My father is a sophisticated kind of guy. When I visit his house, he lines the guest bed with red satin sheets that he picked up from the dollar store. He has never been rich. But that never seems to stop him. “You’re never too poor for a little style, Red,” he tells me, setting up a plate of rolled meat, sharp cheese, sliced apples.

He’s St. Benedict and Frank Sinatra rolled into one, offering whatever finer things he can with class and generosity.

Dad refers to himself as a “recovering Catholic.” He does not attend Mass, but every Lent, he gives up sugar. On Good Friday, he fasts. And every Easter, he watches Barabbas, the 1960s film following the life of the man who was given freedom in exchange for Christ’s crucifixion.

“This movie,” he tells me, every year, “is about me.”

In the film, Anthony Quinn plays the exonerated criminal, who spends his freed life struggling with guilt over Jesus’ death, and doubt over his resurrection. Towards the film’s end, Barabbas helps torch Rome, thinking that this is the will of God (and that he is helping the work of the Christians, who are being blamed for Rome’s burning). When Peter tells Barabbas that burning Rome was not the work of the Christians, he laments:

Why can’t God make himself plain? What’s become of all the fine hopes, the trumpets, the angels, all the promises? Every time I’ve seen it end up in the same way, with torments and dead bodies, with no good come of it. All for nothing.

My father shares the theology of Barabbas: God is distant, God lets bad things happen. My father knows torment. My mother left Dad for a violent alcoholic, who terrorized me and my sister and brothers. Things happened that Dad is still struggling to name. He wonders why the Sunday mornings we spent frying eggs and reading comics were taken from him.

“I loved those Sunday mornings,” he’ll say, “when we were all together, and I’d fry up a pound of bacon and we would just eat and laugh all morning. Those were the happiest days of my life.”

Raised a Catholic, Dad grew up with the rituals of Mass and confession. We grew up with our own rituals: nightly dinners at the table, Sunday breakfasts with sunny-side eggs and buttered toast. Our early family years proved to my father that he and my mother could make a good life together. That he was capable of being a good man. That even without the sacraments, God protected us.

But the sacraments never really left my father. He believed in polished silverware, in fixed and familiar patterns. At the table, there was always the potential for love to come through. The night before he moved out, Dad made a giant roast, sat us around the table, and smiled. “Your mother and I are having a hard time,” he said, passing a basket of dinner rolls. “But we’re working on it.”

My mother took a roll. And later that night, from the bar where her boyfriend waited, she called to tell my father that she had changed her mind.

I am my father’s daughter; I have his red hair, his broad hands, his spiritual doubts. When I’m honest, I let myself wonder if or why God loves me, if God intends me good. Dad tries to talk. “How do you deal with it, Red?” he asks. “What gives you peace about what’s happened to us?”

In Barabbas, Peter shares an exchange with Barabbas that, I think, brings my father back to the movie every Easter:

Peter: Do you think that what has battered on your soul for twenty years has been nothing? It wasn’t for nothing that Christ died. In His eyes, each individual man is the whole world. He loves each man as though there were no other.
Barabbas: I was the opposite of everything he taught, wasn’t I? Why did He let Himself be killed instead of me?
Peter: Because being farthest from Him, you were the nearest.
Barabbas: I’m no nearer than I was before.
Peter: Nor any farther away.

Dad wants to be reassured. He wants to be proven wrong. He blames himself for many things, but mostly he hurts, his psoriasis flaring up like the sores of Job, his sleep dense and dark over troubled dreams.

My father and I are both recovering. And we hope for more than peace; we hope to laugh and eat again without trouble. We hope for God to be near.

This Easter, I’m making a simple meal for my friends. I will knead bread and roast meat. I will lay out the silverware. And I will call my dad and tell him what I’m cooking, tell him that I love him.