A FATHER'S (DAY) REFLECTION:

...It has become unbelievable precisely because Christianity has been so successful in projecting the image of God as an all-loving Father...

...What matters is the insight it gave him (and me) into the meaning we read into our liturgy...

...In ruder times, a father's safety was guaranteed by others' fear that his son would avenge him...

...But if we take away the Mass's power over God, if it ceases to be something we do for God or to God, if God doesn't need changing, what is left...

...People could salvage some aspect of love in God only by postulating that the sickness, disaster, human weakness and death in the world were a punishment for something man had done...

...But does evolution remove the ultimate mystery of suffering...

...Scientific ignorance drives him to invent a religious explanation which is at least better than the notion of a God who enjoys human suffering...

...But the image of fatherhood in general has improved enormously in recent generations...

...A FATHER'S [DAY] REFLECTION JULIAN R. PLEASANTS The image of God the Father in the liturgy is unbelievable The more understandable the liturgy becomes, the more unbelievable it becomes...

...The whole meaning of the gospel good news, that we love God by loving our neighbor, becomes perverted to the idea that we love our neighbor by loving God in a particular kind of ritual which magically helps the world...

...It has made Jesus a hero at the cost of making human beings into flunkies and God the Father into an ogre...

...I did this in articles, but most of all in endless explanations to my children...

...They are not evils from the point of view of the progression of life, but means to its improvement...

...But what about all the suffering that doesn't get responded to...

...At least we don't have the added suffering of thinking that it is a punishment or that it means God is angry at us...

...No father would ever suggest that his children are worthless...

...Jung quotes one of the Indians...

...Both the English and American positions distort some of the truth about us, truth which we need more than anything else, and which we can only accept within an atmosphere of love...

...When we're very little, with no critical faculties developed, we can readily see our fathers as all-loving...

...Not satisfied with letting the liturgy now speak for itself, I made explicit, though not in the pejorative terms used above, the Pauline-Augustinian interpretation of what the Mass was telling us...

...And by appeasing his bloodthirsty Father for us, he makes it possible for his Father to accept us at last...

...I think I've found an answer in Carl Jung's description of the religion of the Pueblo Indians (Memories, Dreams and Reflections...

...We will go to Mass when our need is a parent...

...And in any case, children were the guarantors of support in sickness and old age...

...that there is no collective guilt, though plenty of reasons for personal guilt, even about our unacted-out desires...

...I could even imagine God the Father working that way if the results of such a belief, common (as Jung says) to all religions, had not been so uniformly ghastly...

...The Mass as the memorial of the life, death and resurrection of Jesus could be telling us all that, telling us that God is all-loving, that man is worth loving, worth Jesus' giving his life and death to us...

...and that institutions serve to keep individuals in line and to bring out in them higher qualities...

...To answer, we must return to the modern image of fatherhood, so different from the static world view of earlier times in which the child followed in the parents' footsteps...

...when we need convincing that it is all worthwhile...

...When this was what every other aspect of my world view was telling me, how could I have gone on explaining the Mass to myself and to others so exactly wrong...

...There was a time when wife and children were the poor man's serfs, the businessman's clerks, the powerful man's stepping stones to more power by way of family liaisons...

...It is the genius of a good father (and how few of us accomplish it) to convince his children of their intrinsic personal worth while encouraging them to be even more than they are and while reminding them of the worth of all their brothers and sisters...

...They couldn't possibly be connected with punishment of human sin, since they preceded man by hundreds of millions of years, and may well continue long after man has become extinct...

...But we must keep reminding God the Father of this deal, or he may slip back into old habits...

...It is only in such a world that creative love and loving creativity can operate...

...He alone, by his life, death and resurrection could convince us how great we are, how much greater we can be, and how great everyone is, and can be...

...It is the greatest thing he can do because it is the greatest thing anybody can do, the greatest thing God does...

...Even God the Father could not solve it without giving us his son Jesus...

...The Mass on this year's Father's Day had St...

...It is obviously the greatest power in the world...

...When is our need a parent...

...The family-centered economic system made children such an economic advantage for the father that his motives were bound to get mixed up...

...Whether his interpretation of their religion is true or not doesn't matter here...

...How could I have been so enthusiastic about participating in an expiatory rite that all my religious instincts told me was denigrating both God and man...

...And what a dignity...

...Then why doesn't this come through in the Mass...

...Our needs for truth and love are never fully satisfied because we never finish growing...

...But that is what the Pauline-Augustinian tradition of the Fall, Atonement and Redemption tells us is there in the Mass...

...The notion that we are the only people having an "in" with God has produced and is producing a tragic history of oppression, exploitation and bloodshed...

...God the Father-Mother will not do less.od the Father-Mother will not do less...

...And what of God the Father...

...we are the sons of Father Sun, and with our religion we daily help our father to go across the sky...

...These are racial prejudice-condemning a whole race (the human race) for what some of its members do or did-and genocide-inventing suffering and death to punish and destroy the members of the condemned race...

...This is what God has given him...

...In a Commonweal column last year, Michael Novak cited a sociological survey comparing American and English teenagers...

...that we don't need to change God's attitude towards us, which is and has always been loving-we only need to change our attitude towards God and each other...

...We are worthless, sinful children, hopelessly on the outs with our Father...

...In the technological economic system, children are no longer an economic asset...

...Now I can see what made some of us so excited by the liturgical movement and participatory liturgy...

...But how to account for the unfairness of the way different people pay the price of living in an imperfect world...

...But they do appear as evil when self-consciousness emerges on the evolutionary scene, and the individual sees himself suffering while others escape, and he can see no reason for either the existence or the distribution of suffering...

...We might suppose that this is the usual and expected reaction of youth to the cynicism of age...

...Having absorbed this lesson from our Father, why can't we just go out and live what every father wants for (and from) his children: that they reach their full potential, and do it in loving concern for each other's development...

...What Jesus's life, death, and resurrection really save is the image of an all-loving Father...

...I point out to my microbiology class that as long as people attributed to God the activities of germs, God would bear the attributes of a germ: cruel, capricious, self-centered, unpredictable and unfair...

...But what do we find in the liturgy...

...but "Why did somebody make it fall to punish me...

...The image of fatherhood is now already shaped by the theory of evolution...

...The American young people tended to think the individual is basically good, honest, generous, reliable...

...She didn't mean: "How did I make it fall...

...He hopes to maintain his independence, even when he realizes it doesn't always work out that way...

...We do this not only for ourselves but for the whole world...

...Now I can imagine a father who, out of pity for the unavoidable powerlessness of his children, might fake a certain hard-heartedness and let it be known what kind of actions might soften him up...

...The modern family is not a closed circle but a center of radiation...

...Only Jesus is admirable in the liturgy...

...I have seen the attitude in a little child who asks: "What did I do wrong, Daddy...

...What about the children who suffer...

...The death and resurrection of Jesus do not save man from the anger of God, but save God from the anger of man attuned to individual self-consciousness and aware of the unfairness of it all...

...A father is free to love his children for themselves...

...It has finally become possible to think of fatherly love as disinterested love...

...And as long as our ancestors' collective consciousness was much stronger than their individual consciousness, the unfairness of the situation was not so obvious, though I like to think some parents in every age had the decency to rail against a God who would punish little babies with dysentery and death because of something their ancestors did...

...I suspect that the old instincts of the laity were correct, that we go to Mass to receive something from God, not to give something to him...

...The other big thing which has made the liturgical image of God the Father so incredible is modern science in general and evolutionary biology in particular...

...That something is still there, though obscured by all the prescientific cosmology of fall, atonement and redemption...

...Those who see causality in personal rather than scientific terms are forced to think of evil as punishment...

...If we've once gotten this message, why do we need to be reminded of it frequently in the Mass...

...If we were to cease practicing our religion, in ten years the sun would no longer rise...

...Children can indeed get that impression-it's a hazard of our achievement-oriented world-from parental reminders of how far they have to go, but that is the tremendous problem that parents are meant to solve...

...This could gradually, over time, get them enough over their burden of collective guilt to let them consider the real message of Jesus's life and death, that God is an all-loving Father, that he is not angry at man and never was, that sickness and death have absolutely nothing to do with punishment...

...The image of the father as all-loving comes easy to us at only two times in our lives...

...Maybe at one time that same image appeared unbelievably good in comparison to the fatherhood then prevailing...

...Incidentally, what I've said above and will say below, could equally well apply to God as Mother...

...It has taken a social and economic revolution to enable us to discover this same truth about the family of God...

...That is the kind of worthmanship that the ideal parent provides...

...We could see the Mass not as Jesus' gift to the Father for us (a gift totally unnecessary) but as Jesus' gift of himself to us, to convince us of our worth, our tremendous potential...

...Evolution In the evolutionary world view, pain, sickness and death are an integral part of the evolutionary process...

...The liturgy starts out with two enormous put-downs: of us, and of God the Father...

...There is the pre-medical student who thinks his entire worth, the sole meaning of his life, hangs on his grade point average, and is driven to deep depression when his GPA hangs in the balance...

...But somewhat later, we begin to see our fathers as less than perfect, and later still, in rebelling as we must against our state of dependence and subservience, we may think our fathers are not loving at all...

...Whether we think we are all-loving, or should have been, or still hope to be, we now have an image, one with realism and content, of what God might be like...

...It enabled us to identify not with worthless man or the un-fatherly Father, but with Jesus, the only hero of the piece...

...Jung found the Pueblo Indians extremely secretive about their religion, but by observing their visible reactions, as well as their limited answers to his questions, he formed his own idea of their religion and of the great dignity it gave them...

...Jung himself comments: "Our Christian religion-like every other, incidentally-is permeated by the idea that special acts or a special kind of action can influence God . . . The ritual acts of man are an answer and reaction to the action of God upon man...

...Evolution has no answer...

...But it represents an American extreme...

...And their religious ritual is essential to keep God going...

...Fortunately, most people don't get this picture from the Mass, just because it is so unbelievable...

...When we need to be assured that we are loved, that we are worth loving...

...But he is only the tip of the iceberg of uncertainty about one's personal worth...

...At the other extreme are the students so naively sure of themselves, on largely theoretical grounds, that they believe anyone who has reached maturity is perfectly capable, by himself, of handling alcohol, money, sex and all the individuals who try to victimize him...

...He is so kind that he loves even sinful, worthless man and imputes to us a value not exactly ours...

...I even wrote a Master's dissertation on it, parts of which were later published...

...It took me a long time to realize that as long as the main thrust of the liturgy is to change God, and to change men indirectly by changing God, the real power of the Mass to change men's hearts is largely dissipated...

...The modern father does not raise children to care for him when the roles are reversed and he is dependent...

...Such students have no concept whatever of a recurrent need for community support...

...Even when we later achieve a more balanced view of our own father, it may still be tinged with rejulian R. pleasants is an associate professor of microbiology at the University of Notre Dame...

...That is why we have to accept the kingdom of God "as little children...

...The Mass is not our worship of the alienated Father...

...If he is to create in ways that are meaningful for peoples' lives, he must live in an imperfect, evolving world...

...and perhaps, they are not only that, but are also intended to be activating, a form of magic coercion...

...The odd thing is that this picture of God the Father was so opposite to the picure of him which I held and conveyed as an evolutionary biologist...

...The direction of fatherly love is not circular but radial...

...Who that believes in fathers, can believe in this Father, or would want to...

...Besides giving us this power over God, we also believed that participation in the liturgy would have a magical power in changing the hearts of the people...

...It has been my misfortune in my lifetime to try to make the liturgy intelligible...

...They are acting out that delicate and loving role that fathers and mothers, brothers and sisters, friends and lovers play for us, but parents first of all...

...Perhaps it would be better to say that it was an unfortunately necessary step in my own personal evolution...

...It is easy to see why one would want to hand on such power over God and men to his children and friends, since it would be the greatest thing he could give them, the greatest thing they could have...

...They got the picture all too well...

...when we need reminding that others are indeed worth our loving...

...Children are a net economic liability...

...Paul used the life and death of Jesus Christ to cure people in the only way such people could be cured: not by telling them their world view was unscientific, and their collective guilt non-existent, but by overcoming their collective guilt with a collective atonement...

...For the Pueblos, the sun, so obviously essential for all life, is God...

...Now that we have been justified by his blood, it is all the more certain that we shall be saved by him from God's wrath...

...He gives truth and love to his children so that they can pass it on to others...

...Most of that has changed...

...A frustrated social reformer like me could invest his energy in promoting liturgical participation, and hope to see whole congregations shifting their center of gravity toward social consciousness...

...Being involved with college students, I get to see that pervasive need very frequently, sometimes in extreme form...

...It would be utterly stupid and utterly untrue...

...The Pauline interpretation of the life and death of Jesus served its evolutionary purpose and would probably have died a peaceful death long since, if it had not become fixed as the official interpretation of the Mass...

...We had to attribute to God the Father sins which our modern conscience, sensitized by centuries of Christian teaching, finally sees as the worst of crimes...

...That man feels capable of formulating valid replies to the overpowering influence of God, and that he can render back something which is essential even to God, induces pride, for it raises the human individual to the dignity of a metaphysical factor...

...This made the situation unfair, but not totally unloving and therefore hopeless...

...It is only when we see ourselves as fathers-completed fathers-that we begin again to develop an image of the father as all-loving...

...Instead of being a stimulus to love of neighbor expressed in our life outside church, the Mass becomes a substitute for this kind of love...

...security for old age is a fund in Washington...

...Man cannot create from nothing...

...The Mass is the gift of both Father and Son to us...

...Paul, after pointing out the worthlessness of man, presenting the unfatherly Father: "It is precisely in this that God proves his love for us: that while we were sinners, Christ died for us...

...when a picture accidentally falls from the wall on the other side of the room...

...But a genuine confrontation is inevitable as a more explicit vernacular liturgy meets minds whose world view has finally been shaped by the theory of evolution...

...It would be even more awful to think of a God who enjoyed making people suffer...

...God is indeed as good as little children (and only little children) think their fathers are...

...sentment at our one-time childhood status, as well as resentment at our father's actual sins and stupidities...

...We come out looking rather better than God...

...He wrote: "The English young people tended to believe that the individual is dishonest, unreliable, selfish, egotistical...

...How could an all-loving God choose a mode of creation so cruel and unfair to individuals, even while serving the species as a whole...

...Nothing we do is worth anything in his sight...

...Since I'm a father, it's much easier for me to write about the father image...

...It is precisely God's worship of us, expressing our worth, acknowledging that we are worth the life and death of God...

...The image of God the Father we find in the liturgy is unbelievable-not unbelievably good, unbelievably bad...

...when we need to face our own failures to love and achieve within a context of being loved...

...This life is not all...

...What continuing need does the Mass meet, assuming it is freed from its primitive cosmology either by liturgists, theologians, or our own mental gymnastics at Mass...

...A bloodthirsty God, even if he is only faking it, begets bloodthirsty children...

...Yes and no...

...United with him, we men have power to influence God for the better, and through God the world...

...this world alone provides no answer, but Jesus' life, death, and resurrection do have an answer: Justice will be served...

...Fortunately, as I mentioned above, many Catholics have been able to live out their lives with no clearer idea of Paul's theology of atonement than of Augustine's theology of sex...

...The modern father, not only from theory, but also from some experience, has realized that the best thing he can bequeath his children is an unfinished world...

...and that institutions impede, distort and corrupt...

...Man can see need and respond to it with creative love...

...It still could if we let it...

...wealth is made outside the home...

...The altar becomes the fulcrum on which a small force of liturgical renewal would be amplified into a powerful force to change the world...

...Paul wrote for people with this pre-scientific view of why there was sickness and death in the world, people who believed they had a burden of collective guilt because they thought they were undergoing a collective punishment, people who felt estranged from God because he must be angry at all of them...

...Even when he dreams of his son (or daughter) the doctor, it is less likely that he is thinking of money and free medical care in his old age, than that he is hoping his children will reach their fullest potential...

...I can imagine his doing that to give them the dignity of feeling there were some things in which they were better than their father...

...We can go to Mass unashamedly to receive, not so that we can give back, but so that we can give out the love that we find there...

...I wrote articles and attended meetings to try to get the liturgy in the vernacular...

...The following paragraph summarizes his view...

...He is a bloodthirsty parent, who punishes all his children indiscriminately for the deeds of some, and is never fully satisfied until he sees his own Son (so much better than worthless us) bathed in blood and dead on a cross...