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Petersboat
A Good Father | The Monday After
00:20:39
Sometimes my father would say to me, “Don’t move. I’ll be right there,” and he’d directly intervene to save me from some situation. But other times, he would say to me, “Figure it out on your own.” For instance, when I broke my arm in the 6th grade he rushed me to the hospital, acting powerfully and swiftly on my behalf. But not long after that, when I told him that I was being bullied on the bus, he said, “Well, if it happens again, hit the guy in the nose.” I guess being a father isn’t one or the other. As much as it is sometimes stepping in to save the child, it also means permitting the child the freedom to try and to learn on his own. “I’ll always be here,” a father can say, “but I can’t live your life for you.”
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And we'll go outside again this time. And it's a beautiful evening. As I look at the rain, I think about how the earth needs from God, it needs something from him. The earth as mother, in a sense, receiving from the father. So I speak about the father because this past Sunday was Father's Day. And he talked about how a father is a mystery. Because he needs to both hold out truth to his children, actively willing things for them, intervening in their lives in different ways, but also permitting them to go out the front door and try things on their own, figure it out. He's like God. God, who is both actively willing things in our lives and doing things, and also is permissively willing things, like letting things happen to us. So fatherhood is a mystery and very much at the heart of God's own identity. So I said that my father sometimes would intervene on my behalf. And he's just like, don't move. I'll be right there. He'd show up in some situation and try to help. Then other times he'd say to me, go figure it out on your own. Like when I was in sixth grade, I broke my arm. He rushes me to the hospital. He's powerful and swift, saving me, acting on my behalf. But then shortly after that, maybe the next year, I was being bullied on the bus, came home and told him about it. I was hoping he'd show up onto the bus himself and fix the situation. But he just said to me, look, if it happens again, hit the guy in the nose. So I have a father who sometimes steps in and other times says, figure it out. But I think that's what made him a good father. I guess being a father isn't one or the other. Sometimes you're stepping in to save the child. Sometimes you're saying, I can't live your life for you. I was encouraged these past couple of weeks to hear at some of these commencement ceremonies of college students all the booing against people who champion the artificiality of A.I. you know, over the authenticity of a human life. And the kids, they're like, we don't want that. We don't want artificial intelligence. Not just. Not just. Not to take our jobs, but we don't want it to take our deciding our judgments, our decision making, our passions, our appetite, our lives, our humanity. Oh, yeah, here comes the rain. That's a good rain right there. The human spirit in those young people crying out it still resists the smothering, empty promise of people who say that our humanity is the problem and they're going to fix it. Our humanity is not the problem. I think it is that we are alienated from fatherhood. Fatherhood gives us courage. Did you hear that first line of the Gospel? When Jesus said to his apostles, the men whom the church would call Father and still does, he says, then fear no one. And they're like, well, how are we supposed to not be afraid of people who can kill the body or bully us on the bus? He says, the Father. The Father sees you, and he knows you. Yeah, but the Father's not on the bus with us. Oh, he sees you. He knows where you are. If you know that in your heart, you'll find courage to deal with the bully. So he speaks to his apostles about the Father to free them from fear. The fear of our humanity, our own weakness, and also the fallen humanity that we share, and then evil men. For the fatherhood of God, I think, as Jesus understands it and speaks of it, is that it's God's will. His will is both active and permissive. He creates with a directness, an action all his own, an invention, that creation. But in creating us in his image and likeness, he gives us freedom. So he's Father in that he'll always be active in our lives. That's what grace is. But he won't live our lives for us, this God. We all know guys who have children who insist on doing everything for their child, you know, thinking that a good father controls his child's life or protects the child from ever having to do anything himself by spoiling the child. But the child usually grows to resent that father. But we also know there are some guys who think good fathering is permissive, even passive. These are the guys who want to be their children's best friend. And they deprive their children of instruction and experience. And those children also grow to resent that father. They feel like they were never trusted by the Father, and sometimes they feel unloved. But the good Father, imperfect as he is, he lives in the tension between the two. He's always there, willing and able to intervene. But he's also letting his children build with him, like we said, or make some measurements or judgments on their own. What do you want to do? You decide. John Paul II used to say to people all the time, you must decide even as they do so imperfectly. I mean, as a priest, I experience this a lot. People want me to tell them what to do, and that's a temptation. All right, just do this then, because it kind of ends the conversation and gets me off the cross. But I have to say, look, here's what I think and here's what the church teaches now. Now, you must decide. And I'll be here with you to help you. But you must decide. It's a risk, you know, fatherhood. And it requires virtue. Thank God there are many good fathers in the world. I know some of you listening to me are those guys. And you show men that it is possible, but we still see on display, usually in the world of politics or industry or sports, that some men never learn to embrace that tension between justice and freedom, you know, Instead, they give in to either controlling other people, as we see in the forceful tyrant, or they forfeit their responsibility to the truth altogether, as we see in the man who is morally bankrupt, with nothing to say to his children about God, nor anything to show for his own relationship with him. After Mass today, two guys came up to me and asked for prayer for their children. And then and said, pray to God that I'll have the wisdom to know how to be a good father to my child. Both guys were asking that, and they were standing together. They're friends from the daily mass. And I said to them, you know, if we let God be a father to us, we'll learn from him how to be a father to our children, right? If we let him love us as father, he'll give us a model of fatherhood that we can imitate, and we'll learn it through experience. He'll even give us a share of his own fatherhood, as he did for St. Joseph. Like even my own priesthood. I mean, it has so much to do with the way that I saw my father loving my mother. You know, God will give us his wisdom, his strength, if we let him be a father to us. Saints have said this a lot over the years. Only the man who allows himself to be a son can be a father. But even knowing that God will help us, allowing God to be a father is still very hard because it means entrusting ourselves to his authority in our lives. And it's scary because it can feel like handing over the reins. It can feel like forfeiting our responsibility. It's such an easy thing to do, to convince ourselves that that surely could not be what he would want from us. We must keep things under our control. Isn't that what he wants for us? But submitting to God requires humility. It's something that most of us men lack. This is why our Lord, he told the twelve apostles this past Sunday, again, those whom we would call and still do call fathers that they should fear no man, but fear the evil one. Because the devil fills our culture with contempt for humility. He tries to deceive us into thinking that it's a weak thing to be humble. Because he knows that when a man humbles himself before God, then God himself will make that man strong with a strength that is stronger than evil, stronger than sin, stronger than death. It is so important to remember that the devil is not God's equal. The devil was created just as we are and is as subject to God as we are. You know, God has the ultimate authority in His Son, Jesus. And the name of Jesus itself can cast out demons. Because the name of Jesus is obedience to the Father. That's what the name really means. At his heart. At the heart of Christ is I entrust everything to the Father. But how does a man entrust himself to God for the sake of becoming a good father? How do we do it? It's prayer. Prayer is what St. Paul called this Sunday. That gracious gift that overflows from Christ. The gracious gift that comes to us from Christ is his prayer. The heart of Christ is the place where he is constantly entrusting himself to the will of the Father. And he's sharing his heart with us. This is Christian prayer. It's a share in Christ's own prayer. This is why when he taught us to pray, he said, say our Father. So the connection to prayer is that our hearts are the place of encounter with the Father. We remember that even when Jesus spoke to us about prayer more deeply. He said, go into your inner room, which is your heart, and pray to your Father in secret. And your Father, who sees in secret will repay you. Prayer with the heart. So Jesus said yesterday, nothing is concealed that will not be revealed, nor secret that will not be known. What I say to you in the darkness? Speak in the light. What you hear whispered, proclaim on the housetops. It's what I share with you in your heart. Make known in the world what I whisper to you in the quiet of prayer. Proclaim for your children and for your children's children to hear. You know, when I was at the altar with you yesterday at Mass, I had a deep sense of this happening at the Mass. You know, it was dark when Jesus gave us the Eucharist. It was literally night. But it was also the night he was betrayed. It was spiritually dark, too. The devil was there in Judas, and Jesus knew it. So Jesus says to us in that darkness, take this, all of you, and eat of it. This is my Body which will be given up for you. It's like a secret, you know? And then again after supper, as if whispering, so as not to provoke Satan. Take this, all of you, and drink from it. For this is the chalice of my blood. The blood of the new and eternal covenant which will be poured out for you and for many for the forgiveness of sins. Do this in memory of me. It was as if he were whispering it to us in the dark. And ever since then we've been speaking this in the light. Those words he spoke to us first in the darkness. And proclaiming them from the housetops. Those words which he first whispered to us on that night before he died. We speak them in the light to overcome the evil one who wants us to hide. And we proclaim them because they forever remain the way that Christ gives us his heart. The mass is Jesus of Nazareth sharing his own personal prayer with all of his disciples. The first reading yesterday, Jeremiah. He's like I hear the whisperings of many. Terror on every side. Denounce. Let us denounce him. Terrorizing him, you know. And all those who are my friends are on the watch for any misstep of mine thinking about like Judas. But this is hundreds of years before Christ. And he sounds like Jesus in the garden Gethsemane. But even that confidence that we saw in Jeremiah and all those prophets, that comes from Christ and his cross, that's a share in Christ's presence. Prayer that made its way back in time to all those who were longing for the coming of the Messiah. John Paul II called the cross the center of human history. So even Jeremiah's prayer is a participation in the prayer of Christ. Which is why he's able to say Jeremiah. Even though I live in an evil world where men want me dead, but the Lord is with me like a mighty champion. My persecutors will stumble. They will not triumph. Even that was the grace of God at work in him. It's like Christ praying in the garden. Father, if it be possible, let this cup pass from me. But nevertheless, not my will, but your will be done. The Father's will, which always comes to us in the shape of a cross. The reality of truth. The vertical beam and the reality of sin and the need for mercy. The horizontal beam. Fallen humanity. So I admit that I, perhaps, like you, sometimes tend to wish that God were either one or the other. Either a tyrant who would just alleviate me from the burden of having to make judgments or decisions, relieve me from the burden of responsibility or any sense of obligation. You know, or, on the other hand, to think of him as some ambiguous energy with no personal will for me, no affection, no care that might relieve me of some feeling of a need to conform to the truth of my humanity. Just to do away with truth altogether. Wouldn't that be easier? But my desire is really for both, because my desire is for a father. We see this tendency to one extreme or another in the country we live in. Some cry out for a tyranny. It's a force forcefully threaten and impose order through control. Others, they see the throwing off of authority altogether as the resolution to conflict in an evil world. Evil men will always need to be threatened with punishment, even as they're given benefit of the law for our own safety's sake. But to think that we'd have anything left to live for if we were to throw off the natural law is foolishness. So good patriotism is like good fatherhood, since that's what the word means. Pateritism is fatherland patriotism. It sometimes intervenes. It sometimes says, figure it out yourselves. It says, there's such a thing as truth, but also says, you are free to disobey to your own demise and you will be met with the consequences. It's like the Father in the parable of the Prodigal Son. He lets the Son go, but he also runs out to embrace the Son at the first sight of his return. That's the mercy of the Father in the first place. That first place that enabled that son to know that he could come back to the Father because He gave him the inheritance. And we too, we've been given life. It's the inheritance that's that first place. It's the heart of the Father, that first place. It's his divine will. He gives us life, the inheritance, and then he lets us go, should we choose to squander it. He trusts that if we remember how generously we were given life in the first place as an act of mercy, having done nothing to deserve it, but invited into a participation that we might become like him. We might find confidence to come home, to return to him. You know, last week there was an older boy we baptized at the mass. And because he was older, he was crying over the font, because he was a little embarrassed, I think. And I laughed as I heard him say. He said it right into the microphone. We all heard him say it. He goes, I want to go home. I want to go. So in baptizing infants, they don't usually say that or speak at all. They just kind of cry a little bit. But this boy was like, I want to go home. So we all left and I said to him, don't we all, you know, don't we all want to go home? That's what baptism is, you know, I want to go home. And we have this sense and it's a gift of that. The way to the Father is through the heart of the Son. So we hold the baby over the baptismal font so the life of Christ and his own relationship with the Father could be poured into us. Remember, Jesus was preparing to return to the Father and he said, in my Father's house, there are many dwelling places, many saints with hearts after the heart of Christ. All of them now dwelling places of the Father in heaven. And to think that Jesus said to us, I go to prepare a place for you. That is our destiny. That's the destiny of every man. It's the Father. If we have trouble in this world, if we're rejected or met with some other suffering, it's not unknown to the Father. Like, he knows where we are all the time. Like before gps, you know, when I would call my father, when I was lost on the roads at night or something, he'd say, just tell me what you see. Meaning, like, just let me into your circumstances. And I'd say, well, I see a water tower and a train trestle and a busy road. He goes, you're on vets. That's what he would say. Like, somehow he always knew where we were. And so even if we felt lost, we knew that if we let the Father into it and share our life and our circumstances with him, that he would lead us home. And that's what God is like with us. You know, he sees all the time what's happening to us, and he's either actively or permissively willing all of it. So I'm going to end with the words of St. Thomas More, because today is his feast day. And he wrote these words to his daughter Margaret, whom he called Meg. So you're going to hear her called Meg, as he was facing his own martyrdom. Remember, he'd be put to death for not going along with King Henry VIII's forceful imposition of his own will. Henry VIII was no father, you know, even after giving birth to an heir. Isn't that interesting too, by the way, that he was so desperately grasping at fatherhood that he caused the decimation of the church. See, if he would have allowed God to be his father, he would have been able to accept his circumstances as the conditions that would enable him to become A saint. But as it is, you know he died in disgrace. But listen to these words of one of the greatest fathers in history, St. Thomas More. He's writing to his daughter. I will not mistrust God, Meg. Though I shall feel myself weakening and on the verge of being overcome with fear, I shall remember how St. Peter, at a blast of wind, began to sink because of his lack of faith. And I shall do as he did, call upon Christ and pray to him for help. And then I trust he shall place his holy hand on me and in the stormy seas, hold me up from drowning. Margaret, I know this well, that without my fault, he will not let me be lost. I shall therefore, with good hope, commit myself wholly to him. And if he permits me to perish for my faults, then I shall serve as praise for his justice. But in good faith, Meg. I trust that his tender pity shall keep my poor soul safe and make me commend his mercy. You know, give me the courage to die well. Right. And therefore, my own good daughter, do not let your mind be troubled over anything that shall happen to me in this world. Nothing can come but what God wills. And I am very sure that whatever that be, however bad it may seem, it shall indeed be the best. You hear how he sees everything that happens to him as good because God is good. As terrifying as it is to think of laying our lives down for God, for our country, for our family, the heart of Christ makes it possible for us to see. This is why Jesus said to us, you have faith in God, have faith also in me. Do not let your hearts be troubled, he says. Your heart. You have faith in God, have faith also in me. In my Father's house there are many dwelling places. Yeah. Saint Thomas More's last words are some of the most famous and well known last words of any of the saints. Just before being beheaded, St. Thomas More said, I die the King's good servant, but God's first. You know, I have never wished any harm or ill upon the King. I have prayed for him in all the realm. But I always wanted to give God like first place. First place.