Keeping Faith in a God of Love, Why We Call God Father, and God's Permissive Will

Weekly Notes

Dear Friends, I hope your Holy Week is calmer and more reflective than mine has been thus far. If it is, please offer up a prayer for me. If it’s not, I’ll offer up a prayer for you…and a drink, if I ever find time to have one.

Those of you who have been here all year will notice that this is the last week of our Deus Caritas Est study. Thanks so much to everyone who is following along. After Easter, we’ll begin the next study, Spe Salvi (“On Christian Hope”), which feels perfectly timed.

As always, these weekly newsletters are free for all subscribers, but if they’re worth one cup of fancy coffee a month to you, I sure would appreciate you becoming a full subscriber. If you do, you’ll get an additional long form essay form every month, full access to the archives, the chance to participate in our summer book club, and have early access to something very, very, very exciting that I’ll be announcing in the next few weeks. Here’s the button. Just click on it. 😉

Deus Caritas Est Study, Week 9

Read: Sections 32-42

“Even in their bewilderment and failure to understand the world around them, Christians continue to believe in the ‘goodness and loving kindness of God,’ (Tit 3:4). Immersed like everyone else in the dramatic complexity of historical events, they remain unshakably certain that God is our Father and loves us, even when his silence remains incomprehensible,” (Pope Benedict XVI, 38).

Reflect

The world has always known darkness. The heaviness of sin has weighed on humanity since the first of us fell. Oppression and despair are nothing new. What is perhaps new about this present darkness, though, is its pervasiveness. Most everywhere we look, we see it. And thanks to technology, we can look most everywhere.

No corner of the world remains hidden anymore. Every heart, every life seems to have a camera pointed at it. Tragedy after tragedy greet us online. Pleas for help and demands that we “do something,” follow. “Prayers and thoughts” are reviled. And the insult hurled at Christ on the cross—“Come down that we may see and believe”—is now hurled at Him by nearly all. “Show yourself and stop this.” “If you’re really there, do something.” “If you were a God of Love, you would never allow this.”

What does God do in the face of all that? The Book of Revelation tells us. He just keeps hanging on the cross. Not physically. Not in time. But as the “Lamb standing as though slain.” Forever in the courts of Heaven. Forever offering Himself. Forever interceding. Forever applying the graces of His once and for all sacrifice to us.

God does not leave us orphans. He does not walk away. He never stops offering us an escape from sin and death. He is always inviting us, like the Israelites in the desert, to raise our eyes to Him, lifted high on the cross, and be saved. We can answer that invitation or not. But His love does not change.

This doesn’t have to make sense. Nor, as Augustine said, should it. “If you understand Him, He is not God.” But it does answer the question, “What are we to do?”

Since the servant is not greater than his master, we keep hanging on the cross, too. We keep loving. We keep serving. We keep trusting. We keep praying. We keep hoping. We keep joining our pain to His. Not because we think we can save the world. That’s Jesus’ job. Rather we do it for love of Him. We love because He loves. We hold fast because He holds fast. We don’t despair because He doesn’t despair. We root ourselves so deeply in Him, that even as the darkness washes over us, our eyes still behold the Light, which has loved us for all eternity and will never dim.

Reflection Questions

1. In a crisis, do you tend to pray first or act first? What is the benefit of that tendency? What is the possible danger? Have you found a balance between the two or is that still a struggle?

2. What do you think of Saint Augustine words, “If you understand Him, He is not God.” Do you find yourself doubting God when you do not understand Him?

3. Who has helped you see God’s light in the midst of the darkness? How did they do that? What difference did that make for you?

Next Week

I can’t swear to this (because life), but right now my plan is to do my monthly essay for full subscribers next week. The following week, the week of the 17^th, we’ll start our next Pope Benedict encyclical, Spe Salvi (perhaps my most favorite encyclical of all time), reading sections 1-8. My goal is to take 6 weeks to read through it together, so that we can wrap it up by the time my family heads to Montreal and Quebec City in early June. Over the summer, we’ll take a break from the encyclicals, and then spend the fall going through Benedict’s third (and only social) encyclical, Caritas in Veritate.

Question Box

Why do we refer to God as “Father” and use “He” when referring to God?

Because that’s how God revealed Himself. In the Gospels, Jesus reveals God as Father. God is uniquely Jesus’ Father, from all eternity within the Trinity. But He is also, in a different way, our Father, and Jesus instructs us to address Him as such when we pray. More specifically, He tells us to call Him Abba, “Daddy,” (Matthew 6:9). Likewise, Jesus and the authors of both the Old and New Testaments use masculine pronouns to refer to God. Because we believe the Holy Spirit inspired the biblical authors to write the story of our salvation without error, we take God at His word that “He” is how we should refer to Him.

Some people, of course, claim God revealed Himself as Father because He had no other choice; the patriarchal culture of ancient Israel would have tolerated nothing else. That’s nonsense. If God wanted to reveal Himself as “she” to Abraham (or anyone else), He would have. With all the powers of the winds, skies, sea, and earth at His disposal, He could have made a convincing enough case. God also could have chosen a different people for Himself. The ancient world was awash in goddess worship. They would have been happy to welcome Mother God. But God didn’t reveal Himself as Mother, and He didn’t pick a different nation. He revealed Himself as Father, and the Church doesn’t consider it her prerogative to teach otherwise.

This doesn’t mean the Church thinks God is male, though. He is not. God is neither male nor female. He’s not asexual or nonbinary either. God doesn’t possess sex, lack sex, or reject sex. He transcends sex. He also is its origin. What we know as masculinity and femininity, or more fundamentally, fatherhood and motherhood, are an expression of something in God’s eternal nature (CCC 239). Each images something about Him, possessing a meaning that goes beyond chromosomes and sex hormones.

That is to say, sex, like the body itself, it is a metaphor for a spiritual reality. It makes visible the invisible, pointing beyond itself to some deeper truth. What it points to is God. Maleness and femaleness—or again, motherhood and fatherhood—reveal to us something about who God is and how He loves. Each also reveals something to us about ourselves. Our mission in this world is bound up with our sex. It’s bound up with motherhood and fatherhood. The body shows us this mission. It is like a blueprint or a map, revealing to us the work God has for us, showing us how we were made to image Him and how He calls us to love. As Pope John Paul II writes:

“The Creator has assigned the body to man as a task, the body in its masculinity and femininity, and that in masculinity and femininity he assigned to him in some way his own humanity as a task….” (Theology of the Body, 59:2)

Understanding this is fundamental to understanding why God reveals Himself as Father. If sex has no meaning, if masculinity and femininity are merely human constructs, if fatherhood and motherhood are only biological functions, then we can call God whatever we like. He can be Father, Mother, or the Supreme Duck for all those words are worth. But when sex does have meaning, when masculinity and femininity are each expressions of some Divine reality, and when fatherhood and motherhood are both expressions of Divine love, than God, in revealing Himself to us as Father, is trying to tell us something. He is revealing not just a title or a pronoun, but also something foundational about our relationship to Him.

The Catechism of the Catholic Church explains it this way, noting that in calling Himself Father, God is conveying to us that He is “the origin of everything and the transcendent authority” (239). He is the source of life that animates our being. He is the One to whom we owe everything, including love, honor, and obedience. He is to us everything we think a good Father should be—strong, wise, tender, a protector and provider—but infinitely more and infinitely better than any earthly father ever could be. “No one is father as God is Father,” (CCC 239). No matter how our earthly fathers disappoint us, in Him, we can find the “origin and standard” of true fatherhood. In Him, we can find the Father we need. That is who He is to us. That is who He is for us.

None of this is to say, though, that God isn’t the origin and standard for motherhood, too. He is. Motherhood is also a particular expression of who God is and how He loves. Scripture recognizes this. God compared Himself to a woman in child birth (Isaiah 42:14) and a hen, longing to gather up her chicks (Matthew 23:37). Saints have also looked to the work of the Holy Spirit, in the Church and the soul, and seen something particularly motherly in that work. Others have compared Christ’s feeding of His people in the Eucharist to a mother feeding her child at her breast. Mother love and father love both find their origin in God, and as women, we too can look to God, for a deeper understanding of what it means to be a woman, exercise the feminine genius, and love with a mother’s heart.

Nevertheless, God still chooses to call Himself Father. That’s how He wants us to understand our relationship with Him. So, the Church requires we do the same.

Can we have a priest as a godparent for a baptism?

Absolutely! I have several friends whose children have priests for godparents. Assuming he will be there for the baptism, though, and that it’s not an emergency baptism, you should ask another priest to celebrate the sacrament.

Is infertility ever God’s Plan A or just something bad that happened?

It depends on what you mean by Plan A. If you mean was it part of God’s original vision for man and the world? Then no. If you mean was it something He has always known someone would experience and has permitted because He knew He could use it to bring about the greatest good—everlasting life with Him? Then, yes.

Let me explain.

Whenever we talk about God’s Plan A or Plan B, what we’re really talking about is God’s will. And if we’re going to talk about God’s will, there are a few things we need to sort out.

First, God’s will is not like our will. This doesn’t just mean He sometimes wants something different than what we want. It means His actual will is not like ours. Our will is the power by which we make choices. And to make those choices, we have to think things through. We ponder. We deliberate. We weigh the possible consequences of our choice. And then we make our choice, which is often nothing better than a guess. Accordingly, sometimes our choices are good. Sometimes not.

God’s will is not like that. God, from all eternity, knows everything. He sees everything— all the facts, all the options, all the consequences. So, He doesn’t deliberate. He doesn’t guess. He always knows what He will choose. And His choice is always the best possible choice. It’s always right. No exceptions.

Also, unlike us, God is sovereign. He is in control … of everything. We are in control … of almost nothing. He speaks, and worlds come into being. We speak, and our words echo in the room. If we want to accomplish something, we have to work and wrestle and fall and fight, and things still rarely turn out how we want. If God wants something to happen, it happens. No wrestling required.

That, however, begs the question: if God is in control of everything, why do bad things happen? Is a suffering like infertility or cancer or abandonment something He wills? Are those things part of His Plan A?

This is where it’s helpful to make a distinction between what theologians call God’s “antecedent” will and “consequent” will, or, more simply, God’s “positive” will and God’s “permissive” will.

God’s “antecedent” or “positive” will is what we see at the beginning and end of the Bible. It’s Eden and the wedding supper of the Lamb. It’s wholeness, joy, and peace. It’s light untouched by darkness, with no suffering, no sorrow, no sickness. It’s man being who he was made to be, living in loving communion with God and his fellow man. This was, technically speaking, God’s Plan A for the world. In it, infertility, cancer, loss, heartbreak, and every other wrong thing that befalls had no place. Suffering was never what God wanted. It was not what He positively willed.

God’s desire for us to love Him, however, is just that: He wants us to love Him. And love, to be love, has to be freely chosen. So, God gave us free will—the power to choose to love or not love, obey or not obey. God truly wills for us to choose to love and obey…but He also permits us to choose differently. And we do. We’ve been choosing differently since the Garden. Which has complicated things.

From humanity’s first horrible primordial choice to choose something other than God, flows all that makes life difficult: death, disease, natural disasters, and above all our own moral confusion and weakness. Our first parents broke the world with their free choice, and God let them. This is where His permissive will comes in. He has permitted brokenness—He has permitted suffering—because He judged it worth it. From all eternity, He saw that granting us freedom was better than not granting it. He also saw that letting us experience the consequences of misused freedom was better than stepping in every time something went wrong.

God doesn’t just leave us in our suffering, though. He responds to it. He continually adapts, offering us new routes to the life He wants for us: life with Him. Those adaptations or responses are also part of God’s permissive will. For as long as we are alive, God is working in the circumstances of our life to lead us to Him. He is the universe’s greatest chess player—foreseeing every move we make and every circumstance we encounter, accounting for it, and adapting to it. We can never outplay him. We can only walk away from the game, making a definitive choice at the end of our lives for “Not God.”

But again, He foresaw all this from the start. God doesn’t concoct plans on the fly. Nothing that happens to us and nothing we do sends God scrambling to come up with a new plan. He knows everything from the start. He knows how each of us will suffer and struggle and sin. He sees the path that each of us will walk before we walk it. Which is why calling His adaptations to our suffering and sin a “Plan B” doesn’t really do it justice.

If you are struggling with infertility, I can’t tell you how to make sense of it. But I can tell you, given all that I’ve just written, how I make sense of my own struggle with it.

I recognize that from all eternity, God knew the path my life would take. He knew how I would struggle. He knew how I would sin. And He knew how I would suffer, including from infertility. Not because He positively willed it. But because that would be, for me, one of the effects of living in a fallen world. That’s how the Fall would play out in my body. And He permitted it to be so. He didn’t heal my body. He didn’t work a miracle in me so I could get pregnant. He allowed me to experience this consequence of life in a fallen world, and I believe He did so because He saw, from the beginning, that He could use my struggle with infertility to lead me closer to Him. I also believe He saw how I could use my struggle with infertility to glorify Him. Above all, I believe He saw how He could bring an even greater beauty out of the brokenness—not just in my body and my life, but in the other lives with which my infertility has entangled me: my children’s lives, their birth families lives, the lives of people helped by our story. I believe that He saw somehow, mysteriously, inexplicably, that this was the best way for all of us in a fallen world, a way for witness and prayer and love to help us all find our way to Him.

So, while infertility and adoption were a surprise to me, they weren’t to Him. They were part of a beautiful plan, always known to Him, always permissively willed by Him. They weren’t Plan A. But they also were.

What are the most important books for a Catholic to read, beyond the Bible and the Catechism?

In some ways, this is an impossible question! There are too many books to name, no one will ever agree, and “important” is a relative term. But, because I love giving book recommendations (and because fiction is easier to narrow down than theology), I’ll list ten of my favorite “catholic” novels that I think every person should read. And yes, I know, the list is incomplete. But I’m limiting myself to ten because this newsletter is already long enough.

1.     Death Comes for the Archbishop by Willa Cather

2.     The Man Who Was Thursday by G.K. Chesterton

3.     That Hideous Strength by C.S. Lewis

4.     Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh

5.     Diary of a Country Priest by Georges Borneans

6.     Viper’s Tangle by Francois Mauriac

7.     Kristin Lavransdatter by Sigrid Undset

8.     The Master of Hestviken by Sigrid Undset

9.     The Power and the Glory by Graham Greene

10.  Mariette in Ecstacy by Ron Hansen

Five Things I’m Loving This Week

1. Not having to cook Easter brunch this year. We’re heading home to be with my family, so my sisters will be handling most of the cooking…assuming they have power back by Sunday. My hometown of Rock Island, Illinois, was hit hard by a tornado yesterday, so please keep everyone there in your prayers.

2. Speaking of Easter brunch, if you’re looking for some good recipe ideas, my favorite brunch recipes are all included in my e-cookbook, Around the Catholic Table. Every single one feeds a crowd and pleases a crowd, so you can’t go wrong with any of them.

3. Bari Weiss’ recent interview with Rick Rubin about creativity, art, and music is fascinating. One line in particular stood out. Rubin said he used to urge artists to strive not to please audiences, but rather for greatness. But now, he realizes when he was talking about greatness, he was really talking about making something beautiful for God. That seems exactly right to me.

4. This beautiful song from Acacia Wood. Our babysitter is the lead singer in the band, and they’ll be putting on a little birthday concert for me, here at my house, on Saturday, April 15. We’ll livestream the show, so if you’re interesting in joining my friends and me virtually, please do. The music will go live on Instagram starting at 7 pm EST.

5. Beautycounter released their Cheeky Clean Highlighting Balm this week, and I am way more impressed than I thought I would be. When it comes to makeup, I am super basic, and have always thought of highlighting as something for 15-year-olds who want glitter all over their face. Which I am not and do not. But this highlighter isn’t glittery or shimmery at all. It just adds a really beautiful subtle glow to skin, restoring the luminosity most of us lose with age…and life. It’s great for both mature skin and for those who want a “no makeup” look. Also, like all Beautycounter products, it’s free from carcinogens, endocrine disruptiors, and other toxic ingredients found in most personal care products. You can check out all four shades here. They don’t add color, just luminousity, so each shade works with just about every skin tone.

In Case You’ve Missed Them

No, You Can’t Skip to the Good Part: Chastity Talks, Sex Talks, and Where Teaching the Theology of the Body Went Wrong (Full Subscribers Only)

Welcoming the Wholeness of Women: The Catholic Vision of Feminine Dignity (Free for everyone)

The Deep Work of Homemaking: The Difference Between Housework and Heart Work (Full Subscribers Only

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