Tag Archives: Fatherhood of God

Our Jealous God

Evangelization, Faith and Reason, God's Love, Scripture, Sin, ,

Public revelation was officially closed with the death of John the Apostle.  This does not preclude, from time to time, God raising up prophets, fashioned in the mold of the Jeremiah, Isaiah and Elijah, to help the People of God apply the contents of that revelation to their current times.  History is rife with them—St. Athanasius, St. Francis of Assisi, St. Catherine of Siena and St. Faustina to name a few.  The Spirit of Prophecy is a key component in the Mystical Body of Christ even in our own day.  Unfortunately, like the days of Israel of old, the spirit of false prophecy is always lurking at the door.  There will always be those who claim to speak on behalf of God and yet are lending their voices to the enemies of humanity.  It is to one of those groups that I address this post today—the self-styled prophets who claim “God does not care if…”

This spirit of false prophecy is ubiquitous, especially in our “YOLO” culture.  Who among us has not met one of these prophets?   They are quick to tell us, “God does not care if we go to Mass.” Or, “God does not care if we call Him the right name.”  They proclaim, “God does not care how we worship Him.”  And even remind us that “God does not care if you eat meat on Fridays.”  And “God does not care if you smoke weed.”  These are but a few of their prophetic utterances, but you get the point.  These Bizarro John the Baptists repeatedly reassure us that God loves us as long as we are good people and enable us all to relax a little bit, if for no other reason that we have found out that God has sanctioned our drug habit.  They are great prophets of, well, not exactly peace, but at least of “chilling out.”

God’s New Name

Just as Jonah was stopped in his tracks when his message was received, these luminous prophets are often thrown off when they are asked “how do you know God doesn’t care?’  Probing, you find that what they really mean is that if they were God, then they wouldn’t care.  God is really their prophet.  But it is not the audacity of their message that is the most distressing element, but instead the image of God that emerges if we are to worship “I CARE NOT” rather than “I AM WHO AM”.

All of us tend to chill out in our old age, and “I CARE NOT” is no different.  Given all the time of dealing with humanity, He has chilled.  At least that is what our prophets would have us believe.  But the image this God invokes is actually just as scary as the so-called “fire and brimstone” God they are trying to extinguish.  Their God may be laid back, but He is still merely a Divine Auditor concerned only with tallying up our actions.  He may not put as many things in the left-hand side of the ledger, but he still has his ledger.  Presenting him as mellow does nothing to remove this image.  It is a scarier image because we have no way, other than by listening to these prophets, to actually know which belongs in which column.  If “God doesn’t care” does that mean these are good actions then?  Or do we now have an indifferent column?  If he is mostly indifferent about what I do, then how do I even know he cares about me?  Most people will take the God who hates over the God who is indifferent—at least the former also loves.  Indifference and love, bumper stickers to the contrary, cannot coexist.  In trying to avoid sterile moralism, the Prophet of Indifference manages to castrate God Himself.

Why God Cares

These prophets can still challenge us however, even if it is by way of an end around.  They force us to ask the question why God even cares what we do.  As we probe we find that St. Thomas Aquinas asked the same question, framing it in terms of sin as an offense against God.  In Book 3 of the Summa Contra Gentiles, the Angelic Doctor says that “God is offended by us only because we act contrary to our own good.”  In other words, God cares so deeply about each one of us that He takes offense only when we do something that ultimately harms us.  And what are those things?  We call them sins, but they are essentially things that move us off the path that our nature and our supernatural calling has put us on.  There are some things that help us to advance towards this goal (we call these good), some things that stop us (venial sins) and some things that knock us off the path entirely so that we need His help to get back on the path (mortal sins).  In short, God not only cares what we do and don’t do, He says that He does so as a jealous lover.  He knows that giving ourselves to any other lover than Him ultimately ends in frustration that could be eternal.  But choosing Him as our love, we can love all those other things in Him.  “Seek ye first the Kingdom of God, and all these things shall be added unto you” (Mt 6:33).  This is not to trivialize just how bad sin is—it is still an offense against Almighty God—but to place it within the context of a filial relationship rather than as Judge and defendant.  God, in all eternity, is Father but only with respect to creation is He judge.  It is of His nature to be Father and not to be Judge.  See, He does care what we call Him.

In his sermon entitled “Jewish Zeal, A Pattern to Christians,” Blessed John Henry Newman reminds us of the best weapon with which to combat these false prophets.  He says that Christians should not be taking up the sword in the manner of Elijah when he encountered the false prophets of his day, but instead to capture the spirit of mind that animated his actions.  Zeal, Newman says,

“consists in a strict attention to His commands—a scrupulousness, vigilance, heartiness, and punctuality, which bears with no reasoning or questioning about them—an intense thirst for the advancement of His glory—a shrinking from the pollution of sin and sinners—an indignation, nay impatience, at witnessing His honour insulted—a quickness of feeling when His name is mentioned, and a jealousy how it is mentioned—a fullness of purpose, an heroic determination to yield Him service at whatever sacrifice of personal feeling—an energetic resolve to push through all difficulties, were they as mountains, when His eye or hand but gives the sign—a carelessness of obloquy, or reproach, or persecution, a forgetfulness of friend and relative, nay, a hatred (so to say) of all that is naturally dear to us, when He says, ‘Follow me.’”

Let us go forth in this same spirit.

Revealing and Reliving God’s Fatherhood

Family, Fatherhood,

Each Father’s Day, I begin the day with what has become a personal tradition.  I open my copy of Pope St. John Paul II’s Apostolic Exhortation, Famliliaris Consortio, to p.43 and then read the last paragraph of section 25 where the saintly Pontiff says:

“In revealing and in reliving on earth the very fatherhood of God, a man is called upon to ensure the harmonious and united development of all the members of the family: he will perform this task by exercising generous responsibility for the life conceived under the heart of the mother, by a more solicitous commitment to education, a task he shares with his wife, by work which is never a cause of division in the family but promotes its unity and stability, and by means of the witness he gives of an adult Christian life which effectively introduces the children into the living experience of Christ and the Church.”

These words, written by a celibate to his spiritual children, perfectly capture the essence of what it means to be a father.  They form, what has become for me, a mission statement and so, every year, I visit them to ask God the Father how I am doing in living out the calling He has given me.  This practice has always been fruitful for me personally not only because it recharges my paternal batteries, but also because it provides clarity where busyness may be obscuring my mission as a father.

St. Thomas lived by the motto that “our calling is to share the fruits of our meditation.”  It is in this spirit, that is in recognition of the gifts God bestows on each of us in prayer are not just our own, and not because I am some exemplary model of fatherhood, that I share some of the lights that have come to me over the years.

Keeping the End in Mind

First, I will mention a most important principle that animates JPII’s mission statement.  We ought to, in everything we do, live with the end in mind.  The more conscious we are of our goal or our purpose, that is the more we call it to mind, the easier it is to achieve.  The truth is that all too often activity causes us to forget where we want to go.  We get easily distracted and need to be reminded it is not about the journey but about the destination.  To the extent that each of us does this, asking constantly if what we are doing or about do will help us reach our goal, the more successful we will be.

This is true not just in the natural realm but the supernatural as well.  The more we remind ourselves that the goal is heaven, that is, the more we live with a heavenly perspective, the less often we will fall off the path.  So often we fall not so much out of malice, but forgetfulness.  Like Peter walking on water, we take our eyes off Christ and we fall.  Once we refocus on Him, He is there to put us back on our feet.  In short, the more we keep our desire to be with Jesus in the front of our minds, the more docile we are to the impulses of grace.

Fatherhood is not just one means among other means for us to get to heaven, but for those who have been called, it is one of the primary ways.  Just as husbands are to be Christ in the flesh to their wives, they are to “reveal and relive the very fatherhood of God” to their children.  The mission is simple, even if it isn’t easy, to show those children “born under the heart of the mother” what God the Father is like.  For good or for bad, nearly all of us see God the Father as something like our fathers on earth.  If you want to know how you are doing as a father, ask your children what God the Father is like.

Revealing and reliving the Fatherhood of God—a daunting task indeed!  In fact anytime I grow overconfident in my fathering and need a dose of humble pie, I remind myself of this calling and abruptly reality sets in.  But reality is not that I can’t live up to this calling.  That much is obvious.  Reality is that God never calls without equipping and He has given me the graces I need to make this happen.  For my part I only need to keep my eyes on the purpose—to show them God the Father.

There have been so many times when the Holy Spirit has whispered those very words in my ear—“relive and reveal the very Fatherhood of God on earth”—before I was about to lose my cool or before I was tempted to insist on my own way God the Father is gentle and bears all things.  God the Father is generous.    Do I always listen, no, but when I do these simple words always keep me on course.

How it’s Done

How is it that John Paul II proposes we as fathers reveal and relive the Fatherhood of God?  It is through what he calls the “the harmonious and united development of all the members of the family.”  God is a true Father Who is not far away but at work at every moment forming us into His adopted children.  When fathers take an active role in the development of their children, especially their spiritual and moral development, they image God the Father.

Notice the tone of reverence the Pope displays toward wives and mothers when he speaks of “the life conceived under the heart of the mother.”  That is, husbands are called to love their wives first.  It is because he is a husband that he becomes a father.  One of the best ways a man can love his children is to love his wife and to show reverence for her.  To model true complementarity for your children also shows them that men and women, despite the effects of the Fall, are not in competition with each other, but true partners and made to challenge each other to become more fully human.

Fathers also should make a “more solicitous commitment to education” of their children.  This starts by forming them in the Faith.  All too often men will leave this to their wives or think this means dropping them off at CCD or the Catholic School.  But this is not what John Paul II has in mind.  Study after study has shown that when fathers are committed to the faith, their children follow suit.  Children need to learn the truths of the faith from their fathers but they also need to be schooled in prayer.  There is nothing more manly than to be found on your knees in prayer and children naturally imitate this when their fathers model it for them.  Men should always strive, as JPII says, to introduce “the children into the living experience of Christ and the Church.”

John Paul II also has a broader idea of education of which school is only a small part.  This is especially true today as the contributions to overall education by schools, both public and private, are greatly diminished.  This is why many fathers, following the model of St. John Bosco, develop simple formation plans for each of their children that includes their spiritual, intellectual, social, and human—all with the goal of educating the entire person.

The Pope acknowledges that providing for his family by his work, is fundamental to what it means to be a father.  But he also cautions men to make sure that their work “is never a cause of division in the family but promotes its unity and stability.”  So many of us, especially in a consumer-driven culture, overly focus on the material aspects of work.  Certainly, earning money is a key aspect of it, but we also must ask the harder questions.  What kind of person does my work turn me into?  Am I absent from family life more than I should be or even pre-occupied or stressed out when I am there?  Our work should support our vocation as fathers but never at the cost of the unity and stability of our family life.

Father’s Day in the United States is a relatively recent addition to our holidays.  But Father’s Day has been celebrated for centuries in some European countries on March 19th, the Feast of St. Joseph.  St. Joseph, above all the married saints, truly relived and revealed God’s Fatherhood.  He was chosen from all eternity to be the representative of God the Father on earth.  Fathers should regularly turn to him for guidance and strength.  He was also one of the Patron Saints of Pope John Paul II who bore his name as his middle name.  Let us spend this Father’s Day with these two fathers and ask them to guide us as we examine ourselves in light of these challenging words.