This is an excerpt from an article that was previously published in Sword & Spade magazine.
Although mothers come with their own forms of disorder, in Scripture it seems to belong to fathers to cause explicit pain and wounds. Sirach tells men to not go around their house “like lions” hurting people (Sir. 4:30). St. Paul tells husbands to not be harsh with wives and not to rouse children to anger (Col. 3:19, Eph. 6:4). Catholic fathers should be very interested in father wounds if for no other reason than problematic relationships with a father and a rejection of God seem to have a strong correlation.
The father is a presence that is “other” — he is outside this inner world of childhood but in the way of an overseer, dependable but different from the mother. In many cultures, the mother even serves as a sort of go-between for child and father, communicating needs and wants in ways that she understands especially as one “closer” to both parties. The father’s gaze is outward to the world, but not in the sense of not seeing his children or lacking affection, but of peering into the future so that he may provide for and guide his family as well as watch for danger.
While attachment to the father is not unimportant, there is a predominance of the maternal during this first stage.
Interestingly, God compares His action to motherly or feminine initiatives precisely when He is gathering us into comfort and nourishment. “As a mother comforts her child,” God says through Isaiah, “so I will comfort you…” (v. 66:13). The only time Jesus refers to Himself in the feminine is when He looks out over Jerusalem with a tender sorrow and says He wished He could gather His people in like a hen “gathers her chicks.” God even compares His unending care with the apparent inability for a nursing mother to forget her child (Isaiah 49:15). Motherliness brings security through protective comfort and an encompassing embrace.
…Maturity moves us from the dependence of a child to the dependability of a man. And, as you might have guessed, it belongs especially to the father to oversee the move of children away from dependence to responsible dependability. This is why fatherhood comes with a much stronger sense of discipline. Discipline, we should note, is different from simple punishments, which are about restoring justice when something wrong has been done and are more common in younger years. Discipline is not about something that was done, but about something one will have to do. Discipline prepares your character — body and soul — to be able to exit your childhood comforts to more fully enter your community and family.
In full maturity, instead of receiving discipline, so to speak, the child learns to be disciplined in the freedom of self-mastery. The nourishment of our young years is like the
gentle protection over a seedling. But discipline, as Scripture alludes to, is much more like the pruning and guiding of an older or maturing plant and relies heavily on the father’s role. The way Scripture portrays fatherliness helps us see this more clearly.
In the Old Testament earthly fatherhood is used only analogously and very sparingly to describe God’s ways. Like an earthly father, God gives life, establishes law, protects, and deserves filial obedience and honor. “If I am a father,” God asks through the prophet Malachi, “where is my worship?” (Mal. 1:6). God is angry when His “children” forget that He has provided for them (Deut. 32:18-19).
In the New Testament and by the coming of Christ, however, God is no longer like a father but is our Father. It is reality, not analogy. Our salvation comes by “becoming sons in the Son” and He truly is Our Father.
In the Old Testament God disciplines His people especially through just punishments for sins, but in the maturity that comes by way of the Gospel there is a new and we might even say a more maturing element to His discipline: the cross.
Matthew 16 says “If anyone would follow me let him take up his cross…” In Christ our discipline comes by way of the cross, by the transformation of all suffering into redemption. As fathers we must do the same, leading with our suffering. Just as God does not leave us orphaned and perfects us through the cross, so too we enter into our children’s life with a form of discipline that completes and matures them — it goes beyond mere punishment and law.
This all sounds nice, but clearly there is a great challenge with discipline. The cross is not always seen as loving discipline but as “foolishness” and “a stumbling block” (1 Cor. 1:23). As a father must cut away the comforts of childhood, so too our heavenly discipline cuts us away from the creature comforts we develop. There’s good reason to reject the offer of discipline and thereby reject maturity altogether. Just as a spoiled brat learns to avoid the father that tells him no to a second piece of cake (or a promiscuous girlfriend), so too traditional theology tells us that hatred of God comes primarily from bodily indulgence because God says “no” to the thing we learn to love instead of Him.
…To reach maturity an individual is asked to sacrifice all he has known, all that has brought comfort, and all that he loves, in order to set out into a world unknown and potentially dangerous. And the father forces the issue and even charts the path. There is ample reason to reject discipline — to reject the father — in an effort to preserve the comforts of immaturity.
It also isn’t hard to see how an outright abusive father would lead to a lasting wound. But this is not really discipline per se. His punishments, in fact, might simply be acts of rage and misguided anger (which is wrath). Clearly a fatherless home will inflict wounds by its own constitution. But in these cases the father abandons true discipline. He is not guiding his children toward maturity but punishes them punitively for grating on or exposing his own ego and insecurities.
In our “drop off ” society, dads are often seen as the ones that pay for the programs and places that form our sons and drop them off there. Being either (or both) too busy and too lazy, we are distant powers that might provide but we don’t discipline, we don’t teach. It even seems that, when the relationship or behavior sours in our children in adolescence (the stage of discipline), we’re stuck simply piling on more law in the form of restrictions and rules.
Seeing this more clearly we can note that absence (emotional or physical) and abuse are not actually forms of discipline. But, because discipline could be rejected and
always tends toward discomfort (in contrast to the mother that tends toward comfort), fathers must be careful to maintain the relationship through the discipline instead of taking the extreme of benign a “buddy dad” (no discipline) or a “tyrant dad” (lacking paternal affection). In other words, while it is true that fatherhood can easily tend toward being a source of pain, the answer is not less fathering — but more.
In studying the ways of God and the life of Christ, therefore, we don’t merely learn tips about leadership, but we see more clearly what true fatherhoodis, because our fatherhood is a reflection of His.
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