Our Past is Not a Burden to Cast Away
The first broken relationship: Between father and children
The history of every civilization, faith, and family: Father and child have a falling out.
“In a futile attempt to erase our past, we deprive the community of our healing gift,’’ Brennan Manning writes. “If we conceal our wounds out of fear and shame, our inner darkness can neither be illuminated nor become a light for others.”
The Father/Child division is the first split recorded in the Bible. It’s the spark of every revolution and riot, every cultural split and religious schism from the beginning to the present:
- The percentage of children growing up without a father living in their home doubled between 1970 and 1980, remaining over 20 percent ever since, according to the Census Bureau. The United States now has the world’s highest rate of children living in single-parent led homes, double among African Americans.
- Every time an angry crowd topples a statue, it’s a representation of an elder or previous generation they are condemning.
- “The Defective Father Syndrome” is the common thread explaining why most prominent atheist intellectuals, particularly men, reject religion and God the Father. If their biological father wasn’t adequate, they tend to distrust other authority and “father figures,” including God.
- The “one weird trait” predicting whether you love or hate Donald Trump, statistical analysis shows: people who like strong authority figures tend to like him while people repelled by authoritarians hate him. The word authority comes from the author (or creator) of someone or something.
Nearly every tragedy and loss in life itself goes back to the Father’s broken heart, Neal Lazano writes in “Abba’s Heart”:
“He chose us. He willed us into existence and holds us there in love, despite the pain. The broken heart of the Father is most visible in the broken body of the Son hanging on the cross; Jesus said, ‘Anyone who has seen me has seen the Father’ (John 14:9). His death was not only the consequence of all our sin but also the purest expression of the Father’s love.’’
Let’s assume your father is or was the absolute worst ever
Since the garden of Eden, the father of lies whispered words of resentment against God, the Father, and other father figures.
The problem with hating your father: once you lose faith in father figures, it’s relatively simple to go the next step:
Realizing that you aren’t any better than the parents and grandparents who made you. The fruit doesn’t fall far from the tree. And if you can’t believe in your parents, how can you believe in yourself? Filling yourself with anger toward an earlier generation is like drinking poison expecting them to die.
“Our past is not a burden to be cast away,” Trump said July 4. “We will never allow an angry mob to tear down our statues, erase our history, indoctrinate our children, or trample on our freedoms. We will safeguard our values, traditions, customs, and beliefs.”
Healing the inter-generational wounds and divides
Jesus, of course, came to earth to fill the gap and become the bridge reconnecting the Father and His children.
The absolute worst insult to call someone is “racist,’’ Father Mathias Thelen stresses, but he notes that the tax collectors were the lowest of the low of in the time of Jesus. Rather than attacking them, Christ dined with them.
Why do we blame elder generations for our pain? Friedrich Nietzsche, “blamed the Jews and then the Christians for exalting the lowly,” Father Dwight Longenecker argues.
Eventually, he adds, “the victim regards himself as a martyr, and if a martyr, then a virtuous person, and if he is a virtuous person, then the oppressor must be even more evil. So the rebel is born, and history from the Protestant Revolution onward through 500 years of revolution has shown the ruthlessness of the new revolutionaries.”
Resentment grows regardless of ideology, culture, or beliefs, Longenecker writes, and “their cause has become linked with their identity. Take away their cause, and they crumble.” The only way to make peace with the angry mobs, he argues is to return to the “graced joy” of the faith:
“This joyful humility is the Christian’s true secret weapon against the self-righteous barbarism of our age. It is the secret that empowers Christians to take the crises of every age with a certain joie de vivre.
“It gives Christian warriors a glint in the eye and a spring in the step. It is the quality that inspires the martyrs to make jokes on the scaffold and inspired that master of gallows humor, Flannery O’Connor, to quip, ‘I don’t think I could be a saint, but I could be a martyr if they killed me quick.’”
