In the run-up to Father’s day and in the aftermath of the CRC’s annual Synod, I’ve been thinking a lot about love, and about the lessons in love we receive from each of our three parents: our earthly Mom, our worldly Dad, and of course: our Heavenly Father.
By the time we’re born, we’ve spent nine months in contact and communion with our mother. Over the course of our gestation, we evolve from being a part of our mother’s own body to being a tiny human, capable of an individual existence—though it will be years before we’re no longer dependent on others for food and care. Shortly after our birth, we find ourselves face-to-face with Mom, a person of whom we’ve long had a visceral knowledge, a person to whom we’ve been connected since we were just a tiny blob of undifferentiated cells.
And then Dad walks in, the first stranger most of us get to know. We’re his flesh and blood—or so we hope—but our face-to-face meeting in the open air of the room in which we were born is our first encounter with him. And it is there that we and our fathers begin a lifetime of getting to know, to understand, and to love each other.
While our mothers knew us and loved us even before they had met us, our fathers had to meet us before they could know us and before they could love us.
Love can be sorted into two broad categories: conditional and unconditional. Generally1, each of our parents specializes in teaching us one of love’s types.
Maternal love is the unconditional type, the nurturing feminine energy that loves her baby no matter what. After all, we emerged from Mom’s body; she fed us from her breasts. We have been part of her, and for her not to love us would require her to un-love a part of herself, a piece of her own existence.
Our fathers embody the masculine: a proclivity for action and results over empathy and connection. Our fathers love us, yes. But it is masculine to protect, to direct. And so, paternal love often seems more distant than the motherly kind. It’s only after a child’s birth that a father can become acquainted with the small human he begat. Our fathers must meet us—and will often appraise us—before they warm up to loving us and to showing us their love.
Conditional and unconditional love are both essential; both serve us in life as we grow to love ourselves, and others, and God. It is from our mothers—or from wherever the femininity in our upbringing happens to reside—that we learn unconditional love. Our mothers love us—and teach us to love ourselves—not for who we are, but simply because we are.
Our fathers—or whichever adult embodies the masculine—show us love’s conditional side. Our fathers demonstrate a love of validation, a love based on approval and acceptance. Our fathers teach us to love ourselves for what we’ve done, for what we’ve accomplished, and for what we’ve made of who we are. Our fathers teach us a love that is a function of our behavior, a reward for something well done, a love that is earned, deserved, and strived for.
While Mom says, “You’re precious,” Dad says, “’Attaboy!”
I’m grateful to my own parents: to Mom, who taught me to be at peace with who I am, and to Dad, who showed me the value of striving to be even better.
God is Supreme and supernatural, beyond the distinctions of gender or the biological and psychological limitations of our humanity. God is infinite, unconstrained by limitations that would make her either masculine or feminine. If God is anything, she must be both maternal and paternal, fully masculine and fully feminine: God the Father and God the Mother, all at once.
In our Christian tradition, we speak of God as our Heavenly Father. We characterize our Creator as masculine, an entity whose character is fatherly. We see God as discerning—often to the point of being inflexibly judgmental. His love, in our minds, is conditional and depends on our performance and behavior and “compliance”.
We see God not as the parent who birthed us, but as the parent whose expectations we must live up to. We don’t believe in a God who loves us simply because we emerged from her body. We can’t imagine that our mere existence could be sufficient to deserve her affection. Instead, we believe we must earn his acceptance, win his approval, prove ourselves worthy of his pardoning powers. We believe that God will treat us the way a father might treat a child—that we must go into the world and slay a lion or resist a thousand temptations or endure the rites of a painful circumcision in order to earn our way into the embrace of his fatherly love.
And because we accept that God is masculine, we accept that males are somehow be more God-like than females.
The paradigm that God is manly and men are godly was on full display at the Christian Reformed Church’s synod this year (not to mention the SBC’s concurrent women-ousting shenanigans in New Orleans).
I cringed when I saw the picture that accompanied the Banner’s article about five (white) guys from a classis in the Midwest who all came from the same church. Yes, I know that most of our Dutch-descended denomination is white, and that church roles and theological training have historically been more available and accessible to men than to women, so I understand why white men occupy more leadership roles than we deserve.
But in America, only 30% of the population is both white and male. If you randomly select five Americans from our population, the odds of drawing a Yahtzee of white men are about 1 in 410. Unless showcasing the denomination’s lack of diversity was the Banner’s intent, the magazine might have considered highlighting some other, more inclusive story and some other, more diverse image. But as it is, a photo of five white guys—who I’m sure are fine gentlemen—is an advertisement of insensitivity and of tacit acceptance that the CRC is a denomination of and for people who are white and male and—needless to say—not queer.
When, on the floor of Synod, a woman tearfully pleaded that more time be allowed for deliberation, she was chided by a male delegate and reminded that “we need to be adults here.” (He later apologized.) Grown men cried at Synod, too, and not only the men who were being told not to love and include God’s queer children. The men who believe it’s their role to call others back from their sins cried as well. They said they really love their brothers and sisters, despite their siblings’ sinful welcome of queer Christians into their congregations and consistories. “We love you,” one guy choked out, birthing words directed to Neland Avenue CRC past a lump in his throat.
It’s unfair that we maintain this double standard: that we see a woman’s tears as evidence of her childishness, while a man’s tears earn him our confidence that the judgement he’s pronounced has been tempered by compassion.
Wait ’til Dad gets home, I imagine the delegates saying, intoning the voice of a self-righteous elder sibling.2 Dad sure won’t be happy when he comes back to find you kids running around making a mess and causing a ruckus, what with a bunch of lesbians passing communion trays up and down and over this place, like you’re having some kind of Pride parade in God’s own house. This was meant to be a holy house of worship, you know.
Yes, I can envision a Heavenly Father, scowling in paternal disapproval of the mess we’re making. And I can also envision a Heavenly Mother, wrapping herself and her diaconal, lesbian daughter in a rainbow-striped flag, proudly sashaying their way up the sanctuary’s center aisle toward plates heaped with bread and wine.
We have taken this too far. We are right to base our ideals of masculine and fatherly love on our understanding of the holy love of God. But we are wrong to ascribe to God the limitations we often see in mortal men.
We’ve turned our God-who-is-Love into a caricature of an imperfect human man, into someone who can’t love us until he knows us—and until he and approves of us. We’ve turned God—who in scripture is equated to love—into someone whose affection we must strive to be worthy of.
We were born naked, and immediately we were welcomed—naked, broke, and having done nothing in life—into our mothers’ loving arms. But rather than standing naked before a loving God, we build rickety towers of so-called ‘sound theology’ to try to get closer to her. We mask God behind a graven image of who we believe her to be, or worse yet: who we want her to be. We imagine God and we create a vision of what she must want from us, what she must want from others, and what she must want us to tell everyone else about what she wants from them.
We’ve left ourselves no time to listen to God; we’re too busy putting words in her mouth.
We convince ourselves that God’s love is a poor specimen of the fatherly type, the conditional kind, and a love we’ll probably never be good enough to deserve. No, we tell ourselves: God’s love cannot like Mom’s. No, unconditional love is too good to be true; wretches like us are too miserable to deserve such a thing. God can’t love us simply because she foreknew us and merely because we’ve been made fearfully and wonderfully and in her own image.
We believe we must earn the love of a manly God: a being we envision as our old, straight, white, male, and Heavenly Father. Any minute now, we know God will reappear. He’s had a long day at the office where he’s been reviewing the rolls of judgement and the scrolls upon which our innumerable transgressions have been carefully listed. Our Heavenly Father will fling the door open, letting into our hearts a blast of wintry, judgmental air. We already envision how God will drop his briefcase next to his snow-crusted galoshes. He’ll re-enter our lives exasperated and grumpy, in no mood for our joyous commotion, with no patience for this glittery, Love-is-Love mess we’re making.
Just wait ’til your Father gets home.
The irony, especially for us guilt-steeped Calvinists, is that we often try to earn God’s love by wallowing in the perpetual acknowledgement that nothing we’ll ever do will make us worthy of God’s love at all.
Oh Sweetie, I imagine God saying when at her second coming she wobbles through the kitchen door, with an armload of groceries propped against the jiggly hips that bore all of humanity. It looks like you’ve a busy day. Now could you help me put this stuff away?
Photo by Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash
Thank you, dear reader, for tolerating this post’s broad generalizations on love and gender and family structure. I know it’s all more nuanced than I’ve been able to present here.
Having been the self-righteous elder sibling, I know this voice well.
At first I was skeptical about here this was going. It’s hard to accept that as a father my love is conditional. But, guilty as charged. I loved the way you brought it altogether. The last two synods have made me wonder if I can remain in the church that has been my home for 63 years. But if voices like yours continue to be a part of it and heard, I have hope.
Beautifully written, Daniel. If I already did not follow your final description of who God is, I would be tempted to give them a try.