What a father says to his children is not heard by the world, but it will be heard by posterity. - Jean Paul Richter
Tomorrow many of us will gather together with family to honor and thank our dads. Others will have sent cards or gifts and some, live at a distance, will ET it and phone home. As we take this time to thank them it is also wise to remember how important the roll of father is to our society. The following piece is from an address delivered May 1, 1999, to the pastoral workers of the Diocese of Cheyenne. Unfortunately the author/speaker was not noted but he did share that his thoughts were inspired by the tragic events at Columbine High School.
"The importance of fathers in our search for God"
** There's an old saying that the greatest gift a father can give his children is to love their mother.
That's the importance of a father: the witness he gives through his love. I have many memories of my own father. But above all, I remember and cherish his love for my mother. I always believed in it, because it was always there. My father taught me that fidelity was not just possible, but a source of joy and freedom, satisfaction and friendship. I might have learned that without him, but not in the same way, and not with the same intimacy. He also taught me how to choose to love. Fathers choose to love and choose to remain with their children in a way mothers do not, because mother-love is frankly just more intense, more natural, more organic. Nothing in fatherhood is as automatic, or as biologically directed, as motherhood. Real father-love is entirely a free-will act of self-sacrifice. Lived well, it gives us a window on God's own fatherhood.
Of course, it's misleading to draw too many parallels between the fatherhood of God and human fathers. God is wholly other, and neither male nor female. But Scripture says, "I bow my knees before the Father, from whom every family in heaven and on earth is named" (Eph 3:14,15). And Jesus Himself told us to call God "Father." It's the language God chooses to reveal Himself, and it's through a human father that the child best learns how to integrate justice and mercy; how to engage with the world; our purpose beyond the family; the nobility of strength when it's ruled by love; and the creative fruitfulness of work. A father's love completes the family -- and in that communion of persons, the child gets the first inkling of who God is, a Trinity of persons in a community of love . . . like the family. **
** Looking out from within the love of a family, we can see the poverty of so much of today's culture. If men are simply predators and inseminators looking to spread their seed, and if women really need men only as a way of getting children, well . . . then marriage is just a contract of mutual utility, with the sexes using each other as a means to an end. But people are better than that. Our motives and yearnings are higher than that.
So we come to a final question: What do we do to restore fathers to their place in the family and in the culture, and through that, to renew our language of God?
This is where a speaker usually offers a program. We certainly need a tax code that really favors families. We also need social welfare policies that deliver help where it's needed, without encouraging families to breakup in the process. But those are political issues, and they're always debatable. The real work is on the personal level, and it's both simpler and tougher.
We live in a curious time. We lionize books like Tom Brokaw's The Greatest Generation. We revere the values which the generation of the 1940s embodied -- especially the fathers and brothers and sons who fought in World War II. But how much of it, I wonder, is just our nostalgia for a life we have no intention of choosing . . . because it would demand the hard work of conversion. You see, that's the heart of the matter. The revolution starts in the individual soul. When men and women decide to live scriptural lives, sacramental lives, then and only then, will the world begin to change.
It sounds pious and impractical, but it was impractical for the first Christians to oppose the Roman Empire. It was impractical to abolish slavery. Societies change when families change. Families change when individuals change. Turn off the television. Buy less. It sounds easy -- but try it. Spend time with your kids. Keep Sunday holy. Pray together. Choose to be faithful. Spouses, choose to subordinate yourselves to each other. Husbands and fathers: Be the leaders you were meant to be. Claim it, and it will be yours. Goodness is magnetic. **
Let us resolve together to restore men to a place of honor and respect in our homes and in our society. and in our homes. Special thanks to all the dads who have given so much not only to their families but also to the community by being a strong presence and inspiration..
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