In June at the FLAME conference, we will be attempting to `rediscover' Fatherhood. There is certainly a good deal of evidence for the suggestion that we need a fresh, imaginative engagement with the issue, but it prompts a number of questions: Where and when did we lose fatherhood? What then is a father and what does a father do? Perhaps even, where exactly should we be looking?
Much of the `problem' with fatherhood today, is I suspect tied up with broader uncertainties that men have about their identity and their social role as a result of the rapid social changes that have occurred over the last few decades. These changes have been profound and far-reaching bringing increased autonomy and choice to many, both men as well as women, but equally bringing uncertainty. Women have moved firmly into the public world of work, territory that was traditionally male, and within the home, husband and wives with complementary roles and functions have evolved into partners with more fluid patterns of reciprocity. For our grandfathers and great-grandfathers the status of a responsible married man (and father) was underpinned by his trade and ability to provide for his family, and within the family fatherhood was accompanied by a certain authority and leadership. What a father was and what a father did was understood; his identity was tied to a role and to certain characteristic functions – he provided, protected and probably disciplined. For many of his grandsons things do not seem to be as simple, for stripped of such clear functions and authority, fathers can seem in our society to be auxiliaries, less important and less competent than the more superior model on offer based on motherhood.
Social change is never straightforward and naturally older patterns and ideas persist and continue to influence and shape our current thinking in a myriad of subtle ways. Mothers are widely held to possess a `maternal instinct' (despite passionate disavowals from many) and post-divorce settlements usually conclude that the child's interests are better served by residence with mothers. As a result, Fatherhood is frequently defined and therefore thought about in a minimal fashion - in terms of biology. Indeed, this reductive understanding is swiftly becoming the dominant understanding of fatherhood in our society. Paternity is `tested' genetically and the results seem to establish the status of fatherhood; that is a father is a father because he is the source, because he can establish a biological claim. Such an understanding of fatherhood is feed by a sense that our identity as humans is `really' genetic and ties this to the contemporary emphasis on and exercise of individual rights (including increasing `the right to have a child') within relationships. Clearly biological relationship is important yet this stress on genetics in how we think of who we are, and legal rights in how we relate to others leads to an impoverished understanding of fatherhood as a sort of property right ultimately based upon generative power. In trying to rediscover and refresh the meaning of fatherhood, we might start by considering the nature of God as Father, the gift of the child and the vocation of the parent.
The conference flyer rightly starts with the assumption that in worshipping the Trinity - Father , Son and Holy Spirit, the Church must, surely, have something to say that speaks to the deepest reality of who we are. The implication being that we might start with the Fatherhood of God...
Yet if one turns to look at the idea of God as Father in the Bible, things are not perhaps as one might anticipate. The idea of God as a sort of founding father is of course, a common one in a number of religions, but it is not where the Bible starts in its attempt to speak of God. Rather, we find in Exodus that God is named as `I am that I am'. That is, God is revealed in a fashion almost explicitly designed to prevent his followers producing a mental image of `him', he cannot easily be reduced to `one of us', rather he is - Other. He is not a Father God who begats or generates his people. Even when the metaphor of God as Father is finally introduced it is in the prophetic writings of Isaiah , Jeremiah and Hosea where the clear focus is eschatological; that is on a future time when the relationship between God and his people will be more fully realized as being that of a parent and child. Perhaps more significantly it is quite clear that the Israel or Ephraim that God `taught to walk' and `took up in his arms' ( Hosea 11 v3) is an adopted child.
In fact the references in the Old Testament to God as Father are few (roughly twenty). Rather it is in the New Testament that God emerges as Father and here we find that the fatherhood of God can only be understood through the revelation of the Son. It is because of Jesus that God can be understood as Father, it is because the Son can be seen that the Father can be known. It is because of the cross and resurrection, that far from being a distant, `absent' father, God can be invoked in the most intimate of terms as `Abba', daddy.
The character of Fatherhood, I would suggest is not to be discovered through the paternity test, nor is it located in a set of functions (e.g. the breadwinner or indeed the one who does the washing), nor even in a particular understanding of the role of the male parent (e.g. the parent who exercises discipline), rather it emerges, indeed it is constituted, as a response to the infant and the growing child. The infant lays a claim to a parent. This is caught in Marilynne Robinson's sustained and moving account of fatherhood, Gilead , in which the central character, the aging Reverend John Ames writes of the son whom he will not see reach adulthood:
`I realise there is nothing more astonishing than a human face... It has something to do with incarnation. You feel your obligation to a child when you have seen it and held it. Any human face is a claim on you, because you can't help but understand the singularity of it, the courage and loneliness of it. But this is truest of the face of the infant. I consider that to be one kind of vision, as mystical as any'
The child is the gift that creates the response that makes the parent. There are then no particular rules about how that parent, male or female responds to that gift. The response of the father is simply one shaped by masculinity. Of course, this is not to deny that there are some common patterns and familiar dynamics that go to make up the steps of the dance of family life as it unfolds: Times when it is a father rather than a mother that is sought or desired and times when a certain distance is required or maternal presence preferred: Times when the identification and hero-worship of the small boy for his father is consolidated through a shared love of football; Times when the acknowledgement and appreciation of difference makes `Daddy's little girl' seek out her father during the storms of adolescence.
Fundamentally then in responding to the needs and desires of the infant and growing child, fatherhood, like motherhood, is a vocation and in understanding and deepening our evolving response to the gift of the child, no task is off limits to the parent. Of course it is a gift that generates a great deal of work. As Martin Luther, the former monk who had already adjusted to having `pigtails on the pillow' before raising six children, makes clear in his writing, On the Estate of Marriage (1522) (which is incidentally refreshingly egalitarian in its vision of parenthood), fathering, or housefathering as he calls it, is pretty demanding:
`Alas, must I rock the baby, wash its nappies, make its bed, smell its stench, stay up nights with it, take care of it when it cries, heal its rashes and sores, and on top of that care for my wife, provide for her…'
Yet Luther argues, it is also a high calling to which the individual Chris tian man might well respond:
“0 God, because I am certain that thou hast created me as a man and hast from my body begotten this child, I also know for a certainty that it meets with thy perfect pleasure. I confess to thee that I am not worthy to rock the little babe or wash its nappies, or to be entrusted with the care of the child and its mother. How is it that I, without any merit, have come to this distinction of being certain that I am serving thy creature and thy most precious will? 0 how gladly will I do so, though the duties should be even more insignificant and despised. Neither frost nor heat, neither drudgery nor labour, will distress or dissuade me, for I am certain that it is thus pleasing in thy sight."
Whilst men may not always express it effectively, or indeed constructively, sadly, ironically, the experience of losing close contact with their children following relationship breakdown, often uncovers a depth of emotional connection that surprises them, and indeed others. This suggests to me that the possibilities for rediscovering and deepening something of the awe, the privilege and the sense of gift-edness that lies at the heart of fatherhood are underestimated at our peril.
The Revd Duncan Dormor, St John's College