A Father's Love

I hope that no one took my words wrong in my previous post, believing that I was suggestng that as a father, I am not bonded to my children, or worse, that a father does not love his children. Nothing could be further from the Truth.

The Truth is, I cannot love my children the same way as their mother. But I'm not supposed to.

If a father's love and a mother's love were the same, then God would not have "created them male and female." We would all be the same gender. No, instead God created us "in his image, male and female he created" us. The father plays an essential, complimentary, and no less important role to the mother.

As a father, I will always be the outsider, the other in the trinity of the divine institution of the family, Father, Mother, Child. That's because God is the Other. The father is the image of God the Transcendent, who is outside of us, watching over us, protecting us, looking at the big picture.

A mother, on the other hand, is the image of God the Intimate, who comforts us, holds us, is within us, and nourishes us.

In the events that took place this last Sunday evening with Nathaniel, as a father, I had a very important role to play. As I held my son under the baptismal waters, I was Abraham sacrificially giving my son back to God. (Thank God, like Abraham, God spared me that sacrifiice.) As I drove to the hospital, as Lesley was holding my son (and I believe holding his soul bound to hers), I was praying, "Lord, into your hands I commend his spirit." Because I am father, I am the one called to give him up in sacrifice, or at least be prepared to.

Please don't take these words in the sense that I did not want my son to live. King David prayed through fasting and sacrifice for the life of his son. The child died anyway. King David rose from his prayer, bathed, and ate. When asked why he acted this way, he replied that God had seen fit not to answer his prayer, so what more should he do? This seems callous, but it's actually an image of a father who accepted the will of almighty God. That is my love as a father: to always be willing to obey God even to the point of sacrificing that which I hold most precious to me. Joseph, the husband of Mary, sacrificed his ancestral home, his livelihood, his own security for the sake of Jesus.

Another role I have as a father is to sacrifice myself for my wife, so that Lesley can fulfill her very special role of being the image of God the Intimate. What I wrote earlier was a celebration of that special vocation of hers as Mother. If I approach her relationship with jealousy over her place in my children's lives, I poison myself, my relationship with her, and my relationship with my children. So instead I celebrate her intimate, nourishing, life-gving bond with our children.

In the same token, Lesley should and does sacrifice herself for me so that I can perform my role as a father in the image of God the Transcendant. And believe me, she celebrates my transcendant, protective, life-giving role in our children's lives.

In the whole thing that went down Sunday night, Lesley and I each did our part as the image of God to which we are called by our vocation in marriage, equally, complimentarily, generously, stressfully, and most importantly, faithfully.