To all my fathers, here and gone!

It was a beautiful sunny morning today and as I surfaced from helping to organise a fund-raising dinner the previous nite for nearly 90 people (ending in the early hours of today)  I was welcomed by Father's Day cards from my family. It was a good start to the day realising that despite the everyday stresses of normal family life, you are, after all, appreciated, that you are always considered to be loving and giving....and needed both in the good and the bad times too!


I particularly enjoyed reading some of the cards...learning that I try to bring laughter and happiness to family life.  And that I do my best to keep them from disappointment and strife...especially appreciated since they both are getting married in the coming year. I thought of the years still to come when they would have their own families and they would be doing the same thing....giving the impression that nothing's too much trouble for their own families. When they'd probably move heaven and earth to fulfil their loved ones' dreams. 

It took me back to my young days when I fooled around with my own father, often messing up his office case or filling it with every imaginable scrap of torn paper I could find....and, unaware of my prank, he opened his case in front of a client!!  Can you imagine his face - a senior bank manager - in that awkward situation?  But he took it in his stride.  As always.  There were many other similar pranks on my part (like when I loaded his  cigarettes with matchstick heads and it "exploded" on lighting up - a bit dangerous by today's standards!!) but he smiled them away perhaps wondering what I'd be up to next. 


Those days have now long gone...as he has too, some 20 years ago. He'd be about 95 today if he were still around. Yet I met an old colleague of his the other week while visiting an old people's home ...still going strong despite his age...and with a memory as fresh as ever.  He even recognised me straight away, without any need of introduction, fully remembering the little naughty kid who is now in his Sixties!  


Yet today I also remembered all the other fathers in my life....to start with the many priests I know who though not having a direct family of their own have larger, more extended families to whom they minister pastorally.   We could call these my spiritual fathers...there were, and are, many, because I was originally brought up with the Jesuits under the strict regime of the time (that was called an educational system). Today there are others from across the Christian world whom I have met and still meet regularly.  Above all there is my Divine Heavenly Father who always  surprises me every day with His attention to me. 


The other week, while travelling, I realised what a great love affair there is going on between us.  He loves me beyond any inconceivable boundary while, in my finiteness, I can only reciprocate in such a small way.  He has all the time in the universe for me and my problems, and he is there with me every minute of the day and night as I struggle with my work, my responsibilities, my problems.  Yet, He does the same with everyone else in the world.  He is a very personal God, jealous of His flock that he will protect beyond our imagination. Do you know anyone else who is prepared to do this to you?  Even die for you?  I don't. 


This love affair may sound strange for a man to admit to having with God, who's image is usually of the masculine gender, Our Father, yet there's nothing untoward because God does not have these boundaries....He is our Great Father in Heaven who only wants to have us with Him...and to be given the chance to spend eternity with us.   That's why I love Him...and the family He has given me.  As a father He has given me the right to be a bit like Him, to create human life for Him, in His image and likeness, so He can have another life to love and an abode to live in.  What a great God we have. Can you not love Him and His ways?