In the centuries after Saint Paul, the spiritual concept of a ‘father’ was used for those who had administered baptism to the new Christians. With the rise of monasticism, and from the time of St Jerome onwards, the commitment to this way of life came to be called a “second baptism”. Thus the one responsible for the religious life of the monks was an ‘Abbot’ – a father.
For four years Eugene had lived a community life with the monk Brother Maur, who had given him an appreciation for some of the values of monastic life. In 1815, for instance, Eugene was hesitating between entering a monastery or dedicating himself fully to the apostolic ministry. Some traces of this monastic influence can be found in the Rule of the Missionaries. So Eugene was fully aware of the richness of the concept of spiritual fatherhood in relation to the members of the Missionary group he had brought into existence. In this spirit he wrote about his religious family to the young members who were studying at the Aix seminary:
How happy we are to have such brothers! … Since this is so, our work will go forward. You are destined, my dear children, to perfect it, so make yourself more and more worthy of your great destiny. I will never be grateful enough for the grace the good God grants me in giving me children such as you all are; I feel it keenly, quite deeply and I thank him for it every minute of the day. Grow, my dear friends, in grace and virtue, in the love of Jesus Christ, in union, in the most intimate charity.
Letter to the young oblates in Aix, 29 November 1820, O.W. VI n. 57
“In the Church’s tradition religious profession is considered to be a special and fruitful deepening of the consecration received in Baptism, inasmuch as it is the means by which the close union with Christ already begun in Baptism develops in the gift of a fuller, more explicit and authentic configuration to him through the profession of the evangelical counsels.” John Paul II, Post-Synodal Apostolic Exhortation, Vita Consecrata n. 30, 1996
“The church is not a business with consumers and customers. We are a family with a cause and need those who are willing to die for it.” Ryan Hairston
I recently spent time talking with a dear friend about my relationship with God. My friend was perturbed a bit by my use of the word “Father” when I described some of the ways I relate to God, with me of course being a “child of God”. My friend went on to say that we were both mature adults, with mature and healthy lives of faith, in God; that we were created in the image of God and how hopefully as our faith matures we are no longer children.
I have not been comfortable though with the idea of wiping out and disgarding the image of God as Father. There are many ways I relate to God and Father is but one of them for there is also brother, sister, mother, friend, lover, etc. All of life seems to be described using familial (is that an actual word) words, from plants to animals and humans.
As I grow older I find myself discovering a greater sense of family and connectedness with all of creation. We/I are connected in love, in God and around God – that is, it is through God that we are connected. It is not a boxed-in limited way of being and so we move, we flow back and forth as Eugene seemed to where within the space of a few lines he moves from addressing the young Oblates as “children” to addressing them as his dear “friends”.
I love the quote from Ryan Hairston. It seems to me that it is as a family that the Church lives and thrives and functions, the same with our human family, our “community” families, our blood families. It’s when the “family unit” breaksdown or separates that we can have problems and our focus becomes blurred or lost.
When I move away from my family (at any level) and close myself off, I truly suffer and a part of me dies or can start to die. As compared to when I am present to my family(s) and a part of them that I seem to be most alive. Interesting – I can’t do “it” (life) alone.