I was sixty years old when I became an orphan! That’s the year my mother died, my father having died the year before.
I know, I know—it sounds ridiculous. I wasn’t a relatively helpless small child, but a grown man and a middle-aged one to boot.
Yet there was a certain truth to it. Those who gave me life, whose love and care nurtured and guided my life, whose presence anchored my life, were gone, leaving me behind.
It marked a fundamental change in my life. It’s hard to explain, but it made me more aware of the reality of my own limitations, of the prospect of my own death someday, sooner or later.
Not having my parents alive anymore, that final separation, seemed to be a last step in in the gradual process of becoming a fully independent adult.
Don’t get me wrong. I don’t mean to sound morbid, nor am I. But, it definitely marked a significant change in my self-identity and life.
As adults, we may at times disagree with our parents, make life decisions against their counsel and concerns, but somehow, in some way, we still remain anchored in them and, hopefully, receive support and guidance from them as best they can, no matter the consequences of our sometimes stubborn and ill-advised choices.
It was through them that we first learned to trust and love God. God seemed to be the ideal fullness and perfection of the love and acceptance that, hopefully, we experienced from our parents, no matter their limitations.
When Jesus’ disciples asked him to teach them how best to pray, ignoring the so many formal and traditional titles of God treasured and counseled over the centuries, he told them to think of their relation to God as a child to parents and say:
“Our Father, who art in heaven . . .”
Ha!, the unbeliever might mockingly say, clearly a case of substituting for a lost parental relationship by imagining an all-knowing, all-powerful father figure.
Yes, that is a possibility; it could be true—but just because something could be true doesn’t mean that it has to be true.
It doesn’t require experiencing the death of both parents—or others who have affectionately and perseveringly loved us, almost as a parent—to think of God in those terms.
God is the model, the epitome for all parents and parental relationships. As creator, God is the ultimate source and sustainer of all life and living things.
Total separation from and the loss of parents is imaginable and also inevitable. Total separation from and the loss of our creator is unimaginable and illogical, a contradiction in terms.
It’s not so much that we’re projecting parenthood onto God; it’s the other way around. Parenting and parental care and love are a participation, a collaboration in the life-giving and sustaining love of our creator.
“I will not leave you orphans,” Jesus assured his disciples the night before he died, “I will come to you.
“In a little while the world will no longer see me, but you will see me, because I live and you will live. On that day you will realize that I am in my Father and you are in me and I in you.
“Whoever has my commandments and observes them is the one who loves me. And whoever loves me will be loved by my Father, and I will love him and reveal myself to him.” (Jn 14:18-21)
5 June 2022