THE FAMILY

Fatherhood And The Being Of The Home

by Peter A. Kwasnieswski

Contrary to the persistent humanistic illusion, we have good reason to assert that family relationships, like human matters in general, afford no consistency, no guarantee of solidity. It is only when they are referred back to a superhuman order, which here below we cannot grasp apart from its signs and indications, that their truly sacred character becomes apparent.

-Gabriel Marcel

The French philosopher Gabriel Marcel vividly characterized the modern disease called 'alienation,' the all-pervasive malaise of Western man, in these provocative words: "Let us take despair. I have in mind the act by which one despairs of reality as a whole, as one might despair of a person. I believe that at the root of despair there is always this affirmation: 'There is nothing in the realm of reality to which I can give credit - no security, no guarantee.' It is a statement of complete insolvency."1 The liquid assets of reality have run out, and after a fruitless search for social or psychological aid, nothing remains but a great depression, a crippling lack of commitment to the duties of life. Nowhere in the modern world is this spiritual darkness more evident than in the demise of the family. The wavering of fidelity within the family, and the attempts of political propagandists to undermine it from without, have pushed us closer and closer to a world without structure, without morals, without loyalty, without peace.

When we speak of family, we are dealing with a rich and subtle reality that can only be grasped by reflecting on many experiences and aspects of life. We cannot give a cut and dry definition without in some way ignoring the ambiguity and depth of the mystery of what it means to be 'kin,' to share blood, to live as one-in-many. In its race to be as simple and liberated as possible, the modern age has forgotten that the most important things are complex and duty-bound. Fatherhood is a case in point. If we reduce it to a mere biological fact, it seems to have very little moral, religious, or transcendent meaning. Calling God 'our Father' would be absurd if our only manner of speaking were physiological. To gain a deeper understanding of what fatherhood means, we need to move out of the limited spheres of thought marked off by the world. Intimately bound up with human fatherhood are the irreducible realities of domus, the home or household, and munus regale, the kingly gift man receives from the Almighty Father, the gift of his very being and the love he is able to bestow upon others.

What does it mean to say the seemingly simple words, "I am your father, you are my child?" In what follows I will talk about how the man's role in the family is meant to be an incarnation of Divine love for the sake of advancing Christ's reign in the world, and I shall conclude with some thoughts on the meaning of home in its relationship to man as husband and father.

The Difficulty of the Question

What exactly is the reality of fatherhood? The first question is, as we might expect, the simplest and the hardest. The longer we look at the external signs of a uniquely human reality, hoping to define it in terms of what it does or how it usually appears, the blurrier and darker it becomes. Precisely such a shift for the worse happens if we try to isolate the 'look' or 'operation' of paternity. For a man is not simply what he works, but rather, he works according to what he is. "Out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaketh." Anything can be stamped and sent along with a definition, so long as we are content with a bundle of items tied together by ephemeral circumstances. If we wish to know the being of a thing, we must do more than gather all the havings and doings that belong to it. The man who happens to be a railway conductor is not defined in his being as a ticket-puncher, nor the athlete as a field-goal kicker. Personhood transcends functionality. "The word 'tabulation' or 'repertory' is the best word for describing what the self is not." 2

Hence, we must be cautious. Fatherhood is not, first and foremost, a physiological, psychological, legal, or social phenomenon. To stuff it into any one of these boxes would be either to reduce it to a hard fact (like the betrayal of personality seen in statistics and anatomy lessons), or to drape it in sentimentality and convention.

If we try to define fatherhood in strictly biological terms, we are really not talking of it at all, but of procreation. If we introduce considerations of a judicial or sociological order, we expose ourselves to no less a danger; it is that of allowing fatherhood to be absorbed in a conception which is relative, for, from this point of view, it could only be defined in relation to a given historical civilization whose religious and judicial institutions are transitory.3

The reality of being a father cannot be whittled down to biology or legal obligation. It is not a bodily transaction, a contract or a code, an interruption of one's life. Most especially, it is not a subjective state of seeing oneself as related by ties to which one must remain 'faithful' out of a filtered or secondhand sense of merciless obligation, the observance of which is to be expected of oneself. No, such things are all substitutes. Of its nature, fatherhood has a Divine origin and a sacred purpose.

The Being of Fatherhood

Fatherhood is a real relation within the family; it gives and preserves vitality, it guards and accentuates the worth of living. If there is one truth we must stress, it is this: the family engendered and nurtured by husband and wife is an irrevocable community, unable to be replaced by a substitute, a 'stand-in' or imitation. In spite of the diversity of customs and practices at work in different societies, the roles of father and mother are stable in their nature and irreplaceable in their purpose. Even as the essence of human nature remains one, regardless of the immense variety of man's thoughts, passions, and inventions, so too the nature of fundamental realities cannot be changed or buried by any degree of effort.

At the root of fatherhood we find the creative vow, capturing in a simple phrase the whole character of this vocation. "We can see clearly enough that the voeu créateur implies the combination of a deep personal humility and an unshaken confidence in life, conceived of not as a natural force but as an unfathomable order, divine in its principle."4 When it is sanctioned by self-giving, when it is seriously undertaken and openly welcomed, fatherhood makes God more present in the world, so to speak, by bringing something of His justice, mercy, and love to bear upon the natural and social spheres in which we move. The Apostle Paul instructs Christians to "redeem the time" (cf. Eph. 5:15-16). What is fatherhood, if not a way, perhaps the chief way, for a man to root his temporal love in immortality, leaving behind him a testament of sacrifice and bearing witness to that interior wealth which cannot be priced? Generosity, love without price, is the legacy of our Lord to His followers. A man who devotes himself to the family is learning, and at the same time teaching, the wisdom of Christ.

The connection between man's identity as father to his children and God's identity as Father to His people is not at all coincidental. From the beginning, the Creator graciously revealed Himself under the metaphor, and within the very institution, of the nuptial bond. The Almighty is both Bridegroom and Father. He chooses the Church as His bride, with her He begets spiritual children. The relation we call 'being a father' is rooted in the deepest ground of who a man is, and reaches out to embrace wife, children, and home. In this dynamic correlation between one's own being and the outpouring of love to another, we catch a faint glimpse of the heavenly Father eternally 'giving rise to' the Son, with the Holy Ghost proceeding from both like a breath or flame of love.

Fatherhood as Salvific

Fatherhood is a 'saving' reality to the degree that a man fulfills his role as 'savior' of the mutable world of daily life, the one who redeems the humdrum and exalts the lowly. Because he is not related to his children with emotional or physiological ties of the same intensity as a mother's, the father is in an extremely ambivalent position: either he can shirk his responsibilities as ruler and teacher of his children, or he can all the better live up to them precisely due to his distance from the hearth. His position is one of danger and promise. One might say that the very qualities which render a man fit to be a good ruler and teacher - his natural distance from much of what constitutes the bearing and rearing of children, his ability to look upon his own offspring as basically 'other' than himself (more present to him through their mother) - these and other male conditions open up the possibility of failure, even of treachery. "For reasons which I do not think have been fully elucidated, fatherhood nearly always presents the character of a more or less hazardous conquest, which is achieved step by step over difficult country full of ambushes."5 Fatherhood thus presents, in a twofold way, the paradox spoken by Christ: "He who would gain his life must lose it for my sake." To bring life, that is, purposefulness and inner joy, to his family, a man must learn to lose himself. This is another way of saying that responsibility and suffering are inseparable in the living out of any love that deserves the name. "It behooves the man to place himself at life's disposal and not to dispose of life for his own purposes."6

In losing himself for the sake of his wife and children, he wins back, over time and not without steady struggle, a self purified of egotism and false liberty. In this way, the Divine principle of creation, God's love, is engrafted onto the family, or even better, becomes its lifeblood.

We can state without hesitation that the limitations and deformations to which the fatherly feeling is liable tend to disappear in large families, and one might say that this is like the reward, the immanent sanction, of the act of prodigality by which a man generously sows the seeds of life, instead of sparingly doling out the smallest possible number of descendants compatible with his need of survival. By the multiplicity, the unpredictable variety of the relationships which it embraces, the large family really presents the character of a creation, there is a direct relation between the persevering and often literally heroic effort by which it is built up, and the new wealth, the wealth of life which it receives. Here as elsewhere, nature only gives it best fruits if an upright way of thinking and a courageous will succeed in directing it without forcing it by violence, in short, if a way is found to govern and to serve it at the same time.7

If, by the grace of God, such single-minded devotion becomes as real, as tangible as the union by which man and woman possess each other, as real as the conception and birth of the fruit of their embrace, then the family will begin to escape the inner poverty to which it is vulnerable, especially in an age where falsehood has usurped the place of truth and worldly compromises have tainted human hearts. What, in the end, should a man try to save? He must save or restore the meaning of life in community, life as a gift. He must rescue life from passivity, protect it from the battering of misfortune, endow it with direction, habituate himself and his children to the practice of religion. Fatherhood, Marcel explains, "only exists as the carrying out of a responsibility, shouldered and sustained. . .It is probably in contrast with inertia and blindness that we can best understand what the pure act of fatherhood should be. By that I mean a self-spending which can be compared to a gift, because it prepares and requires an engagement and because without this it is nullified." 8

Now we are in a better position to appreciate the words of Péguy: "the fathers of families, those great adventurers of the modern world." Nothing we have described can be accomplished without toil and sweat, without a feeling of unworthiness and incapacity, a desire to accuse and excuse oneself at the same time. The burden of vocation (even if the yoke is easy, we still must bear it!) explains, I believe, why so many otherwise intelligent men, capable of meditating on their vocation, choose rather to flee from it than to face the sacrifices to which they are called. Seen in its nature and supreme importance, fatherhood is ultimately an expression of piety towards creation and its inviolable sanctity. It is, in Marcel's suggestive phrase, "the hallowing of the real."9 To make the world holy is a cross, because our hearts and the hearts of others resist God's love, and a resurrection, for God's grace triumphs in those who persevere. No one can share the glory of Easter without bearing the cross of Good Friday.

Because the contemporary world is bedazzled by the spell of technology, the ruse of convenience, the bustle of gratification, and, at the root of these, the repudiation of the sacred, we should not be surprised to find all around us the phenomena of moral irresponsibility, weariness of life, skepticism down to the bones, loneliness, and betrayal. We are happily startled and thankful when we meet men and women who have somehow withdrawn themselves, unscarred, from the chaos. "The life of man is a battle," says Job. Indeed, now more than ever, Catholic fathers are called to be soldiers for Christ, protecting their families and defending the truths of our faith in season and out of season.

The Promise of Completion

Fatherhood carries with it the vocation to help sanctify the 'domestic church' of the family. There is a further element we should not fail to consider: the way in which this vocation foreshadows the final completion of man in a community of love with those he cherishes and with the God he worships. Every time man succeeds in 'founding the church' within the bounds of his home, he has furthered in a definite way the continual founding of the Church of Christ, oriented to the consummation of the Kingdom. Thus, it is of the essence of fatherhood to advance the work of God, the continual and arduous effort of "making all things new" (2 Cor. 5:17) in Jesus Christ, who declared: "And I, if I be lifted up from the earth, will draw all things to myself" (Jn. 12:3 2). The Incarnation of the Word reveals the final purpose of God's intervention in human history: the reclaiming of the fallen universe, the re-creation of all in the Image of the Father.

These profound truths do not leave human fatherhood unaffected. The man who rules and serves the family should especially strive to imitate the providential, gratuitous love of the heavenly Father for His creation. In so doing, the father secures himself from the danger of aloofness and tepidity, his wife from the loneliness and monotony of duty, his children from the temptation of revolt and ingratitude. Within life's complicated maze, a man must learn to perceive the distant but all-important end for the sake of which he supports new life in the bosom of his family.

The Centrality of the Home

The "outer world," the world outside of us, only has meaning in terms of a stable reference-point from which we gain our sense of belonging, of rootedness. When we speak of 'going away,' we imply that there is something central and fixed from which we depart. What does it mean to travel, if not to leave behind something familiar, and to return to it afterwards? The concepts 'domestic' and 'foreign' would have no meaning if we did not intuitively understand 'home' and 'away from home.' Each of us approaches the world from within a place where we are already welcome, not strangers. This feeling of welcome, which fits like a glove and warms like hot cocoa, is hidden within the meaning of the word familiar. If there is no home - no household, no hearth, no mother and father - then the world loses its intelligibility, we can no longer compare what we encounter with what is first and better known to us. Our center of gravity, our language and our sentiments, are so tightly bound up with our homes that we cannot even realize the extent of our indebtedness unless something goes tragically wrong. Consider the sentiments expressed by Hilaire Belloc in a letter of sympathy to Evan Charteris, whose father had just died:

Now what has come upon you is as hard a thing as any man can have to bear. The inanimate friends, which are the truest and which never betray, the walls and scents of home, when we lose these we lose, as it were, ourselves. It is a sharp foretaste of death ... To lose one's home, Evan, is to lose one's bones and one's skin. I know it. To lose unique and mutual affection is almost (in a mad metaphor) to lose one's soul.

What is left if the home vanishes? Little more than an incoherent mass of sensual data rushing at us from the vast world. If a man seeks to find meaning while refusing to belong to his family, he will find nothing more than transient distractions to stimulate and occupy him for the present moment, until his thoughts bring him back to the emptiness of his rootless situation. Marcel echoes Pascal and Kierkegaard when he writes:

I am inclined to think that those people are becoming ever more numerous whose existence coagulates round a few satisfactions which from outside seem almost incredibly petty: the daily bridge party, the football match, some recreation connected either with love or food. They would not miss these pleasures for anything in the world. If for some reason or another they have to do without them, existence itself becomes a desert, a blank night of gloom. There is, of course, the most direct relation between the exaggerated value which is given to them and the insipidity which characterizes the general substance of life - an insipidity which can in an instant become nauseating. In every department the passage from what is insipid to what is unendurable is imperceptible.10

When the heart of the rootless man tries to make a nest in the desperate vacuity of his whirlwind life and predictably fails, he will only redouble the search for temporary distractions, until his life becomes a fleeing from, not a movement towards, reality. The home is the first and lasting context of the fullness we spoke of as 'welcome,' 'familiarity,' 'belonging.' Strip it down or take it away, and eventually the only thing remaining is a frivolous masquerade. Behind the mask is nothing, yet the elaborate process of masking we see going on around us in the world - a masquerade which may be said already to have developed its own protocol, values, and lifestyle -enables rootless men and women to bear for a time the emptiness of their existence, the inversion of being, and the nausea that would result from staring into it.

The Founding of a Home

As we should expect, the father has a pivotal, non-transferable part to play in the founding and preserving of the home. Fatherhood rightly lived involves continuous presence to others, living for others, being 'on call' 24 hours a day. Because this commitment is not as natural to men as it is to women, it is all the more crucial for the stability of the family as a voluntary community. That is why the ancient Romans spoke of the paterfamilias, the one out of whom the family arises as a spiritual entity. The man defines the boundaries and character of the home, the woman uses her inestimable skill in giving content and development to it. If man does not live up to his vocation to found a family, a permanent community of love, as the legendary Aeneas is said to have founded Rome by plunging his sword into the ground where the city would stand, then woman will have no one to turn to as pillar and foundation. When domestic stability and prayerful dedication are missing from life, men and women have no direction and no basis for their efforts as parents. In a world of broken or nonexistent homes, the lifeblood of love, promise, is replaced with promiscuity, a haphazard shifting of allegiance comparable to amnesia and schizophrenia. Child-bearing, child-rearing, and the countless cares that make the house a home, will increasingly appear to the woman as intolerable burdens, affronts to her 'freedom,' instead of expressions of loving commitment.

In confronting this danger of hollowness, fatherhood has the saving role of anchor and open sail, reflecting the supreme Fatherhood of God in His providence over all of creation until the consummation of the world in the coming of Christ. The role of father is undoubtedly linked to the vocation of Adam in the plan of creation: naming the creatures of God through knowledge and tending the garden of the world through art. Knowledge, however, can sour into "the pride of life" (1 Jn. 2:16) and technology can transform itself into rape. Fighting each of these primal temptations, the man is meant to trust humbly in God and seek His help, to exercise chastity of life, the mortification of domineering instincts. His abilities have their best use when they are placed at the feet of another: it is invaluable to meditate on the selflessness characteristic of chivalry, a tradition imbued with Christian honor. Addressing the themes of knowledge and technics, our Holy Father in Crossing the Threshold of Hope expresses much the same thought:

Man is the priest of all creation. Christ conferred upon him this dignity and vocation. Creation completes its opus gloriae both by being what it is and by its duty to become what it should be. In a certain sense science and technology also contribute to this goal. But at the same time, since they are human works, they can lead away from this goal. In our civilization in particular there is such a risk, making it difficult for our civilization to be one of life and love. Missing is precisely the opus gloriae, which is the fundamental destiny of every creature, and above all of man, who was created in order to become, in Christ, the priest, prophet, and king of all earthly creatures.11

The vocation of the father is one form of the universal calling to holiness, a calling that takes flesh primarily in deeds of love. In order to make sense out of 'holiness,' a word which is easily said but sometimes so abstract, we should try to see the deep ties between fidelity, self-sacrifice, creativity, and works of mercy. So regarded, holiness acquires tangible meaning: to be faithful to one's duties in life, to make sacrifices for loved ones, to open up room for other souls to blossom, to help where help is needed. In this way, the father is present to his wife and children, the saint is present to the world - each re-presents Christ. In a family where Christian love is the measure and the goal, the possibility of despair is for all practical intents unthinkable. We still suffer - the Christian Faith offers no panacea - but our suffering is part of the life we willingly embrace out of love for God, who turns hardship into a source of merit and glory.

What, then, have we seen to be true about the home? It is a locus of activities, memories, undefinable experiences, the shared 'dialect' of familiar language, a household way of doing things one does not find anywhere else in the world, circling around the mother and father. It is the soil where life is rooted, and whence it draws sustenance. For these reasons it is an elementary given of human life. The home, ensouled by the family, is the beginning of the person - the beginning of our life, our consciousness, our development, our ability to engage the world, our adaptation to the demands accompanying maturity, our success in meeting others and loving them. In a very real sense, it is the crown or treasure of the person in this world. Through the home of his childhood as well as the home he may later establish with his wife, a man learns to absorb and reflect love, he makes himself available to others. In his own home, by working for and with his family, man fulfills his vocation to name and cultivate, rule and serve, carry the cross and extend the Kingdom of God. By leading his life worthily, a man slowly takes on the "stature" of Christ (cf. Eph. 4:13).

Indeed, we are at the point, the axis, where the vocations of man and woman meet, despite their intrinsic and vital differences. "[L]eading the kind of life in which a Christian conquers the 'rule of sin' in himself by means of self-denial," wrote Karol Wojtyla as Cardinal of Krakow,

is thus clearly a question of sanctity in the moral sense, of dominion over evil, in which, in a sense, man's own kingliness is displayed ... Every Christian who conquers sin by imitating Christ achieves the royal self-dominion that is proper to human beings; by so doing he shares in the munus regale of Christ and helps to bring about Christ's kingdom.12

The circle is closed: every time a man rightly exercises his paternity, in begetting and educating, chastising, and rewarding; every time a woman rightly lives from within her maternity, bearing and nursing, training and instructing; every time husband and wife join efforts to rear the fruit of their love, they are sharing in the kingly office of Christ, his munus regale, which is a gift from "the Father of lights" (James 1:17) to the faithful Christian. It is only through the prophetic and royal priesthood of Jesus Christ that the countless sacrifices and labors of life make any sense in the end. It is only in Him that human love, so often obscured and tarnished, becomes aware of its own immortal dignity and beauty. The father and the mother share in the redemptive mission of the Lord. If they have "redeemed the time," they will share in His salvation.

Peter A. Kwasnieswski is studying for a Doctorate in Philosophy at The Catholic University of America, concentrating on medieval philosophy.

1 Gabriel Marcel, "On the Ontological Mystery," The Philosophy of Existentialism, trans. Manya Harari (New York: Citadel Press, Carol Publishing Group, 1991), p. 27.

2 Gabriel Marcel, Metaphysical Journal, trans. Bernard Wall (Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1952), p. 177.

3 Gabriel Marcel, "The Creative Vow as Essence of Fatherhood," Homo Viator: Introduction to a Metaphysic of Hope, trans. Emma Craufurd (Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1951), p. 99.

4 Ibid. p. 121.

5 Ibid. p. 110.

6 Ibid. p. 114.

7 Ibid. p. 113.

8 Ibid. pp. 116-7.

9 Ibid. p. 101.

10 Ibid. p. 116.

11 John Paul II, Crossing the Threshold of Hope, trans. Jenny McPhee and Martha McPhee (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1994), p. 18.

12 Karol Wojtyla, Sources of Renewal: The Implementation of the Second Vatican Council, trans. P.S. Falla (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1980), p. 263.