Meditations on God the Father

Do you know God the Father? He knows you and has treasured you from before the foundation of the world. He has contemplated you as a gift to give to His Son from before time began, and as His work of creation has unfolded in space and time, He chose the specific moment and circumstances in which He would summon the thought of you into your own existence. There is nothing accidental about who you are or about the circumstances. All of these have been carefully prepared so that you might know Him and His immense love for you.

This is even true of the tragic and painful circumstances that may seem to be utterly crushing and for which there would seem to be no answer - yet, He awaits you in this pain all the same with a love so great it will "dry every tear" no matter the bitter sorrow or tragedy that has befallen. He wants you to know His paternal love and to find your rest in it with His beloved Son Jesus. So has He sent Christ the Lord to find you as a shepherd his lost sheep. If you have been searching for God, if suffering has so overwhelmed you that you need to find answers, the Father is searching for you evenmore and yearns to find you in the Heart of his only-begotten Son.

"Whoever sees me, has seen the Father" John 14:9.

If you want to know God, Jesus is the exegesis, the interpretative key of the Father. If you want to know the truth about God the Father, you need to believe in Jesus. The prayer of Jesus is the doorway to this kind of faith. This means, to know, to see, to believe in Jesus, one needs to enter into his Heart through His prayer. His prayer is no intellectual abstraction. It is no Tower of Babel constructed by the industry of human religiousity. It is no mere state of enlightenment that manages to float above the fray of human suffering and even less the evolution of human consciousness beyond the particularities that define its limits. His prayer culminates the wordless cry of a dying man, and in this wordless cry, the hands over to those who might believe the whole truth about who He is and who the Father is. This kind of prayer is on fire with an unquenchable love and only this kind of prayer can overcome evil and conquer death.

This means that the words that Christ addresses to the Father disclose the deepest truth about who He is as eternal Son and what it means for us to be adopted into his Sonship by faith. Jesus yearns for us to know this truth beyond the act of intellectual assent. Instead, He wants us to live in and by this truth - to live in and by the love that He reveals.

"Father, I will that where I am, those whom you have given to me might also be, in order that they might see the glory that you have giving me because you have loved me from before the foundation of the world" (Jn 17:24).

St. Elisabeth of the Trinity remarks that this spiritual place that Christ's has asked for us is "the bosom of the Father." What is the essence of this bosom by the eternal sonship of Christ? We are meant to dwell in Christ's own filial devotion to the Father by faith and Jesus's great prayer before His death is that we enter into this filial mystery, that we find our very life within its infinite horizons, that we might have with Him the perfectly meaningful and loving life that He has known from before the foundation of the world.

"My child, when you come to serve the Lord, prepare yourself for testing." (Sirach 2:1).

Here, we are confronted with the whole mystery of what is most sacred in life and in the world. What is most sacred holds the world and everything in it together, and yet it is not of the world. We carry within us a fascination with the sacred and a kind of nostalgia for it. We also carry an awareness that we are estranged from it, that we do not feel at home in it. But what is it? This is the bosom of the Father, the place where filial and paternal eternal love come together in a new fruitful freedom. The sacred is the source of life. Put differently, in God the Father, the Son yearns to share the life of the Holy Spirit with us because this fullness of life makes us fruitful, sources of life for a dying world. What is most sacred is the eternal relations of the Trinity in the Oneness of the Divine Nature, and this is the life into which Christian prayer baptizes the believer.

To understand this even deeper, the very structure of what is sacred impells us to search the mystery of the beginning. All kinds of creation myths exist that describe the sacred in terms of a primal struggle with the forces of chaos. Indeed, many thinkers today see life as a struggle against chaos, a fight for meaning, so that holding life together around some sort of sacred purpose (even if it is simply self-care) is principally defined in terms as a struggle. This is not without some truth. Yet, in many of these pre-Christian traditions, good and evil are co-extensive principles, equal and opposing powers of light and darkness out of which humanity rises and into which it will fall again. What God reveals in the Bible, however, proposes that these principles are not equal at all. Indeed, God is completely sovereign over evil just as the heavens are soveriegn over the earth, and moreover, just as God reigns in the heavens, His kingdom is breaking out on the earth.

"The Gates of Hell shall not prevail" (Matt 16:18)

This is God's battle cry against evil, and this conflict is already won, because, from the beginning, nothing can stand between us and the love of God. The Christian faith sees the legitimate and unvanquished sovereigny of God at the beginning of creation because, at the end of time, it is under His reign that we will find our peace. And, moreover the conclusion of all things is no distant, remote future possibility, but a mystery already breaking into the present moment. This means, already now, life by faith opens up the possibility of entering into the rest of God, even in the face of our present struggle. We fight the good fight not only for what lay in store for us, but also for the peace Christ gives us now.

"In the beginning.... " (Gen. 1:1).

To believe that God is our Father is to choose to take our stand with life as a meaningful gift, a treasure to be thankful for, and a task to be freely embraced. To throw life away in addiction or abortion or euthanasia is objectively to reject the gift that God's love generously, gratuitously offers us. This is because every life, no matter the suffering, is endowed with sacred and terrible purpose, from its very first moment to its final breath. An unrepeatable manifestation of the glory of God entrusted to humanity, deprived of the glory of even the least of those entrusted to us, the world is less. Though the mystery of suffering and death may seem to obscure what a particular life has enriched us with, the beauty of the world would be diminished had God not granted us this particular endpoint in eternity even if for the briefest of moments in this life. For the human soul, as a manifestation of the eternal glory of God, is terrifyingly immortal, and uncontainable by space and time, even as it unveils itself in the particular circumstances of history and place, even under the veils of catastrophe and misfortune.

The beginning and end of life are contained in the mystery of what is truly sacred in the heart of God. Each new life is a new sign that the world that God creates has its beginning in a fullness of meaning, that is, in God Himself, so that in God alone does the human person discover the deepest truths about himself and the purpose of life. Through our faith in God, we experience for ourselves that life is not meaningless, that it has great purpose, that there is something worth living for because the world comes from an all powerful, all loving, all good God whose intention and purpose of us is always benevolent. He wants us to thrive, to live life to the full, even in the mystery of horrific circumstances and overwhelming distress.

"In the Beginning, the Word" (John 1:1).

Terrrible gratuitous suffering will often cause even the most faithful to question all that they hold sacred. There are even moments of utter abandonment and powerlessness, when all seems lost. Just as light shone in the darkness from the beginning, the Word has gone before us into this chaos and sanctified it as well. The Son is related to the Father as the Word is related to the Beginning. Relation, order, harmony, beauty, an analogy of being surpasses and reigns over the horrific mystery of suffering and death our lives confront.

In the face of all the disharmony in the world and in our hearts, when we profess that we believe in God the Father, we assert, not withstanding exisgencies we confront, that above it is is nothing accidental, but an intrinsically subsistent relation that can never be shaken: the Son dwells in the Father just as the Word dwells in the Beginning. There is no fatherhood without sonship and no beginning without the presence of something meaningful. This means that God is no arbitrary or whimsical or abusive tyrant, but a unity of the most beautiful relations in One God. And the Father yearns for us to share in this beauty with Him. It is on this sacred ground that we make a new beginning, that we start again, that we choose not to be defined by our failures or shortcomings, but instead to embrace the mystery that our lives are defined by the Father's love.

"The Image of the Invisible God" (Col. 1:15).

Jesus reveals the Father to us in a way that evokes a new hope in humanity. This is becasue the Word makes known the everything that begins in the love of the Father and offers it to us, even in the terrible plight of self-contradiction that we so often choose for ourselves. This means that our faith has access to a love that sustains all that is and orders it to the completion, the perfection, the fullness that awaits in the bosom of the Trinity. Our prayer of faith unleashes this love, the love of the only begotten Son, the love of the unbegotten Father, the love of the Holy Spirit spirated in the relations of the Father and the Son. Once prayer unleashes such love, who can stop it?