Saturday, May 19, 2012
Happy Father's Day 2012
Father’s Day is the one day in the year we get the chance to ‘honour’ our fathers, a day when dads get affectionate and jocular cards and treats.
That we celebrate is important and it does not have to cost money to make someone feel loved. You just have to know them enough - I wonder for instance if the family of the dad I met recently knows what a treat it would be for him just to get his hands on the television remote control so that he can ‘watch what I want to watch for a change’?
So, what would the dad(s) including the granddads, in your family really like? (Sir Alan Sugar’s potential apprentices discovered in the series final recently that it is not likely to be chocolates.)
However (and whether) you are able to celebrate fathers’ day this year; fathering is a difficult topic, especially today when it seems under challenge in several areas: biologically, legally, and spiritually.
Being a father has never been easy. We honour St Joseph because he was faithful enough and so man enough, to step up to the mark and to marry Mary and to love Jesus as his own, despite his initial reaction to her pregnancy.
Then, when He grew up Jesus radically changed our perception of God when he taught us to call God our ‘Father’. Until that time God, despite scriptural protestations to the contrary, had been confined and only accessible via the High Priests and sacrifice. By calling God Abba, Father, Jesus liberated him to allow us to enter a personal relationship with Him. St Paul, whose year we are still celebrating, helped carry that liberation to the rest of the world and so to us here today.
In Hebrew ‘abba’ means both ‘father’ and ‘daddy’. So calling God Our Father helps bring us into a closer more loving relationship with him and it also elevates human fatherhood, natural, adoptive, spiritual or proxy, to new levels of importance. Pope John Paul II said that ‘God himself is present in human fatherhood and motherhood’.
Fathers are key figures in human family life. Their example matters to the well being of children. If our father is loving, we can begin to learn about God as a loving Father. This helps us to grow into adults who can love and approve ourselves and give and receive love with others.
Where no reliable father figure is available to us God is there to step into the breach. God himself becomes our Father. The challenge is to let him. How?
The Trinity shows us God as ‘relational’ and God works through relationships too so it might be that you can let other people help. If you do not have a father or have been hurt by a father or father figure you might want to find a trusted friend to whom you can ‘open wide your heart ‘ as St Paul urged the Corinthians (2 Cor. 6:13)
Jesus does not condone poor fathering (or mothering). He had very strong words for ‘whoever causes one of these little ones who believe in me to sin’ (Matthew 18:6). No human father figure is perfect which is why every child needs to know about God as our loving Father. Whether we are able to understand and accept it yet or not He does suffer with us - witnessed most dramatically on earth in Jesus.
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fathers day
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