Father

Not to get mired in the New Age gender issues of political correctness or the DaVinci Code parlour tricks of a rousing game of "What if," but gender is not really the issue here. It is not about whether God is He or She; it is about the relationship.

I know that many many people disagree with me about this point, but I am not that concerned with the whole masculine/feminine thing. I think of God as male because that is how I grew up thinking about God. So far as I know, the only pronoun God used in referring to himself was I, and that does not shed any light on the subject. Nor does it need to.

The significance of the word Father is not that God is male; it is that God is parent. Most of us probably have heard the word intoned in that solemn and stoic tone assigned to middle schoolers playing pilgrims in a Thanksgiving pageant. We aren't used to the word's having the warmth and the love that we (hopefully) associate with our earthly fathers. We don't think of the word so much as a word of relationship as we do as a word of distance.

My pastor, Tiger Pennington, sometimes speaks of God the Father as Daddy, a term that we from the South understand to encompass both the reverance and awe we have for our paternal units when we are young and the deep love and affection we have for them; it also suggests that we are children, even though many of us may use the term all our lives.

Without getting into a long discussion of the Trinity, we need to think of this word as referring to God the Father. What does that mean? Why not Lord or God or Yahweh? All of these refer to God, but each has a separate connotation, each carries its own baggage for us. In this prayer, our model for how we should be praying, the word used to address God is Father, and that has to be significant. For Christ, it had a very direct significance, but what about the rest of us? What message is packed into this word?

Everyone's relationship with a parent is individual, is slightly different from everyone else's relationship. Even our relationships with our two parents are different from each other. But there are certain characteristics that all healthy parent-child relationships share, and there are characteristics that describe both the giving and the receiving aspects of the relationship. The basics all seem to focus on love, respect, and security.

Central to the relationship is love. English is so limited with this word. We have a multitude of words to describe hate--loath, despise, dislike--but we use the same word, love, to describe our relationship with our spouse, God, and pizza. I may be guilty of a bit of hyperbole, but not much. Love is a much abused word. Or, perhaps, it is used not nearly enough. Maybe it is that we should love more, especially our Father. God pours out his love on us, and we soak it in. His love manifests itself in so many ways, in so many blessings, many of which we take for granted each day. God's mercy and grace are examples of God's unconditional and awesome love for us.

But what about our love for God? If we stick with our focus of God as parent, then our love for Him is akin to our love of our parents: we love because He is our Father, because He is there for us and always has been there for us, because He loves us and we cannot help but love Him back. God's love is immense, and we cannot hope to love Him back in like measure; but, God does not expect our love for him to equal His love for us. It is like Christmas presents: our friends, our siblings, even our spouses may expect our presents to them to match up with their presents to us; however, our parents are overjoyed with whatever we give them. I know that I am so delighted with the small gifts my kids give me; they may not cost much, but they are priceless. The same holds true with our love for God: so long as we are giving it with our hearts, God treasures it as precious. And we are called to love God. According to Christ, loving God is the first and greatest commandment. Love is a two-way street. God loves us constantly, no matter what we do, even if we do not love Him back; but, when we do love Him, it opens the floodgates of His love.

So, we're smothered in love. We are covered up with it. What now? We are already loving God, which is how we got this massive blessing of love to begin with. Is there anything else? Part of the wonder of being human is that we can experience multiple emotions simultaneously: witness the emotional stew we go through with people we love--how much more complex could it be with God? I am afraid that many of us distance ourselves so much from God that we force ourselves to make our feelings for Him as simple as possible; we love Him, in a distant and "reverant" way.

Reverant isn't bad, of course. We are told to honor our fathers and our mothers; and, this transfers to honoring our heavenly Father. We are supposed to respect our parents, and this, also, applies to our Father. Remember when you were a small child and you thought your parents were perfect? You believed your parents could do no wrong; that whatever they did, they did well; that they were always right. Remember? That's the same respect we should feel for God. Do we always feel that way? Probably not. We probably experience doubt, occasionally. We may try to second-guess God. We question God's authority. In short, we treat God as if we are teenagers. It doesn't mean that we don't love Him; it means that our human-ness is rebelling. We feel that we are grown-up enough to handle things on our own. We mess up.

Christ suggests that we should come to God as little children. Little children love unconditionally. Little children respect their parents unquestioningly. Little children experience their emotions purely. We may think that being as children is easy, but most of us have a hard time giving up our "maturity." We may have gained knowledge, but, like Adam and Eve, we have gotten it from the tree at a price. We give up our innocence but later realize that we want it back; fortunately, we can regain our innocence--in a way--through the amazing grace of Christ Jesus. We can regress from adolescence to childhood, and we should, but it takes a little effort--it takes giving up our selves, which most of us find pretty difficult to do.

So, aside from following Christ's admonition, what is the benefit of being childlike? Aren't we supposed to become mature in Christ? How can we do both? To begin, we cannot put human limitations on God's love. Like something in a Zen koan, we find that becoming mature in Christ means becoming childlike. And when we do, we achieve the final piece of the parent-child equation: we find security. When we accept that we are a child of God, we can curl up in His arms, we can feel safe in His embrace, we can rest in His love. God will hold us just as our parents held us, just as we hold our own children. And there is no better feeling possible.

Of course, I am not naive enough to believe that everyone's parent-child relationship is perfect--or even that any parent-child relationship is perfect. I have seen enough after-school specials and read enough high-school student personal narratives to know that not every person out there has a great relationship with his or her parents. However, we can fall back on the archetypal parent. We can say that the parent-child relationship is what it should be because, after all, we are talking about our imitation of Christ, and Christ would have the perfect relationship with his Father. So, when we say the word Father as we pray, we need to be aware that the word is loaded, just as our lives are loaded with love from our heavenly parent.