Church of the Holy City

And They Left Their Father

And They Left Their Father

Genesis 17:1-22 Matthew 4:18-25

The Judeo-Christian scriptures are filled with father imagery. In our Old Testament reading today, we heard about Abraham being the father of a great nation. And the Jews are often referred to as the children of Abraham. The story we heard also mentions Ishmael, who will also be the father of a great nation. Biblical tradition makes Ishmael the father of the Arab race.
And in the Christian tradition, God is seen as the Father, as we say in the Lord’s Prayer each Sunday. Jesus Himself refers to God as His Father. Swedenborg tells us that in heaven, everyone is seen as children of the one Heavenly Father.
Today we honor the contribution that fathers make to our lives. Fathers are often overlooked in families, while mothers receive much of the attention. A generation ago, fathers often went off to work, brought in the family income, and rested after supper. For this reason, their influence on the family was less pronounced than mothers. Though even in this role distribution, often fathers were the head of the family and often set the tone for the household.
Fathers, too, were often the disciplinarians of the family. I remember my mother threatening us when we were misbehaving, “Just wait till your father gets home!” My father was a strict and harsh man. I never confided in him. In fact, I rarely talked with him. He barked out orders and yelled at us when we needed to quiet down or when we were doing something he didn’t like. He was very critical, and found fault with almost everything I did. I was not close to my father, nor were any others of my siblings. I even found it hard to believe that he loved me. This role was almost expected of fathers in that generation. My friends talked similarly of their fathers, and some of their fathers were even more severe than my own father. I think of popular movies of the time, and the father was depicted in the manner I’m describing. The Sound of Music, and Mary Poppins both had distant, severe fathers who were transformed into loving tender fathers under the influence of Julie Andrews’ feminine influence.
In the generation in which I grew up, the roles of men and women were much more fixed than they are now. Since my father was so critical and distant to me, my primary bond growing up was with my mother. I developed sensitive, artistic qualities that were not considered manly qualities. As I came into adulthood, I confronted some of these deficiencies. I tried to make myself more masculine. I worked construction. I tried to get tough. I tried to be the kind of man that I thought our society said I should be. I did like construction work, but the rest of this identity was a pose I took on like an actor would take on a role.
My relationship with my father affected how I relate to other men, as well. Until late in my life, I found myself often uncomfortable around men. And men in authority positions were even harder for me to relate to. There were some of my friends who went on hunting or fishing trips with their fathers, and I noticed that they were comfortable around men—certainly more comfortable than I was.
I think the image we have of our fathers can influence our image of God. I knew that God is loving, but when I would pray, my father’s personality came through. I saw God just as critical as my own father was. All my sins and wrongs came to the fore when I prayed. I found it hard to feel the love that I knew God has for me. Rather, the judging, lawgiver God of the Old Testament was often how God seemed to me. I know children of overbearing fathers who have even abandoned the imagery of Jesus and a Father God. While they have never told me so, I guess that it was the hard image of their own father than led them to such a theology.
But even in my childhood, there were men who became my spiritual fathers. I met some of them at church camps. They brought religion to me and showed me that being sensitive and religious and artistic could also be a part of manhood. As I went on in life I met more spiritual fathers. My teachers at the Swedenborg School of Religion were much more approachable. I could talk with them openly. I could confide in them. I could safely show them my feelings. They manifestly showed compassion and love for me. They showed me that a male authority figure could be gentle and friendly. Also some of my professors in graduate school were men more like me. I expanded my idea of what it means to be a man, and how men can relate to one another through these intellectual and caring men.
My relationship with my own father grew over time. Dad softened, and he did some really caring acts that showed me how much he really loved me. I was able in his later years to bond better with him. But the image of fathers from childhood still have a strong influence on us. To this day, I have to consciously remember my spiritual fathers when I pray, and consciously try to integrate their personalities into my conceptions of God. I have to consciously apply the characterization of Jesus that I find in the Bible, whom Walt Whitman calls, “the gentle God.”
Theologically, though, outgrowing our family notions of reality is part of our spiritual journey. I will now come back to the story from the New Testament. When Jesus calls James and John, the Bible tells us that they left their father and their boat and followed Him. I take this to be a symbol of spiritual rebirth. We receive what Swedenborg calls our natural degree of life from our parents. He even says that our soul comes from the father, and our body comes from the mother. I don’t know if this is true, but that’s how he sees it. The natural degree of life needs to be reworked in order to allow spirit to flow through it. This natural degree of life Swedenborg also calls proprium. The proprium is the life that comes from self. In the proprium are all the tendancies to evil that come from our heredity and our environment. The very idea of self, or ego, is born from our father and mother. Like James and John, we need to leave this level of our personality in order to come into spiritual life. Our paternal conceptions of how things should be, and our innate desires can be a real obstacle to our spiritual life. We can really grate against society if we expect everything we do to be the way it went in our families. In spiritual growth, we learn to adapt to things that may go differently than they did in our family life. We open up our minds to a greater world, and embrace the world as it is, not the way it went in our upbringing. Spiritually, we need to leave the self-interest we are born with in order to open up to the higher degrees of spiritual life. In Swedenborg’s system, we are born into the natural degree. Religion teaches us to open up the higher degrees, which are called spiritual and celestial. If we fail to open up these higher degrees of the self, we are left with our biological self, and self interest—an image of the natural world. We let go of ego in order to open up to the neighbor and to God. We need to leave our fathers in order to follow Christ.
Today, roles of fathers and of men and women both are changing. Men are becoming more openly caring and loving. Men don’t have to be the harsh, overbearing critical parent that they were a generation ago. They don’t need to be tough. Men today can even cry. And many women, maybe most women, are now out in the workforce as men are. In some households, men are even staying home and mothering their children while the women are at work. I received some interesting responses to the Mothers’ Day sermon I gave last Mothers’ Day. One person said that there were many people who played the role of mothers to her father in his upbringing, and that they deserved to be recognized. I also received a call from a friend who wanted to be mentioned because of the mothering he had been doing for his daughter. I told him to wait for Fathers’ Day. So I can now mention him, and all the other men who are acting in the role of loving caregiver to their children.
Unfortunately, in society today there are many fathers who neglect their responsibilities. They abandon their lovers when they get pregnant, and force women to bear the whole responsibility of raising children. The number of single parent families, which almost always means single mother families, is high today. Men need to step up to the plate and share the responsibility of raising their children. Not only is it an obligation, but it would do so much for them to be involved in the care and nurturing that comes with parenting.
It seems to me to be a step forward to have the kind of balance that we see in some households today. Fathers and mothers both working, and men and women both showing love and care openly for their children. The sad drawback, though. Is that with both parents working the kind of care I’m talking about is very hard to achieve. Though roles are becoming more balanced, is the kind of deep loving bond between parent and child available in these households? I don’t think society has yet found a good answer to this problem. Nevertheless, I still see it as a good sign that fathers are becoming more integrated into family life, into the decision-making processes about their children, and are contributing masculine love to their children as they grow up. These are great steps forward in social life. So today, we honor the modern father. And we thank him for all he does in family life.