Time Immortal

Last week, Count Roland also wrote in with some thoughts on this article, about how many Canadians profess greater love for their pet dog than for their own father. I’ve just been lax in posting his thoughts.

They do need to give their heads a shake. But it may be to remind themselves of the meaning they are imparting when they speak of ‘love‘.

Today we have lost the Greek nuance and use love to mean many different things, from pleasure-induction (”I love chocolate”) to self sacrifice (the love of husband and wife for one another and for children for whom they and their friends express gratitude to God, pray for the new family as nurturing gifts from God and give congratulations for expanding the universal Church through the expansion of the domestic Church for which the blessings of God are asked for).

They may be correctly using a weak and partial meaning of love insofar as pets can give things — such as companionship and acceptance — which may be lacking from otherwise good parents for reasons beyond either party’s control. But love as it means in its fullness this is not. And to miss this difference is to impoverish our language and our lives.

I think it almost can be taken as a given that when anyone in the media speaks of “love,” they are not speaking of love in the fullest sense of the word, and certainly they are not capturing all the nuance imparted to the concept of love by the Greeks. But then, the same could be said of most musicians (I will grant some exception for a few country artists) and actors/actresses. Love is very poorly understood by our modern, post-Christian culture, and I cannot help but think that the departure of our society from Christian ideals has both precipitated and paralleled our departure from understanding what love really is.

A goodly number of Canadians need to give their heads a shake. That’s about all I can think to say to people who rate their love for their pet dog higher than their love for their own father (I’ll grant exceptions in the case of abusive and/or deadbeat dads, however).

Inability to relate to a real father leads to an inability to acknowledge the Heavenly Father?

The crisis of fatherlessness is partly cultural. We experience it acutely in the United States. Teachers and pastors witness its devastating effects every day. An abnormal ideological feminism at times enters the vacuum created by fatherlessness. Fatherlessness also can generate homoeroticism or a frantic search for some “spirituality of masculinity.”

Indeed, both boys and girls need a wise father who encourages them and strengthens them, and provides what a mother cannot. In society today, the need for true fathers has become desperate, though by the grace of God generous grandfathers have stepped forward to care for the young. U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas wrote movingly about this in My Grandfather’s Son: A Memoir, published earlier this year.

Vitz takes a broad historical sweep of atheists from the Enlightenment to our own day. In most cases alienation from God was a reaction to an absent or defective father. Similarly, a survey of staunch believers of the last two centuries shows that most of them had a close relationship with their father or instead enjoyed an effective father substitute.

An example is the life of Hilaire Belloc (1870-1953), whose father died when Hilaire was two. Henry Edward Cardinal Manning of Westminster was a real father figure to the young Hilaire, and Belloc matured in the way men do whose biological fathers helped them along the way.

As an Anglican clergyman, Manning lost his wife, so he knew the sorrow of widowhood personally. Later as a Catholic, when he became cardinal-archbishop, he maintained his role as father and found time to spend with the teenage Belloc despite the many pressing duties of office.

Vitz gives us an autobiographical section in which he explains his own “superficial” atheism as a young American academic. His atheism was more a social conformity and a career need than a damaged relationship with his father. A positive father relationship probably helped him overcome temporary atheism and made possible his serious adult conversion to the Catholic faith.

But Vitz’s selection of authors to analyze is interesting and adequate. On the atheist side we study 29 intellectuals or world leaders from the 18th century to the present. These include those who suffered from deceased fathers, weak fathers, absent fathers or abusive ones.

I should remember that the next time somebody tells me that my faith is irrational, illogcal, and based on Stone Age delusions of cave-dwelling madmen with no basis in actual fact or history. What do I know? Maybe that’s all true…but at least I’m not the one with daddy issues.