Spiritual Sunday – Father’s Day
When I attended church as a child, I came away with the impression that God was an old man who was angry all the time. It didn’t help that our rector, as I learned later, was a fire and brimstone Episcopalian (they’re fairly rare). I was also freaked out by the confessional of the time, especially the lines, “We have left undone those things which we ought to have done; And we have done those things which we ought not to have done; And there is no health in us.” (The language was softened in the 1979 prayer book revision.) Christianity, as I experienced it, seemed to do little more than exacerbate my already strong sense of guilt. I would have agreed with William Blake’s depiction of such a God as “Nobodaddy,” a “silent & invisible Father of jealousy” who hides in “darkness and obscurity.”
The end result was that I stopped going to church when I hit high school and didn’t return until my late thirties.
It helped in my return that I started thinking of God as female rather than male. This gender shift opened up possibilities that had seemed closed off before. I also appreciated that Julian of Norwich, whom I taught in the British Literary survey, refers to Jesus as a mother.
Katherine Mansfield’s poem “God the Father,” however, provides a more positive view of a paternal God. She too appears to have had negative feelings until, after having been beaten about by life, she arrives at a new appreciation.
We can’t help but anthropomorphize the deities we worship, but literature helps us expand the range of our metaphors.
To God the Father
By Katherine Mansfield
To the little, pitiful God I make my prayer,
The God with the long grey beard
And flowing robe fastened with a hempen girdle
Who sits nodding and muttering on the all-too-big throne
of Heaven.
What a long, longtime, dear God, since you set the
stars in their places,
Girded the earth with the sea, and invented the day and night.
And longer the time since you looked through the blue window of Heaven
To see your children at play, in a garden….
Now we are all stronger than you and wiser and more
arrogant,
In swift procession we pass you by.
“Who is that marionette nodding and muttering
On the all-too-big throne of Heaven?
Come down from your place, Grey Beard,
We have had enough of your play-acting!”
It is centuries since I believed in you,
But to-day my need of you has come back.
I want no rose-colored future,
No books of learning, no protestations and denials–
I am sick of this ugly scramble,
I am tired of being pulled about–
O God, I want to sit on your knees
On the all-too-big throne of Heaven,
And fall asleep with my hands tangled in your grey
beard.