Summary
God the Father’s love is reflected by our earthly father. Imperfections in our relationship with our earthly father can influence our relationship with God the Father. We can come to know God the Father more intimately through reading Scripture, and we can give God the Father a name that is personal to us.
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Reflective Study Guide Questions
“I am in the Father and the Father is in me.”
Jn. 14:10
1. Mother Teresa said that men reflect one aspect of God’s love and women reflect another aspect of it. How have you seen this in your relationship with your parents or your children?
2. Wounds from our relationship with our earthly fathers, even small wounds, can greatly influence our relationship with God the Father and our perception of Him. What wounds might be influencing your relationship with God the Father?
3 .One of the best ways to come to know the Father more intimately is through His Word. How can you work on reading or praying with Scripture more regularly in your life?
4. We can call God the Father by a name that is personal to us, that expresses our relationship to Him. What name for God the Father most appeals to you and seems to fit your relationship with Him?
Text: Entering Prayer with God Our Father
Hello, it’s Claire Dwyer back with you for the Pray More Advent Retreat. And in this talk, we’re going to be exploring the beautiful mystery of God as our father. Let’s begin with a prayer.
Opening Prayer
In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, Amen. Lord, every time we make the sign of the cross, we begin with the words in the name of the Father. And yet so often we forget how incredible it is that we call you our father, that you are our father. Help us to look upon this marvelous mystery, this grace with fresh eyes today, and to truly live as your sons and daughters. We ask this all in the name of Jesus our Lord whose arrival we are preparing our hearts for, Amen. In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, Amen.
Prepare Our Hearts For Him
Well, I want to just begin by sharing something with you. This is a picture of me as a little girl with my head flung back, I’m laughing, I’m carefree. It looks like I don’t have a care in the world actually. And what you can’t see in that picture is that I’m actually on somebody’s shoulders. I’m on my daddy’s shoulders feeling so safe and yet so free and so cared for. And when we, my friends live as if we are on the shoulders of God, our father, when we live, knowing that we are cared for and provided for, there is nothing so liberating. And in fact, that is really why Jesus came, didn’t he? He said he came because it was his father’s will that he come to reveal the Father to us, to liberate us from our sins, but to liberate us from our sins by knowing who our father is and living as if that was true.
And so, as we prepare our hearts to welcome our Lord Jesus this Christmas, let’s also prepare, pray that we can prepare our heart to receive what he came to give us. And that is a relationship with God the Father, to live in relationship with him as his children through baptism, to know ourselves, to be cared about and provided for by a loving father and to live as if that’s true. And I think when you see pictures like this of a child that just feels safe and cared for, it strikes us. It strikes us because there is really this power of a parent to bring peace and confidence and serenity, no matter what else is going on in a parent’s life. If they feel secure in their relationship with their parent, they can navigate just about anything. And so therefore, it really shouldn’t surprise us that that is how God designed us to know his fatherhood through our experience of fatherhood.
The First Representatives of God for Man
It says in the catechism in paragraph 239, that human parents are the first representatives of God for man. They are the first people we see. They’re the ones who show us what love is. They’re the ones who show us who God is by reflecting him. And God designed it so that our mother and our father both reflected different aspect of the love of God. When she was writing a letter in 1995 as a direct response to the attack of radical feminism, Mother Teresa said that men specifically reflect one aspect of the Father’s love of God’s love. And women reflect another aspect of God’s love. And that together, they show forth God’s love more perfectly than they do alone. Which is why in God’s plan, we do need a mother and a father. And that means that God specifically created us to see in our experience of fatherhood, whether it’s our dad or our grandfathers, our uncles, priests, other father figures, something of himself as our Heavenly Father.
And when this goes right, it is so incredibly powerful and so healing. But when it goes wrong, is so wounding. The reality that God intended us for as the catechism said, “The reality that God intended that we know him, something of him through our experience of earthly fatherhood is not always what happens.” What happens in and through our experiences is that we take those earthly experiences and often unconsciously we project them onto God, our Father. And we kind of say to ourselves, even if we don’t realize we’re saying it, this is what I experienced about fatherhood, so this must be what God the Father is like. But that’s backwards, because the reality is God isn’t like anything. Your father may or may not have been a true father. Your father figures may or may not have been true father figures. They are that only to the degree that they imaged the protective tender love of God the Father.
So negative or neglectful or abusive experiences actually saying nothing about the Father, because God is not like our fathers. God is the Father, he is definitive, he is the definition of fatherhood. He’s the father from whom all fatherhood gets his name. For this reason, says St. Paul, “I bow my knees before the Father from whom every family in heaven and on earth is named.” We call God our Father in the creed and it’s like the stepping off point of our entire faith. We say, I believe in God the Father Almighty. We say it because the Son taught us to say it. We asked him teach us to pray. And the first thing out of his mouth is our Father who art in heaven.
The catechism of the Catholic church in fact says that the our father is the quintessential and it fundamental prayer of the church. And yet, we have to marvel at that because at the same time it’s fundamental but at the same time, it’s so incredible and awesome that at the mass the priest reminds us that we dare to say this prayer. We dare to call God our Father. It’s really astonishing and we can tend to forget how marvelous it is. So we call God our Father but we might struggle with that because even if you had the best dad, there are at least these little wounds or these little holes that happened in your experience of fatherhood. And they affect your understanding of who God is and they affect our relationship with God, our Father. So they can impact our ability to receive God’s love and mercy and they impact our ability to come to him with our needs, to be vulnerable and to trust him with our heart. And I think we especially see this present today with some who cannot even bear to call God father.
The Deepest Wound There Is
You see father wounds, even seemingly very small father wounds are actually really incredibly powerful things. Neal Lozano, the founder of Heart of the Father Ministries and the author of “Unbound” and “Abba’s Heart” says that no one has ever argued with him when he says that the father wound is the deepest wound there is. Lozano explains in “Abba’s Heart” that even when the father wounds are not the direct source of our pain, they didn’t directly come from the father or the father figure. Our wounds always seem to come back to the father because instinctively, we know that our fathers are supposed to protect us. So when we’re hurt, there’s something in us that feels hurt by the father. And our hurts always kind of dig into that original father wound. As Father James Brent says in his new book, “The Father’s House,” which I highly recommend.
He says horrible experiences of horrible fathers, however is not the last word on fatherhood. Even if you have had a poor experience or no experience of earthly fatherhood, there is still a way to come to know the Heavenly Father. Supernatural mysteries are hard to put into words, but with scripture and tradition to guide us, there is a way to catch the supernatural mystery of the fatherhood of God, a way even for those who have suffered much under their earthly fathers. So there’s a way to come to know God as our father, even if you haven’t experienced the best of earthly fatherhood. And Father Brent goes on to explain what we can know about the Father through Jesus’ words, that he’s going to prepare a place for us and take us to the Father’s house.” And what does that mean?
Well, Father Brent explains that to the followers of Jesus who lived with him in those times, in that culture, those words, the Father’s house would actually be loaded with meaning. Because if you were in the house of a father in those times, that meant you were in the household of a patriarch, the oldest male relative who had a very rich and a very multi-layered role in your life. The first role of the father, Father Brent explains is to supply all of your material needs, food, water, land, livestock, anything you need, it was the father’s role to provide that for you.
The second role of the father was to settle questions of justice, to stand up for you and secure what is due you. And when I read about this in Father Brent’s book, this verse from scripture, from Exodus came to mind, “The Lord will fight for you, you need only to be still.” That was the role of the father. The third role of the father is to provide protection and keep you safe from threats. The fourth role of the father is to teach you the ultimate truth of the world, to tell you what things mean, to hand on tradition and to explain those traditions for you.
And then the fifth role of the father, as Father Brent explains, is to love the members of his house, which quite frankly was revolutionary in those times because the culture surrounding Israel were filled with stories of violence of sons against fathers and fathers against sons. And while Israel wasn’t perfect in this regard, and we know this because if we’ve read scripture, we know that Israel wasn’t perfect and examples of fatherly love still, it was actually a vastly different experience of fatherhood from other ancient cultures.
The Importance of Scripture to Know the Father
And so, God was slowly unveiling himself to his people and we can know something of God and Jesus wants us to know something of God by his calling God our Father. And in knowing the context of what he spoke about God, the Father and the Father’s house. The way that he would most perfectly show forth his fatherhood was not just through his words but his very self. And in John 14, Philip says to Jesus, “Lord, show us the Father, and it is enough for us.” And Jesus says to him, “Am I with you all for such a long time and you have not known me, Philip? He who sees me has seen the Father. How is it you say show us the Father? Do you not believe that I am in the Father and the Father is in me? I’m not speaking the words which I’m saying to you from myself, but the father abiding in me is doing his works.”
So when we read scripture and when we spend time meditating on it, praying with it, inviting the Lord to speak to us through it, we are coming to know the Father personally and intimately because remember, the Father’s word is living and active. He’s speaking to you right now in your exact needs and your exact circumstances in this very moment through the living words of scripture. And so, this is a really powerful way to restore broken images of fatherhood and to heal father wounds and to strengthen our relationship with God the Father, which is our most fundamental relationship.
So invite the Lord to restore your understanding of fatherhood. In fact, you could say that is his mission, that is his reason for coming to save us from our sins, but also restore a relationship to God as his sons and daughters. God is very interested in your understanding of who he is as your father. He wants it more than you do, but he will not force healing upon you. He will wait for your invitation. He waits to be asked into those tender places, those father wound places.
Hagar from the Old Testament
And there’s another way that I invite you to heal or to strengthen your relationship with God the Father, the one who sent his son into the world this advent. I invite you to imitate a character from the Old Testament called Hagar. And I invite you to give God a name and that name that you will call him. You will use that name when you cry out to him or when you are alone or when you are afraid, or when you want to just have this tender relationship with God in prayer.
So let me give you a little backstory about the character of Hagar in the Old Testament. She was the Egyptian maid servant of Sarah, the wife of Abraham in the Old Testament, she had left Egypt with them as their servant. Although Sarah and Abraham had been promised an heir, Sarah had not been able to conceive. And after a while, Sarah starts to despair a little bit and wants to take things into her own hands.
So she’s getting older and she decides to give Hagar to Abraham and he can conceive a child through Hagar and have an heir. And Hagar does conceive a child and then looks down on her and Sarah to Abraham says, “Look, this is ridiculous. You choose, it’s you or me.” And Abraham says, “She’s your servant, do as you wish.” And then Sarah begins to abuse Hagar. It is just nobody’s finest hour in the Old Testament. Finally, it gets so bad that Hagar runs away. She’s heading south, she’s probably heading back to Egypt, back to the pagan land she came from. But there is a lot of desert between her and Egypt. And so basically, she’s running away to die. But somebody has been watching her all along. God intervenes, God sends a messenger to intercept her and this messenger says, he calls her by name, first of all. He says, “Hagar, where have you come from and where are you going?” And then he waits for her to tell her story and he hears her. But then he tells her to go back and he gives her a promise of her own. And then she does something that nobody else in the Hebraic scriptures does. She gives God a name.
You she says, “Our El Roi, the God who sees me.” When we call somebody by a name, we invite a sort of intimacy with them. So in your prayer this advent, I invite you to pray about a special name to call the Father. To express not just his role as a father, but his personhood as your father, and to express something of your unique relationship with him, the unique relationship that he wants for you, that he designed you for from the moment he created you.
Who is God to You?
So just to pray with this is. Is God Abba to you? Daddy? Is God the Father, Heavenly Father, Father of lights, Author of life, Father of orphans? Is he Father of compassion, Father of love or Father of glory? Is he faithful one? Is he my father? Is he Father most holy or Father of mercies? Who has God been for you? Who do you need him to be? Claim his promises about who he is and what he will do by calling him by name and calling him a special name. You can go through the litanies. There are litanies of God the Father and litanies of the Holy Trinity. You could go through those litanies for ideas. He might be life giver to you, vinedresser, Father of joy, Father of all eternity or Eternal Father. Any of these names, you can make your own and you can begin to develop a new aspect of your relationship with God the Father by calling him something special. I believe that he would want that for you. He called you by name. He created you with a word. He called you forth from nothingness. So what name do you have for God the Father? I just invite you to pray with that this advent. Let us pray together now.
Closing Prayer
In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, Amen. Good and gracious Father, we invite you this advent to come into our lives in a new and more deeply intimate way to bind up our father wounds. Help us to know truly what it is to be fathered through your love and your provision in our lives. We give you permission to be our father, Lord. Thank you in your fatherly role for sending your only son into the world so that we might come to know you and to be saved through him. We ask this all in the name of that son, Jesus Christ our Lord, Amen. In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, Amen.
About Clair Dwyer
Because each of us is called to co-create a masterpiece of our lives in cooperation with God, Claire Dwyer writes and speaks at the intersection of creative and spiritual direction. She loves putting words and stories, written and spoken, in service of the Gospel and helping others do the same. Claire is the author of This Present Paradise: A Spiritual Journey with St. Elizabeth of the Trinity and the creator of the Let Yourself Be Loved Women’s Retreat. She serves as content editor of SpiritiualDirection.com and is the co-founder and content director of Write These Words and the PraiseWriters Catholic Writer’s Community. She lives in Phoenix with her family. Follow her—and receive a free“Be Loved” Litany—at ClaireDwyer.com .