Father as Provider and Protector
One
Father as spiritual and moral leader
The Trinity starts with a Father. God Himself starts with a Father. It’s the same with the human race. Humanity starts with a Father. It’s the same with our human families. The father begins a family.
But, of course, sometimes that’s all dads ever seem to do, is to start a family and then go on to neglect it. And everyone knows what damage this causes a family.
Families need dads. And Dads know – every Dad knows – that he has two particular responsibilities for his family. He must work to provide for his family. He must work to protect his family. The only way any family feels safe and secure is if they have a Dad who will never quit working to provide for and protect his family. But again, that providing and protecting can’t just be at the physical level.
A man, if he’s going to fulfill his responsibilities as a man, must provide spiritually for his family and protect his family spiritually.
So what does that look like?
Two
Spiritual provider
To be a spiritual provider for his family, a Father has to take an active, and even a primary role in three things:
educating his kids in right and wrong and the gaining of virtue
ensuring they live the sacramental life
teaching them how to have the habit of daily mental prayer
But you can’t give what you don’t have so we Fathers better have this first! You have to teach your kids the faith.
There are a lot of resources to help with this. That is one of the reasons we do this Rosary precisely this way – so parents and grandparents can learn the faith they should hand on. And yes, kids will ask you questions you can’t answer, so go find the answer.
How can you claim to be a provider for your family when you don’t provide for the fundamental human need for truth? And that includes truth about right and wrong, obviously.
So you have to teach your kids the faith and morals of Christ, but secondly, you have to make sure your kids live the Sacramental Life.
You have to lead them to Mass.
Maybe most importantly, you need to personally get your kids to make a regular habit of going to confession.
Third, you have to help your kids develop a life of prayer. You have not done your job as a Dad unless you have helped your kids do the most important thing there is, which is to develop a deep friendship with Jesus in prayer. Not just vocal prayer, but mental prayer – because that is where we not only talk to God but we listen to him. That is where the real conversion and change in life occur.
So have you been teaching your kids? Bringing the kids to the Sacraments? And have you been teaching them how to do daily mental prayer, meditation?
Three
Spiritual defender: corruptions of the culture
A father is the primary provider, but he’s also got to be the primary defender. And spiritually, there’s a lot to defend your family from.
Are you paying attention to what comes into your house?
You wouldn’t let a stranger off the street come into your house and spend the night in your kids’ bedroom, would you? You wouldn’t let your kids hop into a stranger’s car, would you? Of course not – because that would be really physically dangerous. But then do you let your kids bring unmonitored, unsecured laptops and phones into their bedrooms? So that all the perversity, all the twistedness, all the lies available anywhere on the planet – all the filth the human mind has ever been able to produce – it’s all right there at their fingertips?
What could possibly be more spiritually dangerous than that?
Be a man! Be a father! Keep your kids safe – develop rules, and protocols, invest in software that prevents your kids from getting hurt on your watch.
That’s what a Dad is supposed to do.
Four
Your example
Of course, all your spiritual providing, and all your spiritual protection, won’t do your kids much good without your example. No speech, no demand you make will mean much if you’re not actively striving to live the faith.
They’d better see you praying. They’d better see you going to confession. They’d better see you apologizing when you fail. They’d better see you learning the faith. If they don’t, no amount of verbal instruction will be able to make up for it.
The same goes for spiritual protection.
The outside world will probably never be able to do as much damage to your kids as your bad example.
If you’re judgmental, if you’re unfaithful to your wife, if you view pornography, if you’re irreverent in your talk about holy things.
It is really, really hard for kids to take the faith seriously when they think that their father, their Dad who always talks a big talk, is actually just another hypocrite.
In other words, there’s no way to spiritually provide for or protect your kids unless you yourself are serious about trying to become a saint.
Five
Be a saint for your kids
We all hope we can basically get done what we need to get done without having to try and be holy. But if you’re a Dad trying to raise your kids in the faith, you have to let go of that illusion right now.
We were put on this earth to be holy, to be saints. We should do it out of love for God, but a lot of us don’t love God enough. We should do it because we know that holiness is the only path to happiness, but a lot of us don’t love ourselves enough.
But now, please realize, that your kids’ best chance at happiness is if you are striving to become holy – so would you consider doing it out of love for them? Would you consider recommitting to overcoming your vices, and acquiring the virtue you don’t have yet – would you be willing to do that for them?
You are not responsible to make your kids holy. You can’t make them do that. But you are responsible to give your kids a holy dad!
God is our Father, which means we are made in His Image. And we are our children’s fathers – which means they are made in our image.
So our kids are, in fact, the blending of our image and God’s image. Let’s love them fully by loving God fully, and conforming our lives to Him. Then, by God’s grace, our children may conform their lives to Him too. And then – if we are close to God and close to our kids who are also close to God…
Well, what greater happiness can there be for a father than that?