Father's Day

 

St. Joseph's Oratory, Montreal

For Father’s Day, tomorrow, friend Xerxes remembers his mother praising his own father for being “consistent.” He considers this a case of being damned with faint praise. He thinks “devoted” would have been better.

I think he is quite wrong. To be consistent is exactly the father’s job. “Level-headed” and “even-tempered” are almost as good. The mother is free to fuss over and pamper a child. The father must not. The father’s job is to teach morals and good judgement. Including not thinking too much of yourself.

Put another way, the mother looks after the child’s physical and animal needs. The father looks after the child’s spiritual needs. This is why we conceive of God as Father, not as mother, and of nature as Mother, not as father.

The gospels trace Jesus’s ancestry through Joseph as well as Mary, even though Joseph is not Jesus’s biological father. Because the father represents a spiritual and moral inheritance, at least as important as the genetic or biological, and which is passed on just as surely. For good or ill.

In dysfunctional families, it is for ill. The essential and most damaging characteristic of what we call the narcissistic father will be their inconsistency. Just as the most damaging characteristic of a bad mother is emotional coldness.

Our current tendency to devalue the father’s role, and towards fatherless families, is a recipe for moral chaos and collapse. Fatherless backgrounds can be directly correlated with higher rates of mental illness, higher rates of imprisonment, poorer results in education, more pregnancy out of wedlock, difficulty in finding marriage partners, and so on.

It is also functionally impossible, unfortunately, for one parent to perform both roles.