5 October 2022
Wednesday of the Twenty-Seventh Week in Ordinary Time
The Jesuit polymath Walter Ong studied the universal characteristics of masculinity in the animal kingdom to better explain male behavior in general. For example, he noticed that males are typically less essential to the survival of a species than females, and a colony with a greater number of females and a smaller number of males is more likely to survive than one with many males and few females. He recognized that males are thus more expendable than the more durable females. For the good of the whole, males willingly inhabit spaces that stand at a distance from females (and their offspring) to protect and even give their lives so that the species may survive.
Within the realm of human relationships, a father often stands at a greater distance from his children than their mother, who carries a child within her own interior space for nine months and then feeds the child with her very body. In contrast, a father must choose to draw near to his children and provide for their needs in a way that is typically more exterior than that of their mother. Every child must be, in this sense, adopted by his or her father, and this adoption is something that we daughters and sons can accept as a particular gift of our fathers.
In today’s Gospel, Jesus speaks of God as Father and so opens the way for us to approach the all-powerful, eternal God of the universe through him. God is infinitely beyond human sex and gender, and although God could be described in some sense as mother (for example, as the source of all life and as ultimately drawing all of creation back to God), it is perhaps more important for us to recognize the distance from creation that God has overcome in choosing to be in relationship to us. God is our Father because each of us has been adopted through Jesus Christ. This is an even greater love because it is so freely given, with no basis in the duty of a parent to his progeny. Instead, God approaches us in our alienation and misery, puts a robe on our shoulders and sandals on our feet, and welcomes us into the Father’s house.
Let us never cease to feel wonder that even within the fabric of our own sexual differentiation we can recognize the mysterious love of God the Father and so worship him more fervently as his adopted sons and daughters.