Our Father?

I used to pray like this: “Our Parent, who art in Heaven, hallowed be Thy name.…” Yes, I was one of those. But this was decades before our society began to suffer from gender confusion (which can be rather sexist, it seems to me.) My use of “Parent” instead of “Father” was partly a little war against perceived sexism in the Christian religion, but it was mostly about anthropomorphism — giving human form to that which is not human. So, I continued praying “Our Parent” until a very simple thought occurred to me.

But before I get to that…

God Is Not an Old Man

I had once been an atheist. Not for long, but for long enough to clear my young adult mind of any concepts of an all-powerful deity and rid myself of any habitual or psychological dependence on such a nonexistent being.

I was an atheist just long enough to make my personal discovery of the reality of God all the more ego-shattering. Knowing that the “reality that everyone calls God”[i] is true, is really real, I was extremely reluctant to fall back on any human conceptions of God.

I had searched and tried various religions of the world in order to find the best way to live in the reality of God and, surprisingly, rediscovered Christianity, which meant that I had to deal with the image of God as “Father.” One thing that really worried me was that I would take the new, overwhelmingly sublime awareness that I had been given of the true existence of that which we call God and mess it up with images of God as some bearded old man in the sky looking down on us and judging us. This was not the God that I knew to be real (because this isn’t who God is). What I knew then is what I still know now, that the ultimate reality of God is transcendent, beyond all human conceptions and imaginings.

Therefore, praying to God as “Our Father” — masculine, but also very human — just didn’t seem right to me.

God Is in Intimate Relationship with Us

What happened to change this was that I grew to become a real Christian. I grew to believe that Jesus is the Word of God made flesh, the Savior of the World. God reveals Godself most fully to us through Jesus — because Jesus is God in the flesh. And yes, Jesus, son of Mary, is male. But that still doesn’t mean that God is male. In our gender confused world, let’s not confuse our understanding of God as Pure Spirit: God is not a creature like us. The thing is — and here’s the most important part of this post — God chose to become one of us. The Creator became a creature. Jesus is God Incarnate, God in the flesh. “The Word of God was made flesh and came to dwell among us.” God’s love is no longer abstract or distant, but very near — in the flesh.

As I grew to love Jesus and believe that Christianity is factual and true, I had to listen to Jesus, to listen to the words that He said. Jesus proclaimed God as “Father.” Jesus said to His disciples that God is their Father — our Father. Jesus tells us to call upon the Father, to pray to God, “Our Father.” Why?

Because Jesus is the Son of God. To put a finer point on this and, well … be kind of crude and basic … who fathered Jesus? Who is the biological father of Jesus, if you will? We could say no one is (and perhaps that’s technically true, but you will have to ask a theologian about about that one.) Jesus was conceived in His beautifully human mother’s womb — nothing unusual about that — but Jesus was conceived, not by the power of another human being, not by the joining of female ovum with male spermatozoa, but by the power of God, by the Holy Spirit joining with Mary in the creation of her son. There was no “father” involved where a father is needfully involved. God did it. God is Jesus’s father.

This is the radical reality of Christianity. It’s what makes Christianity radically real.

It’s natural, therefore, for Jesus to call the Infinite Eternal One “Father.” But Jesus did not stop there. He who is God in the flesh invited and directed everyone who believed in Him as Lord and Savior to address God as their Father too. That’s because Jesus shares the deepest and most intimate solidarity with us. We have true kinship with Him. What is His becomes ours because He gives His very life to us. Yes, we are all children of God, brothers and sisters in Christ, and we could think of God in an abstract parenting way. But as Christians, we know that there is nothing abstract about God’s love for each and every one of us. God’s relationship with us is intimately familial, is lovingly present. So, with Jesus we say, “Our Father,” praying with Jesus.[ii]

As Christians, we strive to live our lives in intimate union with Jesus Christ, the Son of God who came to live with us here. We listen to Him, we follow Him, we believe in Him and we believe Him. Our goal is to be like Jesus, united with Jesus now in Spirit and Truth, and forever in the glory of His Father’s merciful love — Our Father’s merciful love.

Simple Understanding

The simple thought that I had about praying “Our Father” is this: If it’s good enough for Jesus, then it’s more than good enough for me. 🙂

Jesus calls God “Father.” So I do as well. Who am I to correct the Divine Incarnate, God in the flesh?

© 2023 Christina Chase

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Feature Photo by Carlos Andres Gomez on Unsplash

[i] St. Thomas Aquinas; see Catechism of the Catholic Church paragraph 34

[ii] a shout out to my friend, Megan Gannon (author of Special Things for Special People), who recently pointed out to me that we pray the Lord’s Prayer with Jesus.