Seventeenth Sunday

Our Father

What was your father like?

This is a tough and deeply personal question to each of us. It is a hard to be objective about one’s own family.

But it can be difficult to pray the ‘Our Father’ or to approach God in confidence if we have a rather jaundiced view of what it means to be a father. Some psychologists and authors speak of the ‘father wound.’

A lot hangs on our own experience of what our image of fatherhood is.

There are two extremes – I think of a friend of mine at the seminary who one day told me about his own father. I was complaining about the predictability of seminary institutionalised food, and especially the dried overcooked roast beef we got four times a week in our first year, when he told me of his father who spent the entire weekly wage packet on alcohol. Often his main meal was tea and bread and jam. It sobered me up and I began to appreciate that I didn’t have that experience and I thought of the food differently too.

Another extreme in the other direction was that of St Therese the Little Flower whose father doted on her and he called her has ‘little princess’. In her own writings she admits that she was, as the youngest, rather spoilt by her father after her mother died when Therese was only four. It was heartbreaking for her later to learn of her father’s mental illness and dementia.

Fathers come in different packages and it’s a rather delicate topic.

In this Year of Mercy I think now may be the opportunity - if we need to do so and if we have not yet done so - to forgive our fathers their failings and shortcomings. I see people who live long years of trauma and resentment over the failings of their distant angry fathers – or even towards male father-like dominant figures in authority – such as priests, doctors, Gardai (police) and teachers -  and then who often develop the traits they most hated. It’s a vicious cycle that can only be overcome by forgiveness with God’s grace in prayer.  They strive to still live up to unrealisable expectations. Some people relive old rows, arguments and disputes and harsh words exchanged that stung and continue to sting years later.

So either your father was distant, seemingly unemotional, uncaring, and undemonstrative in affection, controlling, harsh, overbearing, and authoritarian or worst of all, absent

Or

Your father was just honest, diligent, fair, sensible, a man of integrity, with quiet strength, practical, caring and authoritative.

Or he was a mixture of both

It’s so easy to generalise and to concentrate on the negative aspects of our upbringing. It is more challenging, but possibly easier as we grow older, to think of the many sacrifices of our fathers in providing for us, who were there for us on our toddler years holding our hands, and as we grow older, provided sound advice.

Jesus teaches His disciples, i.e.  us, how to pray to God as Father.

I think that the Our Father can be summed up in 4 P words – Praise, Provision, Pardon and Protection. We can pray the Our Father better when we learn to appreciate what our father/father figure did for us, when we see how he/they provided for us, financially, materially, advisedly, when we see and appreciate their efforts at our protection, and above all when we learn to forgive them, recognising now our own shortcomings as fathers or mothers.

Praise, Provision, Pardon and Protection therefore are the key words to recognising God’s love for us, as Father, experienced and shown first to us however imperfectly in our own parents and now the key to our praying to God and loving and trusting Him more confidently in the words our Saviour gave us.