“Almighty ever-living God, whom, taught by the Holy Spirit, we dare to call our Father, bring, we pray, to perfection in our hearts the spirit of adoption as your sons and daughters, that we may merit to enter into the inheritance which you have promised.” 

The Collect for the 19^th Sunday in Ordinary Time contains much grist for meditation, though it also invokes images and experiences increasingly rare and marginalized in our culture: fatherhood, adoption, and inheritance. Let’s consider each.

Fatherhood

The Triune God approaches human beings in most intimate ways, teaching us to call Him “Father,” indeed, “Dad” (Abba). That is profoundly different from so many other world religions and mythologies. Zeus, despite his sexual combustibility and the women he seduced, could hardly be called “Dad,” especially by ordinary humans. The very fact that we call God “our Father” is not by our initiative but was revealed to us by God Himself.

St. Paul reminds us that all paternity in heaven and on earth finds its origin in God the Father (Eph 3:15). When Jesus speaks of God as Father, He often reminds us that Divine Fatherhood is so much more perfect than even its best human incarnations: “If you then, who are wicked, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your heavenly Father give good things to those who ask him” (Mt 7:15).

Part of the problem, however, is the deteriorating and defaced modern image of fatherhood. While there seems to be an uptick, the sad truth is that too many children still are raised outside of a stable marital home with a mother and a father. If a child is being raised by a single parent, that parent is usually the mother. The prevalence of divorce – often female-initiated – also accounts for even young Catholics having confused ideas about “father,” confusion that extends to their ideas about God.

We might also add, in terms of intimacy, that God reveals Himself in spousal terms. In Hosea, God compares His relationship to His People as one of a faithful husband and a faithless wife. In the New Testament, Jesus is regularly presented as the Bridegroom, His Bride the People of God, the Church. These, too, are extraordinarily personal and intimate categories of relationship. They make our understanding of God eminently personal, something that should not surprise us since we confess the communio personarum of the Triune God.

Adoption

While Jesus teaches us to call God “our Father,” He uses that term in instruction to us: “When you pray, say…” (Lk 11:2). Never does Jesus speak of “our” Father in terms that include Him. Whenever He includes Himself, it is always “my Father and your Father.” This point is vital because Jesus is God’s Son in Being, “consubstantially.” We are God’s children by adoption. We have been filiated by grace, adopted by God’s Holy Spirit (the same Person who teaches us to call God “our Father”).

Despite the modern attempts to whitewash everything, adoption has both a good and bad side. It is good that a child is adopted, received with love into a family. But it is a tragedy that must happen because the child lacks what he naturally has a right to have: a mother and a father. Sometimes, that happens outside of our control, e.g., when a parent dies. But often it happens because of our decisions, e.g., when a child is born out-of-wedlock and abandoned, or when children become living property bounced between two people as part of a “divorce settlement.” Sometimes — as in the Fall — the need for adoption is the consequence of man’s self-inflicted injury to his relationships.

Our tragedy is that we lost our relationship with God through sin, though God does not abandon us. Through Christ’s redemption, we are adopted by grace into an even deeper relationship than we might have at first even imagined. Adoption is, therefore, part of the lifeblood of Christians.

It is worth noting that recent studies (see here) repeatedly show that, when it comes to alternatives to abortion, adoption remains the least likely choice picked by mothers in distress. The bizarre fact is that many women think it is better for a child certainly to die than to face the “uncertainty” of adoption. That thinking is in part colored by a caricature of adoption built on misinformation, including a lack of awareness on many of these mothers’ parts about the role they can play in determining their baby’s placement (and any relationship they might want to maintain). We need better to understand adoption.

Inheritance

Inheritance has been a casualty in the kinds of immoral social conflict that some politicians stoke in deriding people with wealth. Without getting into the debate over paying one’s “fair share,” one must ask whether no small amount of today’s political discourse, particularly from the left, stokes hatred of people with money. It is a logical fallacy to conclude that the poor are poor because the rich are rich. That bias has often colored approaches to inheritance, including justifying the now largely dormant “inheritance tax.” I would challenge society’s unqualified “right” to decide how to “break up” and “redistribute” familial wealth when passed down from generation to generation. Families exist prior to the state; it is not the state’s right primarily to decide what families should be able to inherit from one generation to another.

The idea that parents would want to “pass something on” to their children has been a primordial human urge for ages. It is only our age — shaped by a warped anthropology that sees human beings primarily as individuals with few ties except those contractually agreed to — that fails to value that instinct. Talk to today’s “retirement planners” and you’ll hear a lot about “not outliving your money” but much less (at least compared to once upon a time) about passing it on. For many such “planners,” the primary focus is the retiree: his familial bonds are a nice but ultimately optional extra, nice for those sentimental enough still to value such things. With young people facing ever higher obstacles entering the job market (and ever lower starting salaries when they do), our age seems more in need of facilitating inheritances rather than making them optional extras.

Sunday’s Opening Prayer was very rich. I wonder if our underappreciation of it stems from our contemporary cultural impoverishment.