Dear Brothers – What do we think of fatherhood? Some of us have had a very good relationship with our fathers. Others of us have had difficulties with our fathers. Most of us are probably somewhere in the middle. The father/son relationship is usually complicated – we love our fathers and want their approval, but we have likely rebelled against their authority at some point. They may have supported our choices and independence, or criticized us. They may have been affectionate and warm, or cold and withdrawn, having little time for us, or they may have been the stern authoritarian that many associate with the figure of the father. They may have encouraged our vocation, or intractably opposed it. Our relationship with our fathers has probably been complicated.
One thing is certain, though. Our fathers have influenced our lives, for good or for ill. They have given us a picture of what it means to be a man, whether we admire that picture or not. They have coloured our attitudes toward authority, toward work and responsibility, and toward love. If our fathers have passed away, in many ways they still live on in us.
So what do we think about fatherhood these days? Some say that the model of the traditional family is falling apart. With same-sex marriage, divorce rates rising, and single parents becoming more and more a norm, the role of the father is changing. I’m no sociologist, so I’m not qualified to speak about this. I don’t know the statistics as to whether children raised by a single parent make better adjusted adults or worse. I do know that for many the traditional family has been a nightmare. Over 50% of women have been abused at some point in their lives, either sexually, physically, or emotionally, and the majority of that abuse happened in their family of origin. Most of the trauma that we carry with us is from our childhood, caused by our traditional families. But at the same time, fatherhood, or mentorship, continues to be an important element in everyone’s life. If we can’t find the support and love we need at home, or even if we can, we may find it elsewhere. I’m sure many of us can name one or several men who have been fathers or mentors for us aside from our birth father, figures in our lives who have guided us and supported us in important ways, who were there at turning points in our lives.
And lest we forget, the Holy Family was far from our model of a “traditional family.” According to Catholic teaching, the marriage between Joseph and Mary was never consummated. And Joseph was not the biological father of Jesus. There are theologians who believe that the irregularity of Jesus’s conception was well-known among his contemporaries. In John’s gospel, Jesus’s enemies taunt him by saying, “We are not illegitimate,” as the NAB translates it, implying that they thought that Jesus was. There is an old rumour, from about the late 2ndcentury, that Jesus’s real father was a Roman soldier named Pantera. Also, Jesus was an only child, again according to Catholic teaching. Scripture refers to the brothers and sisters of Jesus, particularly James, somewhat unfairly called “the lesser,” who was a leader in the early Church, but Catholic teaching explains that seeming contradiction to the perpetual virginity of Mary. In any case, as a one-child family, Jesus’s household would be an anomaly in a culture which prized female fertility and large families. Jesus’s family was far from the traditional model of his day and even of our own.
Nevertheless, it is clear that Joseph played the role of father to Jesus and of husband to Mary. In popular pictures of how we imagine Jesus’s childhood, Joseph is often depicted as teaching Jesus the trade of carpentry. One of the few things we know about Joseph was that, like his namesake in Genesis, he listened to his dreams. He believed that God could and did communicate to him through dreams, and he followed the advice given him in dreams. When he thought that Mary had been unfaithful and that he would have to divorce her, a dream explained her situation to him. When Herod was about to kill all the male children under two years old in Bethlehem, Joseph heeded his dream and protected his family by escaping temporarily to Egypt. Because of his silence, Mary gets all the speaking parts, we think of Joseph as quiet and patient, a gentle man.
Joseph, then, was a very real father to Jesus, despite not being his biological parent. He nurtured and protected him, and gave him an example of what it means to be a righteous man, as Matthew describes him. We might imagine that Jesus gets his compassion and patience from Joseph.
According to Pope Francis, contemporary society, particularly in Europe and North America, tends toward individualism, where the individual’s wants and needs outweigh the wants and needs of the community. We are taught, through our culture, that we must be self-sufficient, that we must stand on our own two feet, make our own way in the world, forge our own path. This can lead to many problems, such as neglect of our elders, who shuffle off to retirement homes after they are no longer able to be self-sufficient. It also leads to a certain short-sightedness. We view our own story in isolation from others and from history. We have no identity except for the one we have constructed for ourselves and the past extends only as far back as our own lifetimes. All this emphasis on the individual gives our society a sense of restlessness and rootlessness, bereft of the history and community that we could be given through our fathers and mothers, grandmothers and grandfathers.
Our Gospel today begins with the very tail end of Matthew’s genealogy, which begins, “The book of the genealogy of Jesus Christ, the son of David, the son of Abraham.” The genealogy proceeds through the generations, mainly from father to son, until ending with the verse before us, “and Jacob was the father of Joseph, the husband of Mary.”
In the reading from 2nd Samuel this morning, we hear the promise that God makes to David, that a son would sit on his throne, so that “your house and your kingdom shall endure forever before me.” Although the obvious interpretation of these verses is that they refer to Solomon, who did build the first temple, Christians believe that they refer to Jesus, and Matthew makes clear, through his long genealogy, that the prophecy of Nathan is, in fact, fulfilled in Jesus, through his father, Joseph, descended from David.
So, aside from all his other virtues as a father, Joseph provides Jesus with a lineage, a place in history and in his community. Jesus is not merely an individual, forging his own path, but the end result of dozens of generations of men and women who had their own stories, and made their own contributions to history. He is the fulfillment of history. His context gives his mission greater meaning and effectiveness. This sense of history, of belonging to something greater than ourselves, is something our contemporary world could use more of. And it is provided through fatherhood.
Here at Gethsemani, we are privileged to be able to find a different sort of relationship to fatherhood. We have an abbot, a father who is the representative of Christ for us. Our elders are not sent away to retirement homes, but live with us and pass away with us. Our past is a living thing through their stories and examples. Simply living in our monastery and worshiping in our church day to day gives us context and a sense that we belong to the history of this place. Our cemetery shows us that our community extends far beyond the brothers we are living with here and now, that generations of men built and sustained this place before we ever arrived, and are still with us in spirit. They are all, in some sense, our fathers. Like Joseph, they dreamed of a future. We are their dream. Our way of life could be a sign to the world of a different message of fatherhood.
And of course, the spirit of St. Joseph is alive and well here at Gethsemani. All we have to do is look around to find him all over the place. He is the patron of our church, which was dedicated to him in 1878 and rededicated in 1998. And he watches over us from his perch on St. Joseph’s hill in all we do, from our singing in choir to our work in our industries, from our waking to our sleeping. Joseph was a father to Jesus, and he continues to be a father to us, gently guiding and directing us. The plaque outside our church doors which commemorates the dedication calls him our “chosen patron, protector and defender.” We could do worse than remember the prayer inscribed on that plaque, and continue to dream of the future under Joseph’s patronage: “May there be an increase in the life, merit, and number of the brethren.” Amen.