A Father’s pride and joy

It is God who invented us, not we who invent God, and that is why we yearn for that Father-love.

Bishop Scharfenberger

Celebrating the Most Holy Trinity last Sunday, we heard proclaimed some of the most beautiful and consoling verses in the Bible. This passage, one might even say, is the very Gospel itself! “God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him might not perish but might have eternal life. For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but that the world might be saved through him” (Jn 3:16-17). And God takes great pride and joy in his Son — who saves all who turn to him — and in us, whom he loves as his own.

“This is my beloved son, with whom I am well pleased” (Mt 3:17, Mt 17:5, cf. Mk 1:11, Ps 2:7), we hear on two occasions, the Baptism of the Lord and the Transfiguration. This is a divine Father proud of his only-begotten Son. References to a voice from the heavens or “from the cloud” leave no doubt about the divine source of the affirmation, logically the one whom Jesus has himself called Father.

These are not the first personal references to a Father-Son relationship within God. Jesus himself speaks of his Father in the temple incident where, as a boy gone missing, he is found by his parents after three days. He expresses surprise about their unawareness of his need to be “in my Father’s house” (Lk 2:49). Early in the Matthean account of the beginning of the public ministry of our Lord, during the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus adds the possessive pronouns “your” and “our” and “my,” variously to the (heavenly) Father some 13 times, most dramatically in the “Lord’s Prayer,” in which “we dare to say, Our Father …” at the culmination of the Communion Rite of the Holy Mass (Mt 6:5-15; see also Lk 11:1-4). Why is this so daring?

On the one hand, the familiarity with which Jesus instructs us to call God Father, or “Abba,” a diminutive term, roughly equivalent to “daddy,” could appear to be disrespecting the power and the glory of God. Calling God “Father” might indeed even come across as blasphemous, if for no other reason than, save for St. Joseph maybe, no human fathering can reflect the holiness and purity of God. This notion, however, is quickly dispelled by the sweep of the next few verses which acknowledge the holiness of God (“hallowed be thy name”) and the reign of God in full power (“thy kingdom come”). We end the prayer with the invocation: “For the kingdom and the power and the glory are yours, now and forever.” This is no denial of the sovereignty or majesty of God here.

Skittishness about the daring notion of calling God Father, however, as Jesus himself clearly did, may also be rooted in a psychologistic assumption that we address God as Father merely because of a human need to be fathered by someone who we can completely trust never to let us down. A projection, in other words, of our own wishful fantasies. Like Voltaire’s (sarcastic?) aphorism, “if God did not exist, it would be necessary from man to invent him.” Well — and it would be difficult to argue against this — such a need is universal, is it not? The need for good fathering? We certainly know the horror wreaked by absent or abusive fathers.

According to the U.S. Census Bureau (2022), 18.4 million children, 1 in 4, live without a biological, step, or adoptive father in the home. To put this into perspective, that would be enough children to fill New York City twice or Los Angeles four times over. Research shows that a father’s absence affects children in numerous unfortunate ways, while a father’s presence makes a positive difference in the lives of both children and mothers. You may want to visit the website of The National Fatherhood Initiative for some revealing infographics to discover what we now know about the father absence crisis in America, the strengths of father presence and why involved dads are good for moms (www.fatherhood.org/father-absence-statistic).

Any hope for overcoming an addiction — any addiction — involves coming to terms with the need to acknowledge “a higher power,” and not the tyrant in control of one’s life, which may be the addiction itself, or the tyrant behind the tyrant, the father that was or wasn’t. Those who know the value of the 12-step programs have found great freedom in following them. To wit, “(1) we admitted we were powerless over (the addiction), (2) came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity, (3) made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood Him …” You may find the rest of the 12 steps at www.aa.org/the-twelve-steps. Every­one would profit from them!

How much a father proud of his son or daughter could help the healing of one enslaved by addiction — including sin itself, which is one addiction most humans seem to be caught up in, if we could overcome our pride and admit it. Pride, unless turned outward toward others, is not a virtue. It is the meek who inherit the earth and the poor in spirit to whom the kingdom of heaven belongs (cf. Mt 5:3-12, the Beatitudes). But a father’s pride — especially of a heavenly Father — can be the “balm in Gilead” (cf. Jer 8:22), the spirit to breathe life into the sin-sick soul.

Is it not possible, even probable, that this need, this hunger reflects in us the one in whose image and likeness we are all made? That St. Augustine, who struggled for years from sexual and other sensual addictions, came to realize, as he writes of in his “Confessions,” that God has made us FOR love — for himself (God IS love) — and “our hearts are restless until they rest in you,” as he discovered? It is God who invented us, not we who invent God, and that is why we yearn for that Father-love. Our desire for the loving Father is not a projection of ours but a spark in our souls of the God who loves us first and who gave us his only Son with a face like ours!

The Hebrew Scriptures speak of our names being written “in the palm of God’s hand” (Is 49:16, cf. Jer 1:5, Eph 2:10). God sees and loves in us what he sees and loves in his own Son, the Word of God made flesh, who bears a human face and feels with a human heart. And this Father is proud of you and me, his children, as he is of his only-begotten Son. The sins and scars we may bear, God sees beyond. We are created and loved by this Father who loves us, despite the color of our skin or our national background or our gender. The heart and soul of our humanity — our core identity — is deeper than how we dress, or how we are addressed. It is the image of God’s Son which he holds in his heart and sees and loves in our own, a Father’s pride and joy.

June is the month in which we honor our fathers, as in May we celebrate our love for our mothers. For some of us this can be difficult, even traumatic, if a father, a father-figure or, devastatingly, a man addressed as Father, in some way gravely wounded us through neglect, abuse or abandonment. I want you to know of my grief and sorrow for you and my heart’s desire, through faith and prayer, to bring you to the arms of the loving Father I know, the one in whom Jesus himself entrusted his life: “Father, into your hands I commend my spirit” (Lk 23:46).

 @AlbBishopEd