Today, few fathers in their right mind would think that children should obey him unconditionally. We know that this is not a healthy situation and is not what fatherly authority is all about. After all, children are raised to be independent.
This text has been auto-translated from Polish.
In the Church, I heard constantly about love. Christianity is a religion of love - it was repeated. Then there were objections that it was about mature love, responsible love and what else. As with merchant's integrity, which sometimes differs from honesty simply. As a result, I was farther and farther away from what I myself felt was love.
I think Catholicism itself had a problem with this. More than once, the faithful have to strangle the reflexes of their hearts to conform to the Church's instructions. At a religion class in high school, Father Vladislav cut through the doubts and gave a definition: love is an act of the will, not a feeling. At the same time he pointed out that these two states should not be confused with each other.
Why such a sharp distinction? As far as I know something about love from experience, it consists in the fact that the difference between feeling and will rather disappears. One does not need to force oneself to love. As someone can not do without repeating: "After all, I love him!" and clenches his teeth, then in my humble opinion he should think carefully about what is happening to him.
Another thing arguments and differences of opinion. More than once it can be heated, but underneath even in the worst crisis, however, there is something that cannot be ignored or divided into will and feeling. One and the other prompts: let's fix it, let's communicate, let's clarify difficult issues. If agreement is difficult at this particular moment, we will try again as soon as everyone recovers. If something like this disappears, it's probably time to part ways.
God Father - a relic of times long gone
But with Jesus Christ and God the Father things are quite different, and so are Christians and their God. There is no question of disagreement, because the Son is to obey the Father. Now we understand why the act of will is so important. As love is founded on obedience and is difficult to separate from obedience, feelings can cause serious problems. It is necessary to do something about them, to brainwash the slave within and tell it what to do and where it belongs. And the best way to do this is to use a strong will.
All the more so because the Christian goes against the instinct of self-preservation: "Father, if Thou wilt, take this cup from Me! Yet not My will, but Yours be done!" (Luke 22:42). Christ "humbled himself, having become obedient to the point of death - and that death on the cross" (Phil. 2:8). The requirements are exorbitant, as you can see. In Christ-like obedience, one must come to a wall - self-denial, that is, complete self-denial.
For good measure, we are in some completely archaic and anachronistic situation. Today, hardly any father in his right mind would think that children are to obey him absolutely. We know that this is not a healthy situation and this is not what fatherly authority is all about. After all, children are raised to be independent.
The Christian God Father looks like a fossil from the days when fathers considered family members their property. Already Molière laughed at this some four hundred years ago, but Catholics have not read it. Their God still has the right to demand obedience, demands it, and there is no way around it. The Church will tell us what the highest authority wants from us.
Let's still stay with God's love. As for obedience, there is no discussion, but after all, the Christian God grants forgiveness to the faithful - forgives disobedience, of course.
What's the deal here? In the Church they will say that God forgives because he loves us as we are, with all our imperfections, that we can confess everything before him. I'm not convinced... I have the impression that the most important thing in this relationship turns out to be rather something else. Mercy is just the other side of the anger that God experiences. He is constantly pissed at us. He is offended by anything that sticks out from under the template we are supposed to obey. If He wasn't angry, He wouldn't need to forgive.
Authoritarian fathers indeed get terribly angry when someone doesn't listen to them. Anger is a human thing, it could be forgiven and God Himself, but still, let's look at what it looks like. There is in it, were there not, some exaggeration.
In Apocalypse God's wrath takes the form of a "lake of fire and sulfur." It lands in it one by one all the disobedient to "suffer torment day and night for ever and ever" (Rev. 20:10). Total and unconditional rejection. Our God experiences wrath that annihilates those He has offended. And this is without appeal! This wrath burns without end, so either obey or "I will curse you!".
Here let me make a small digression. When I catch myself doing something like this, a red light goes on in my head, especially if I can't get away from the fantasy of annihilating the disobedient. Not because I consider anger to be something particularly bad, rather because the persistence of such "I'll banish, kill, forget forever!" points to something underneath. To some unresolved past - mine... In situations where fathers say to their children "you don't exist for me, I don't want to know you anymore, you will never have access to me again," most often there is something wrong with the fathers themselves.
The infant complex
There's something wrong with love that apparently can't handle differences. Those we love will not unconditionally meet all our expectations, and if this is how we imagine love, it won't last long. In adulthood, there is no boob on demand. Something similar may be demanded by a toddler, and he has every right to be endlessly furious if he doesn't get it, but he grows out of it. For such a toddler, the mother is supposed to be available until final exhaustion, because if not, armageddon! Obedient to the point of death, and death at the cross - from sleeplessness, back pain, endless carrying, and the inability to break free from the demands of a several-month-old tyrant. Do you know this? Those who have children certainly know.
One suspects that strict fathers have stopped somewhere along the way and can't forget the paradise of the mother's breast along with sweet, unbroken unity. They would like to return to it, only now with their own children. And like our babies they get angry when it doesn't work out - ultimately, without distance and forever and ever amen.
The hard part. It seems that we have a God-Baby... Or some infant complex plaguing those who imagine such a God and who are comfortable with it. An infant is also a man, but he is not fit to be a father. He won't make it...
Parents must not allow themselves to be boundlessly angry, which is as much as possible with a child. They should accept as something most normal in the world the rage of a toddler, who rebels with his whole self against the fact that the mother is nevertheless someone separate and sometimes she is not in the room. They are prepared for this, strong and mature. If they themselves get into a similar rage when the child does not listen to them, then my sympathies are with that child. And the Christian God apparently gets into such a rage.
The punishment for disobedience is hell, and the worst thing about it is total rejection without appeal and forever. You don't want to dance as I play for you, then take your toys and get out of my sandbox! But after all, that's no way to treat children. If we already take this father-son metaphor seriously, then we are dealing with a very immature father.
A child will not be able to defend himself against a parent who threatens hell. He can't handle the threat of separation, because he needs his parents like air. It is worse for him than death. It wants to separate on its own and is panic-stricken about it, so there is nothing to compound the fears and threaten the highest level of punishment for independence, because it is something destructive and beyond its strength. Probably no father or mother, who feel something not a little bit, will not give the child a similar experience.
They may say, let's say: "I forbid this or that, and if you transgress the prohibitions, we won't go to the movies," but this is quite different from: "Be obedient shithead, because if you don't, I'll give you to the orphanage!". Hell is something like an "orphanage" or a "policeman" who takes away for disobedience.
This was the kind of education I was funded in the Church when I was six or seven years old. Keep this in mind if the idea of sending your children to religion comes to you.
Thief, but ours
And how do people imagine relationships with their children when they forget about Christianity for a while? And what can then be expected from the father or simply from the parents? Acceptance! Perhaps you know The Thief Over Thieves? I've told this fairy tale a thousand times to my daughter, and on top of that we watch it from time to time in a great film adaptation by German TV ARD (I recommend it!). And I heard it myself for the first time from my grandmother, we used to chat whenever my grandmother ironed.
A thief over thieves arrives years later at the family home he ran away from, sits down at the table with his parents and says: I am a thief. Nothing pleasant for parental ears. But the parents reply: a thief, but after all, our son. And they are nevertheless proud of him when he shows that he is a master of his craft, although it is not at all their world.
A beautiful story about how there is some betrayal, something thieving, in growing up and becoming independent. "The one is lucky what he steals, because there is not much in the world of it. Whether it's nice or not nice, don't ask, I don't know it." But this difference inherent in adolescence can be survived. This is the most important and moving thing about this tale. Relationships with parents become different, but they do not cease to be close, although children choose something different from their parents.
With the God of Catholics, something like this will not be experienced. God loves you, God supposedly accepts you as you are, but still on the condition that you obey. You may mess up sometimes, do something your own way, but you must always recognize in the end that it was a mistake. That Father is right after all, and that his laws absolutely apply. Whether you are convinced of this or not, whether you feel like a sinner or not - it's all the same. You should repent for your sins, that is, in the final analysis, for disobedience. If you don't, there is no forgiveness.
In the Church they call disobedience falls. The most important thing, they say, is to always rise from such falls, that is, to return to obedience. "To love is to rise". - sang at Mass. Getting up from the falls was very tiring and, believe me, not because I got lazy and didn't want to work on myself. Rather, it was because I was being pushed into the role of a kid who God is endlessly displeased with.
Heavenly Father was creating a situation that produced unsuccessful children. It's hard to be a failed child, and it can get tiring. Constantly jumping up with the knowledge that you won't make it anyway, because the bar is too high, and constantly needing fatherly forgiveness. Horse and pony who will save the mental balance with such treatment.
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Tomasz Żukowski - literary historian, professor at the Institute of Literary Research of the Polish Academy of Sciences. Author of the books The Great Retouching. How We Forgot that Poles Killed Jews (2018) and Under Pressure. What those whose voices are being taken away say about the Holocaust (2021).
