I believe the Lord is calling fathers to build the “communities of love” the Church tells us our families are supposed to be. But this can be a tall order, especially when so many of us (like Jack) have no reliable blueprint. I offer you the following five tips as a starting point for becoming the kind of father God is to us, and is calling us to be to the children he has entrusted to our care.
1) Be the Pastor of Your Family Parish
Catholics consider the family to be “the domestic church.” This means several things, but perhaps the most important ideal conveyed by this phrase is that each family must be centered around a deep love of Christ. Fathers play a central role in making this happen.
Ancient Hebrew tradition made it the father's responsibility to teach his children the Law of God, the Torah. Interestingly, psychological research supports this tradition, having found that children who grow up to exhibit the highest levels of moral virtue and healthiest spirituality learned to do so at the father's knee. These same studies suggest that even when the mother is active in teaching the Faith to her children, her efforts are severely hampered–even nullified–if the father is not leading the way.
Sacred Tradition and solid research agree. Catholic fathers must be the pastors of their family parishes. This begins when we pursue a close, personal relationship with Jesus Christ both in personal prayer and in the Eucharist. And it continues when we take the lead in encouraging family prayer, and serve as the primary teachers of the Faith in our homes.
2) Love Your Wife
Father Theodore Hesburgh, former president of the University of Notre Dame, is credited with saying, “The best thing a father can do for his children is to love their mother.”
Love certainly involves giving tokens like the traditional flowers, cards, and candy, but it is also so much more. The Christian definition of real love is “willing and working for the good of another.” Everyday we must ask ourselves, “What can I do to make my wife's life a little easier, more enjoyable, more grace-filled?” and then we must do it. Not only because she deserves it, but because our Christian dignity demands it. Doing this serves the “Prime Directive” of Christian discipline: teaching our children how to have healthy adult relationships with others and the God who made them.
Jesus said, “Anyone who says he loves God but hates his neighbor is a liar.” We cannot legitimately consider ourselves Catholic, Christian men unless we give every drop of energy we have to loving – that is, daily working for the good of our closest neighbors, our wives and children. What can you do for yours today?
3) Foster A Family Identity
Every Christian is given “a mission from God” (as the Blues Brothers put it) to live out the spiritual qualities we are given at baptism. A family identity statement is a means by which each family member can help the others fulfill their life purpose and help each other to grow in Christian virtue.
Sit down with your wife and children today and, starting with yourself, ask each person: “Who does God want you to be when you grow up?” That is, what qualities, like love, wisdom, service, joy, etc., do each of you wish to be your legacy at the end of your lives? Once you have developed a list of these qualities, take turns discussing what changes you would have to make in the daily life of the family in order to achieve the goal of living out these virtues more fully. What priorities would have to change? What behaviors would have to be exhibited? What skills would you need to develop? How will you keep each other on target?
Write your answers down and post them in a prominent place so that all can see what your family stands for.
4) Love and Serve Your Children
We all want obedience from our children. But true, Christian obedience (as opposed to fear-based, blind obedience) is best understood as a loving response to having been loved first. As St. Therese conveyed in her Story of a Soul, she never wanted to do anything to offend her parents because the love and service they showered upon her compelled her to offer nothing less in return.
Of course, God “commands” our obedience in the same way. He is constantly reaching out to us, showering us with love so that one day we might wake up from our sin-induced trances and say, “God really does love me. I can trust him. I will follow him.” As the children's Bible school song says, “O, How I love Jesus, because he first loved me.”
Mirroring God our Father, we earthly fathers must work to expand our capacity for love, affection, and service for our children. We must take the time to play our children's games. We must kiss them and cuddle them and gently correct them and say that we love them at least a thousand times a day. We must be demonstrative with the pride and joy we feel when we look at our little ones. To paraphrase the great Catholic apologist and child psychologist Fr. Leo Trese, “It is not enough to have love for a child, we must show it, or it will be as if the child was never loved at all.”
Boys especially need a father's demonstrative love. Even now, there is a cultural bias against boys with regard to displays of fatherly affection, but God created every human being to need love more than anything else. Babies -including boy babies – will refuse food and drink to the point of death if they are not kissed and cuddled enough, and even older boys show the effects of a lack of affection.
It is my professional opinion that the reason so many parents experience boys as more troublesome than girls is because in many homes, boys are typically shown less affection than girls, since they are thought to need it less. I am convinced of this because I have seen boys who have grown up in homes where they, with their sisters, experienced generous physical and verbal affection from their fathers. These boys are no more troublesome than their sisters, and they display just as much emotional and communicative ability as their sisters.
At the same time, these young men are in no way effeminate. They are “all boy” with regard to their interests and games, but they are capable of more love and sensitivity than boys from less affectionate homes, they are better with younger brothers and sisters than boys from less affectionate homes, and they are better behaved to boot. In short, the generous affection of their mothers and fathers is helping these boys not only become men, but Christian gentlemen.
5) Heed God's Call to Growth
Peter DeVries once said, “The value of marriage is not that adults produce children, but that children produce adults.” Through the grace of marriage and family life, God calls each Christian father to grow up – to be perfected in love. But growing up can be hard work for us fathers. Sometimes, rather than facing and challenging our weaknesses – our lack of patience, limited capacities for affection, feelings of incompetence, dislike of the chaos and noise of childhood – we retreat into work, friends, community involvements, or “important” ministries. (“I'm sorry, Hon. Gonna be home late again, that client/meeting/friend/committee called today and they really need me!”)
Yet the Good Lord continuously brings us back home at the end of the day to remind us that there is nothing more important than learning to love our closest neighbors, than being perfected by the work of love, without which we will be poorly prepared to join in the feast of love at the Heavenly Banquet.
Embrace the weakness, incompetence, vulnerability you feel in the presence of your wife and children. Experience these feelings as the voice of God calling you to grow up, to be perfected in his love. Doing this can be a fearsome task, but it is a task worthy of a true Christian man compelled by the love of Christ to “Take up your cross and follow me.”
Products
A Father Who Keeps His Promises, by Scott Hahn
10 Mistakes Catholic Parents Make, by Patrick Madrid
Like Father, Like Son, by Scott Hahn (audio)
Related Articles
Teaching Faith, Teaching Faithfully, by Zoe Romanowsky
The Fathers on Men, by Paul Thigpen, Ph.D
Subversive Masculinity, by Sarah E. Hinlicky
Discussion Forum
What are your techniques for sharing love and creating a paternal bond with your children?
To contact Mr. Popcak about marriage and family issues you may call (740) 266-6461 or visit his website at http://www.exceptionalmarriages.com)
