God is Our Father
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God is Our Father
We take for granted that God is our Father.
Judaism believes God is a father only to the extent that he created the universe and gave them the Law.
The best all other religions can admit is that God created the world.
Catholicism is the only religion that proclaims the awe inspiring truth that God not only created the world and sustains it in being, He wants to place His divine life in our souls, making us truly his sons and daughters by adoption, partakers of the divine nature as St. Peter writes.
We are invited to receive the gift of his divinity through faith and baptism.
With this gift we can truly say Our Father.
Think of who you are speaking to when we pray this now and think of the fact that you are his son or daughter!
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We should live with great confidence in Our Father.
The Catechism (2778) teaches us there is one word that captures the attitude we should have toward God Our Father – that word is parrhesia which means a:
· Straightforward simplicity with God
· Confident trust in God’s Providential care
· A joyous assurance, humble boldness and the certainty of being loved
· That is the attitude we should intentionally cultivate and practice every day
God revealed to St. Faustina that He desired from all souls this straightforward simplicity and bold trust.
Jesus said to her: “The graces of My mercy are drawn by means of one vessel only, and this is – trust. The more a soul trusts, the more it will receive. Souls that trust boundlessly are a great comfort to Me because I pour all the treasures of My graces into them. I rejoice that they ask for much, because it is My desire to give much, very much. On the other hand, I am sad when souls ask for little, when they narrow their hearts.” (Diary of Faustina 1578)
When my kids were little, they asked for everything. Now that they are grown, they don’t need me, so they don’t ask me for much and it makes me sad.
So, if you want to please God your Father – go to Him for everything.
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God is a Father in a way that is infinitely scarier than we can imagine.
Sometimes I wish God was the type of Father who lets us do whatever we want and bless us for it. What we really want is a senile grandfather. C.S. Lewis writes: What would really satisfy us would be a God who said of anything we happened to like doing, ‘What does it matter so long as they are contented?’ We want, in fact, not so much a Father in Heaven as a grandfather in heaven—a senile benevolence who, as they say, ‘liked to see young people enjoying themselves’, and whose plan for the universe was simply that it might be truly said at the end of each day, ‘a good time was had by all’.
This is not the kind of Father we want, and that is not the kind He is.
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What kind of Father is God?
God is the kind of Father who will make us into something so great that it is beyond our wildest imagination. He will make us like Himself, like God, no matter what suffering and loss its costs us, no matter what suffering and loss it cost Him. And it will take suffering because we must be totally undone to be totally remade like him.
God showed Jeremiah by analogy what type of Father He was: “So I went down to the potter's house; and there he was, working at the wheel. And whenever the vessel he was making came out wrong, as happens with the clay handled by potters, he would start afresh and work it into another vessel, as potters do.”
God is the Divine Artist, and we are His masterpiece. God has made us in His image. We are the picture of God. But He will not be satisfied, He will not stop until we are really like Him, until we share in His Life, His Being, His Attributes and His way of Living. For we are invited to put on Christ and become like God.
God will take endless trouble to make us like Himself, and He will give endless trouble until we become like him.
Again Lewis writes: “It is natural for us to wish that God had designed for us a less glorious and less arduous destiny; but then we are wishing not for more love but for less.”
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I don’t want to suffer, and I don’t want my loved ones or anyone for that matter to suffer.
Like you, I struggle with the suffering and loss that God Our Father allows in our lives.
Like you I too ask: “God, how could you let this happen?”
But if He has only one purpose in mind for all of us – to make us like Him, to make us God-like, forever. And He is strong enough and wise enough and good enough to make it happen, then by all means, and I mean by all means, even if that means pain suffering and loss, then Good Father, do it to all of us so that we can be happy together forever in Heaven with You and everyone else.
So in the end we say, Fiat Voluntas Tua, Father, not my will but your will be done!