Father's Day began in 1908, a few months before the first Model T rolled off the assembly line, about the time Americans fell in love with the telephone. In the 100 years since, we've come to associate the holiday with everything from Sunday drives to long-overdue phone calls home.

As with any holiday, it's easy to fall into familiar, comfortable Father's Day routines. We dads enjoy lingering over a bacon-piled-high breakfast or a mid-day grill fest. Others might spend the day fishing or golfing with friends and family.

Father's Day, like all secular holidays, combines family ritual and social event. Like links in a chain, these occasions connect us across time, place and people. Essential and ever-present, such days can just as easily go stale and lose the generative element of surprise.

In their book, "Rituals for Our Times," authors Evan Imber-Black and Janine Roberts observe: "The [magic] of rituals is embedded in their capacity to not only announce a change, but to actually create the change. ... If rituals remain exactly the same, year after year, then the change possibilities inherent in rituals are lost."

As I move from a baby's birth, to a silver anniversary, to a close friend's death, I sometimes long for more -- to be stirred or awakened by the rituals I join and help to create.

Such was the case a few weeks back, when my church congregation celebrated an annual rite called "Moving on, Moving up" that marks the passage of children from one level of religious education to the next. We also acknowledged variations on the theme, from moving to a new home, losing a loved one or changing jobs. The air within the sanctuary became redolent as successive children and adults stood to be acknowledged.

I had a similar experience a few weeks earlier at a Pakistani Basant (Kite) Festival hosted by students at the University of Texas. Basant means yellow in Hindi, symbolizing the yellow mustard flowers that blossom in Pakistan each spring.

As a perfect Texas blue sky turned to dusk, several hundred people gathered, ranging from grandparents to newborns. A few flew kites. Some sampled the food. Others gave periodic attention to the stage. As the energy level rose a notch a two, I asked myself: Why did so many people come?

I noticed, in particular, the adolescents. No petulance or "why did you drag me here?" protest. No outward effort to look cool. Pure exuberance. The simple thrill of being young and in the company of peers. Rather than reject their elders, the young Pakistani-American teens seemed to draw from them strength and comfort.

So, what could we do this Father's Day in service of change and renewal? Could we challenge the picture of Father's Day so nicely packaged and bowed by greeting cards and retailers? Could today be the good day that we surprise our children, spouses, fathers and ourselves with something new and unexpected?

For starters, I want to mark this 100th Father's Day by setting a few extra places at the welcome table. To acknowledge and celebrate fathers in their infinite variety: living or dead, heroes and villains, in triumph or failure.

So Happy Father's Day ...

... To men surrounded by young children, blessed by good health and enough fortune, able to father as well or better than you were fathered.

... To fathers of young men or women who stand apart, outcast, alone, withdrawn, frail, ill, handicapped or with needs that you doubt you can ever fully meet.

... To men of physical strength, contagious joy, quiet humility, personal discipline, or deep connection to spirit, aware of how children, your own and others, want to model those qualities.

... To fathers whose daughters or sons stand in harm's way, on battlefields, or streets marked by violence and family brokenness.

... To gay men who overcome great obstacles and ignorance to claim your rights and gifts as fathers.

... To expectant fathers, surrounded by mentors and love, or faced with scarcely a single model of what it means to be a good man or a good parent.

... To men who long to be fathers, or seek an outlet to direct that purpose, considering adoption or otherwise challenging the culture's assumptions about a man's ability to parent fully.

... To men in failed marriages, faced with single fatherhood, overwhelmed by uncertainty.

... To fathers fallen into a stony silence or gone underground, whose children have forgotten you, or will not yet forgive you.

... To fathers on autopilot, moving too long or too fast in a groove of work, or drink or other compulsions, too busy to really notice your children.

... To absent fathers, torn from your children by divorce, mistakes, deep shame or rancid indifference.

... To dying fathers, aware of the work not yet done with your children, yet faithful that your love in them will endure.

The poet Rumi spoke to fathers when he wrote:

Come, come, whoever you are.

Wanderer, worshipper, lover of leaving -- it doesn't matter,

Ours is not a caravan of despair.

Come, even if you have broken your vow a hundred times,

Come, come again, come.