Reading Francis

A good friend asked me, “Do you look at your faith differently – decades on – now that you have raised a girl child into a woman?” That seems like an appropriate topic for Father’s Day.

It’s a great question, and unfortunately I need a running start to answer it.

Lesser loves either prepare us for or prevent us from realizing the perfect, sanctifying love of the divine Lover. They prepare us by providing infinite recurring opportunities to decenter ourselves, to get over ourselves, to put the needs of another ahead of our own. They prevent us in two ways: when we reject the invitation to will the good of the other and choose selfishness, and when we build walls around those we are willing to love, excluding the rest of Creation that God loves just as inestimably as ourselves, by saying, “These I will love. But no more.” That is the idolatrous nature of lesser loves.

Marriage is, for my money, the most effective of lesser loves. When two people commit to love each other, for better or worse, and then put a lifetime of effort into honoring that commitment, the sheer proximity and constant presence of another person who, at a similar lifestage, is (roughly) equally as broken and limited and difficult as ourselves is the best sandpaper for rounding our sharp edges, tumbler for polishing the grit and dirt off the unrefined gem of a soul, weight and resistance for building the muscle of self-forgetting. Insert other metaphors as you wish.

By the way, while the Church has set parameters for big-S sacramental marriage that are primarily ontological, I believe that true little-s sacramental marriage of this sort is both rarer and more fragile. My experience is that it does not matter the lineup of genders in the pairing, nor their fecundity (though more on that in a second). Same-sex couples that are able to enact this sort of all-in commitment to each other are equally testaments to the supernatural power of grace, it seems to me. At the same time, I’m afraid very few of us realize on the way into marriage that this self-forgetting is the point, rather than more romantic ideals of wedded bliss. It seems sometimes that a minority ever really catch on.

I can’t speak to the many heroic people who raise children as single parents. I am in awe of what they do. For April and me, it took almost all of both of us to raise one child, and a relatively easy one at that. I can only speak to this experience.

Parenting with a partner is an exponential magnification of the self-forgetting of marriage’s lesser love. The needs of an infant are so much greater than those of a fellow adult, and while those needs change as your child grows, they don’t lessen, so much as shape-shift. There is an extra pitfall for married parents, because the parenting role is so absorbing that, unless you’re intentional, you can mistakenly elevate it above the vocation of marriage. I know a lot of divorces that stem from couples who became co-parents and household managers while forgetting their primary calling to marriage.

OK.

All that said, I think parenting has helped me see God differently in ways that I’m not sure marriage parallels. I feel more kinship with God the Father in a small way, having created with April this unique person, not ex nihilo, but from our own selves. With children at any age, you notice the parental resemblances, not just physically but in habit and character; if the notion of being “made in the image of God” has any parallels to this, God must enjoy when our divine resemblances show up in the way we love. 

Especially during adolescence, we both experienced the sadness of being rejected by our own “creation”, as she went through the normal teenage stage of establishing her own boundaries of independence (and, again, she was and is a GREAT kid; it’s just part of the deal). And of course, the willingness to sacrifice anything for your kid is a shadow of the divine impulse. Those are ways I better understand and appreciate God.

The other thing I’ll say is that parenting opened the door for me to a relationship, a fellowship with Mary. I was raised Methodist; Mary was just a supporting character in the story for me. When I joined the Catholic Church, the Marian doctrines were my biggest hangup. But as you watch your heart walk around in another body, as many people define parenting, I found myself turning to Mary to sympathize and maybe pull some strings for me.

Having an adult child is amazing. She is very much her own person, and yet she pulls from both of our DNA. We have a shared history of jokes and stories that encompasses almost her whole life, which we enjoy. She still has problems, but each time she tackles one on her own, making a “grown adult” decision, we are both awed by her competence. And April and I are both crazy about her.

I suspect that a boy would have been different in some ways. Betsy is no shrinking violet; she blows things up for a living, and has the certification from ATF to prove it. She knows more about sports than most of the men she knows (that, at least, I can say she got from me). She knows more about electrical work than I do. But she carries a sense of wonder and naivete, about small animals and nature, about love stories, about the arts, that our culture would probably have drubbed out of a boy. I’d say seeing her hold onto that essential innocence, even amidst her general worldliness, is another way to see through God’s eyes.

How’s that for an answer?

Happy Father’s Day