly parents is, in some small, finite way, a pattern for how we hope to also love our Heavenly Parents one day. Not instead of, but as well as.

Hence the great importance of making sure we have good relationships with our parents–and with our children–in this life; we all need the practice. Such is perhaps why Christ Himself recommended having a millstone strapped to your neck and being drowned in the depths of the sea if you hurt your children otherwise.