Being a father

A Japanese student left Leeds Trinity just before Christmas and returned home. She gave me a "thank you" card - most Asian students I know are good at observing the proper courtesies. I put the card up on my shelf for a while and then I picked it up recently to dispose of it. I re-read her words, which had very evidently been carefully crafted: "Thank you for being with us father. You are a father to us all." I felt immensely moved. The words seemed to have a greater import precisely because of the length of time that it must have taken her to write them.

It is a great privilege to be called "father" by so many people. Now that I am middle-aged, the title has acquired a new meaningfulness. I know through lived experience that my life as a priest is truly generative. I give life to people through my celebration of the sacraments, through my preaching and through my listening. I've learnt, I think, over nearly two decades as a priest that I am more effective and more happy the more I enter into the relationships which ministry makes possible. A father is less of a father if he remains aloof. Moreover, young people especially need fathers. If a father expresses his admiration for the way one of his children is developing, it is a key moment in that young person's life, a moment of liberation. In fact, the more I think about it the more I can see that priestly celibacy is not best described as the sacrifice of one good - namely family - for a higher good -  namely God. Rather it is a means by which a man enters into the fullness of fatherhood within the family of the Church. It's a gaining more than a foregoing.