Revealing Our Father’s Day

Pope John Paul II said that the future of the world and the Church passes through the family. Obviously if Satan is literally hell bent on thwarting God's plans, the family is a natural place for him to attack. What better way to attack the family than by weakening the head.

In Familiaris Consortio, John Paul said that, "In revealing and in reliving on earth the very fatherhood of God, a man is called upon to ensure the harmonious and united development of all the members of the family."

"Revealing and reliving the very fatherhood of God." Does the sex crazed idiot that we see on TV reveal the fatherhood of God? Never mind TV, how about the nearly 50% of all children born in this country who are born out of wedlock and will have very little contact with their dads? Or what about the dad who works 60 hours and week and sees his children less than a half an hour a day? What about the dad who spends all of his time at home on the internet feeding his addiction to porn? Do any of these dads reveal and relive the very fatherhood of God?

To begin, it is important that we recognize the power of imitation. All day long your children are imitating what they see. They learn by imitation. It is without a doubt that the habits that my children have that annoy me the most are the ones they learned from me. It takes brutal honesty though to admit your faults when you see them in your children and then set out to correct them (in yourself). One day, we were leaving Church my oldest son looked up at the doors leaving the sanctuary and said, "Damn! Those are some big doors!" I pulled him aside gently and told him that wasn't a good thing to say and asked where he heard it. He said he didn't know. In the back of my mind I was thinking of all the places he could have heard it because he didn't hear it from me. Well the next day, I am making a sandwich in the kitchen and a fly lands on it just as I am about to eat it. So I say, "Get off my damn sandwich!" He proceeded to ask me, "What's on your damn sandwich, Dad?" It didn't take any humility on my part to recognize where he got it from at that point. From the moment on I decided that I would put imitation in my parenting toolbox.

I constantly remind myself that my kids are going to imitate whoever has the most influence on them. This underscores the importance of spending time with your kids. The imitating goes on whether I am there or not, so the question becomes if I am going to be there for them to imitate. It is rare that someone would quote Woody Allen in a reflection on fatherhood but I think his point about 80% of life being just showing up is particularly appropriate for fathers.

So many families are so overloaded with activities that these organic moments of fatherhood rarely ever happen. Children need to be included in the activities that their fathers are doing. Where will our sons learn to be men? Where will our daughters learn what a real man looks like? Do our kids really need to learn both the piano and guitar or do they need to see how their father lives and how he does things? The best times are those that we "waste" with our kids, not those that are planned.

Many men today are living with their own father wounds. They don't really know how to be fathers. It is amazing though how many times God will reveal his fatherhood in your own fatherhood. One time, I was moving mulch in the backyard and one of my kids wanted to help me. I was thinking that by helping me he meant that he wanted to jump off the pile. But it turned out that he actually wanted to help me. I had one pitchfork and one wheelbarrow. He wanted to fill the wheelbarrows himself and then let me push them. My first reaction was to say no because it would end up taking me twice as long, but I could feel the Spirit tugging at my heart telling me that this is what God's Fatherhood was. He can do anything He wants without my help and in no time at all, yet He is humble enough and patient enough to let me do it.

My point then is that you need to give your children the opportunity to imitate you, imitating God.

So getting back to my point about revealing the very Fatherhood of God, we can't give our children something that we don't have. We have to know God as Father intimately in order to share Him with our children. So the first question then is what is our prayer life like?

Do our children ever see us pray? Unless they see us pray then all of the words we say to them about prayer are useless. Remember they learn by imitation. We need to let our children hear us pray. Not just rote prayers, which are certainly important, but to hear them pour our hearts out to God.

The greatest gift we can give our children is to teach them how to pray. There is nothing more manly that to be on our knees asking the Lord for help.

I get up early in the morning long before anyone else in the house is awake and pray. Sometimes my kids will come into the Bonus room and see me praying. SO many times I'll walk into the bonus room later in the day and find them with children's Bible in hand praying. This is without any prompting on my part. They go back there to pray because they think that is what they are supposed to do because they have seen their mother and father doing the same thing.

Each week I spend an hour with Our Lord in the Blessed Sacrament. Without any prompting of my own, my nine year old asked if he could come with me. I warned him that it was an hour and that I would take him back later if he wanted to spend less time. Instead he went with me. Why? Because he knows his father does that. The world tells us that is strange, but for our kids it will always be perfectly normal. Showing our children that faith is normal and a normal topic of conversation is extremely important for the times later in life when the world will test their faith.

Going back to the whole just showing up thing, our kids have to see us at Mass and reverent. We cannot let our wives be the spiritual heads of household. Part of our role as spiritual heads of household means going to Mass. I see every Sunday so many mothers there by themselves with their kids. That this idea of spiritual head of household is not simply a holdover from some patriarchal (as if this is necessarily bad) system it seems to bear out empirically. If a father does not attend Church regularly with his family, only 1 in 50 children will grow up and be regular Mass goers…regardless of what the mother does. We must go to Mass with our family!

As Catholics we believe that we hold the full revelation of God's truth. So obviously the other way we can reveal God's Fatherhood to our children is by properly forming them in their faith. This means that we have to be properly formed ourselves. We need to spend the time to learn about our rich tradition and all of the beautiful teachings of the Church. Learn why the Church teaches what she teaches so that when the inevitable questions come from our kids we will be able to answer them. Guess what? If we don't have the answers, they will seek them somewhere else and most likely get the wrong answers. We must never forget that we are the primary educators of our children. We are responsible for them knowing and loving the faith. It's not the Priests, not the CCD teachers and not their Catholic school teachers. They are all there to support us in our roles as primary educators…not to be substitutes.

If you want your children to be obedient to God and to you, you need to show them how you are obedient to His Church and all her teachings. If there is something you don't agree with, investigate it further. I have had a lot of issues with different teachings of the Church and amazingly enough each time that I have looked into the why, it was the 2000 yr old Church guided by the Holy Spirit that was right and not the know it all.

Teach them to love the Church and to respect all of the Bishops and Priests because of their office. Of course this means we have to show the Bishops and Priest respect by never complaining about them in front of our children.

Children love superheroes. If we can introduce them to the saints as God's superheroes it is amazing how well the kids relate and again will try to imitate.

So we can reveal God's Fatherhood by teaching our children to pray and educating them in their faith. How do we relive the Fatherhood of God? There are two ways that I especially want to focus on. The first is for us to protect our children as God protects us. Obviously there are many ways in which we protect our children, but I want to focus especially on how we can protect our children's innocence.

I think it has become very easy for us to become desensitized to all the attacks on our children's innocence that the culture throws at us.

The culture has taken to teaching children a moral relativism. The most egregious way that this is taught to our kids is through "values clarification". It teaches our kids to "make good decisions" by teaching them that they should be guided by their own subjective values. The problem with this is that because there is no consistency the kids take this subjectivism to their own behavior and learn to rationalize just about anything. We have to fight against this by teaching them that there are moral absolutes and things that are always wrong. Isn't this what has made the Church so unpopular; Her insistence that no matter what the circumstances some things are always wrong?

We have to also protect our children's innocence by monitoring their contact with the media saturated culture we live in. Notice that I said monitor. There is a tendency to deal with media contact in one of three ways.

1. Anything goes-This one is pretty obvious
   
2. Nothing goes- This is better than the first, but probably leads to problems later on
   
3. Closely monitor and limit what they do come in contact with. This is the best approach because it teaches them to make value judgments.
   

We need to watch TV with our kids. The TV has become a babysitter in many families and this is very harmful to children. We should point out when someone does something virtuous and when someone didn't. We should encourage our children to think about what they are watching and to filter what is coming in.

Keep the TV in a main room and the computer in a main room where you can see the screen as you walk into the room. This is the best way to keep "My Space from invading your space."

Finally I want to talk for a few minutes on how we should use God as our model for discipline. Keep in mind that the word discipline and disciple have the same root word. We have to keep in mind then that the goal of disciplining our children is always to teach them. Whether you decide to spank your children or not, it is important to always remember that discipline is aimed at the ear and not the rear.

First of all, if we expect our children to grow up and obey God, we have to teach them very early on to obey us. To obey means to listen and respond the first time.

We have a tendency to want to play baseball with our kids, giving them three chances to comply. I think this is not a good approach. First of all it gives them the impression that they do not need to do anything until after the second warning. The second thing is that it makes us more likely to have an explosion. Now our discipline comes out of anger which means we have a tendency to be more extreme and it can hide the love that should always be shown.

This ties in with my second point and that is to be consistent, even when it is inconvenient. Now none of us are consistent all the time, but it should still be our aim. Kids tend to pick up on the times when you are distracted or busy and will often use those times to act up.

Part of consistency is presenting a united front. By this, I mean that you and your wife need to be on the same page. Demand that your children respond to the voice of their mothers. Even if you do not agree with what your wife is saying, go along with it. It is better to present a united front than to show that one of you does not have ultimate authority. Ultimately, if one of you doesn't have full authority, your kids will see it as neither of you do.

Something that parents often struggle with too is kids in Church. Teach your children to be reverent in Church. This starts with us being reverent the minute we enter the sanctuary. We should genuflect to recognize that Christ is our King and He is truly present in the Church in the Eucharist and we should be prayerful and quiet. This will set the tone for your children by letting them know that Church is a place to be quiet. If you do have to take your children out, I would recommend that there be a stiff punishment attached to it. For younger ones if you have to take them out I would recommend that you hold them, speak to them about their behavior and then return. To let them go out and run around simply tells them that if they act up then they get to go out and run around.

One final thing I want to talk about is a devotion to St. Joseph. This is especially a good thing for those of us who for whatever reason did not have good fatherly role models of our own. God chose St. Joseph to be the teacher and protector of the most important man to walk the face of the earth. When the culture was out to get Jesus as a child and Herod killed all the Holy Innocents, Joseph dropped everything and took the Holy Family to Egypt. He searched tirelessly to find him when he was lost for three days. He taught Jesus how to read, how to pray and how to be a carpenter. Take advantage of his intercessory power to ask Jesus to make you a better father.