WOOD YOU BELIEVE

A large number of people find themselves quite uncomfortable with the concept of God as Father and are much more at home praying to Jesus. The Abba of the New Testament doesn’t convey for them a sense of warmth and closeness but instead feels surprisingly cold and distant. A likely explanation for this is that if we could reach into a child’s mind to determine how they see God we would probably be looking at the image of the child’s own father. How we later relate to God as Father can be largely determined by how we saw, or didn’t see, our physical father.

The father can be absent from the child’s life in so many ways other than physically as in death or separation:

• Being emotionally undemonstrative, distant or unavailable.
• Unconsciously resenting the child for getting the attention he was denied at that age.
• Abdicated his responsibility in favour of work or leisure.
• Having his own unresolved childhood issues.
• Alcoholism, drug abuse or pornographic addiction.
• Having a too rigid or too relaxed discipline structure.
• Mental, physical or emotional punishment, violence or sexual abuse.
• Being unaware that he is using the child to fill his own emotional needs.

An important aspect of the father role for the boy growing up is to free him from his mother attachment and introduce him into the world of manhood. Where this doesn’t take place, the male may present a macho image precisely because he is unsure of his masculinity. Or he may become effeminate and have a bi-sexual or homo-sexual orientation. Emotionally he is not free, his feminine side is too much in control and he may well marry a woman that he can call ‘mum’ and eventually treat her as such! In practice this means that he is likely to re-enact his early years, taking his partner for granted just as he would his mother. He may find responsibility very hard to take and he will be drawn towards living the life of single man similar to when he was a young adult.

For the daughter, part of the father role is to affirm her emerging femininity. In his masculinity her femininity can feel at home. Where this is absent she is likely to feel unsure of herself as a woman and either be drawn towards same sex relationships or spend much of her life searching for the father she didn’t have in the various men she attracts into her life. Each of these relationships she will idealize but eventually cripple by a burden of unrealistic expectations. From her gaping father wound will come an inordinate need to be hugged, caressed and affirmed. Often this will cause her to trade sex for affection, but because this is operating at the unconscious level of the father-daughter relationship she usually senses something wrong, and may even speak the truth, that it feels ‘incestuous’.

Ultimately, seeking the answer outside of oneself in someone else will not heal the father wound. Only by becoming father to that part of the hurting self can healing and resolution take place. This is when the relationship to God as Abba Father begins to become real.