Does calling my father every Sunday actually keep us close, or just keep us from having to find out that we're not?

Sunday at two o'clock becomes the ritual that replaces the religion. Twenty minutes about weather, about the car, about nothing that costs anything — and when you hang up you feel something that resembles relief but is actually the momentary silencing of a reed that has forgotten how to scream its separation. Rumi's reed flute cries from the moment of its cutting; it does not schedule its longing for convenient hours. The Sufi path names this clearly: what you mistake for maintenance is often avoidance perfumed as devotion. The question underneath your question is whether Love can be scheduled. It cannot. It can only be risked — which means one of you, some Sunday, has to say the true thing before the twenty minutes run out.

“The heart is like a mirror; if you don't polish it, rust collects.”

— Rumi, Masnavi, Book I

Camus watched Sisyphus and said: imagine him happy. Not deceived, not consoled — happy, because the rock and the hill and the labor are not obstacles to his life. They are his life. The Sunday call is not a symbol of closeness or a substitute for it. It is the thing itself — planks and rope and the specific Sunday-morning air between you, week after week, without arrival. Don Juanism knows this: you do not love less by loving with open eyes. Pick up the phone knowing exactly what it is — a ritual against silence, a hand extended across a distance you cannot measure — and extend it anyway, deliberately, because the alternative is not truth or depth or authentic connection. It is just a quieter void.

“One must imagine Sisyphus happy.”

— Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus

The Tao Te Ching says the wheel's usefulness comes from the empty hub — it is the nothing at the center that lets the wheel turn. A call scheduled like a bill payment is not closeness; it is the shape closeness leaves behind when it has gone somewhere else. You already know this. That is why the question has its particular weight at whatever hour you typed it. The bent tree survives the storm not because it reached heroically toward the light but because it stopped pretending the wind wasn't there. The silence you're afraid to let happen between you — the gap you fill with car talk and weather — is the only place he could actually find you. The Sunday call keeps the door latched and calls it open.

“Knowing others is intelligence; knowing yourself is true wisdom.”

— Tao Te Ching, Chapter 33

Arjuna stood on Kurukshetra and asked Krishna whether charging across that field would feel meaningful before he charged. Krishna's answer was not therapeutic. It was structural: you are not entitled to the fruit of the action, only the action itself. Your father is aging in a specific chair in a specific light. You have a phone in your hand every Sunday at whatever hour you have made into ritual. The question of whether the call is real — whether it constitutes closeness or merely simulates it — will eat you alive if you let it become the thing you audit instead of the thing you do. That hour is your dharma. The call is your dharma. Made and made again, without demanding that it return something certifiable.

“Let right deeds be thy motive, not the fruit which comes from them.”

— Bhagavad Gita 2.47

Sartre said we are condemned to be free, which means there is no ritual that makes the choice for you, no schedule that substitutes for showing up. The Sunday call is a waiting room you both agreed to inhabit — same plastic chairs, same outdated magazines, same muted television playing in the corner — so that neither of you has to walk through the actual door. Bad faith is not lying to someone else; it is the collaborative fiction two people maintain so they can avoid the vertigo of genuine encounter. Closeness is not a schedule. It is a choice made in real time, raw, without the buffer of ritual to absorb the impact. The call doesn't connect you. It lets you both go to bed feeling like it did.

“Existence precedes essence.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre, Existentialism Is a Humanism