© 1996 Claire Thurston
© 1996 The Fellowship for readers of The Urantia Book
By Claire Thurston
Editor’s Note: This story is an excerpt from an article published in 1991 in QUEST magazine. The author will also present this material in a workshop at IC’96. Thurston is currently working on a book to demonstrate a philosophical framework that can be used in everyday life, to give mental and spiritual leverage over decisions which affect a father’s behavior towards his children.
I had been reading The Urantia Book for 10 years, and had a hard time initially accepting the authoritative tone of the book. I linked this tone with the unabashed focus on God the Father. Didn’t the revelators know this was politically incorrect? I had read Mary Daly’s Beyond God the Father, and knew I wasn’t supposed to need HIM anymore. I remember a fellow woman muralist in San Francisco confessing ashamedly that she still found herself praying to God the Father despite all her feminist ideology.
But The Urantia Book was so compelling, I just couldn’t dismiss God the Father as a theological throwback.
¶ A Father’s Unique Contribution
At first he is simply present. His presence, characterized by its otherness, becomes linked with the world or existence itself. When existence comes into focus for the baby, it is undeniably real. All the senses — taste, touch, and sight — confirm its reality. Just as mother will always be indelibly linked with the merge/memory, so will father be indelibly associated with the fact of existence.
This sounds abstract, but a father can feel deeply personal premonitions of his role even at his child’s birth. Psychologist, Arthur Colman, in the anthology Fathering: It’s Not The Same, speaks, “The nurse gave the baby to me. The warmth of his body, his eyes looking at me — I was crying. I felt deep joy. Not a gushing joy, but silence. Holding him, feeling his heat, I was a benign presence there, a pillar, a silent presence. I felt the warmth of his body and the strength of my arms. The baby needed protection and security, a protection that gives freedom to move as well as comfort.”
Relating to father means reaching across the gulf of separateness that lies between parent and child. If father responds, a new kind of personal relationship begins for the child, different from the previous blended state with mother. Put another way, the child first experiences utter separateness (distinct from the merge/memory of mother) while maintaining a personal relatedness to father. That relationship is characterized by separateness powerfully linked, a primal I-Thou pattern.
The Latin transcendere literally means “to climb over or beyond.” Within the context of personal religious experience, the human father essentially introduces transcendence. This is not to deny that mother’s care is equally important for the child’s spiritual development.
A helpful distinction may lie in the linkage of mother’s and father’s roles in infancy with preparation for later adult experiences of immanent and transcendent spirituality, respectively. By honoring father’s role, there certainly is no intention to cast any aspersion on single mothers, but rather to encourage them (and support groups or social agencies) to seek out positive male family members or friends.
James Fowler, a leading thinker in the field of the psychology of religion, in his book Stages of Faith, talks about many different dimensions of faith. In simplest form, he defines faith as the “relation of trust in and loyalty to the transcendent.” As representative of otherness, and hence transcen- dence, the father is strategically situated to nourish spiritual dialogue.
When father throws his baby high in the air, think of the feeling the infant must have when he or she lands in strong arms. This kind of play contributes to the sense that the universe is a safe place. If this relational process grows, the child may feel safer negotiating risks and moving towards independence. In other words, father can create a context where faith remains anchored within the changing perceptions of the child’s growing world.
But how betrayed a child can feel when father breaks the I-Thou trust. Therdpist John Bradshaw, appearing in his recent series on public television, talks about his absent alcoholic father. As an adult, Bradshaw describes how he still suffers from fatherloss, the longing for a feeling of safe haven, of protection in the cosmos.
Psychologist Peter Blos, in his book Son and Father Before and Beyond the Oedipus Complex, records the words of one grown man who remembers his childhood feelings. “My father never acknowledged me as me: I did not exist in him, I had to be in his presence in order to exist for him. When the baby looks up from the cradle and sees his father for the first time, that’s God. He had the power to extinguish me. He loved me in his not his image of me …”
It is easy to imagine how this bitter son’s lament could go unnoticed. Without a fulfilling I-Thou experience of his own, without a sense of such internal affirmation, the father would rely on external images of himself for his primary identity. Similarly, he way, but I was craving for his love as me, would have to rely on an image of his son in order to relate at all. How vast the tragedy of lost opportunity for personal spiritual development when father is disconnected from his own inner confirmation.
¶ A Question of Approach
Psychologists have only recently begun to study the father’s role. But results have been so inconclusive that fatherhood specialists such as Michael Lamb proclaim, “Until we have a better understanding of the father-child relationship, attempts to characterize its effects are probably premature.”
Students of behavior are always looking for ways to improve research techniques, but perhaps an examination of the underlying assumptions behind different approaches may lead to a fruitful direction for understanding fatherhood.
In psychology, the father-child bond is described in terms such as attachment and affiliation. Carefully avoided are such murky concepts as love. Moral development and value motivation, such as altruism, are subsumed under the heading of learned behavior. All behavior falls within the confines of a “body-mind” model, body encompassing instinctual behavior and mind encompassing learned behavior.
Religionists assume an additional category of reality which includes love, faith and absolute values such as truth, beauty and goodness. To encompass these additional realities the body-mind model must expand, becoming a body-mind-spirit model.
Psychology seeks to gain knowledge of human behavior through observation and claims an empirical basis for its findings. Religion, on the other hand, seeks to guide human beings towards value goals, claiming a revelatory basis for its teachings. Can a third approach provide a new way of talking about fatherhood in which empirical observations and value-goals can be joined together? Is it possible to unite the scientific attitude of psychology with spiritual insight, notwithstanding their different models of humanity?
Philosophy can walk the tightrope between psychology and religion if certain pitfalls of determinism can be avoided. On the psychological side, one must sidestep predicting behavior. For example, if father does x to a child, then y will happen. On the spiritual side, one must sidestep making moral judgments. For example, a good father does x, y and z. By avoiding spiritual or psychological determinism, a philosophical approach can prevent blanket generalizations, such as “an insecure attachment to mother during the first year of life always leads to adult dysfunction.”
¶ The Gender Stumbling Block
If father’s transcendent connection is truly so primary in infancy, then why has it gone unrecognized for so long? What could be obscuring our view of the process? Perhaps something right in front of our eyes; namely, sex roles. Sex role issues may have overshadowed the spiritual dimension of father’s role from both psychological and religious viewpoints.
Freud intuits a spiritual dimension to father’s role when he links father with the development of a super-ego. According to the theory, at age three or four, the child incorporates his father’s rules and values partially as a means of resolving desires for the parent of the opposite sex. Fear of castration catapults a young boy into internalizing his father’s values while penis envy supposedly makes a young girl accept her father’s values and her mother’s sex role. To keep his theory consistent, Freud concludes that girls have less well-developed super-egos than boys because their identification with their mothers is not due to castration anxiety.
Freud’s preoccupation with sex roles distorts his perception of father’s role. Although Freud senses that father is a key player in the realms of standards and values, his theory tries to join sex roles with the assimilation of those moral rules and values. His sexist foundation grounded in early 20 th century values seems glaring today. Unfortunately, Freud leaves an intellectual legacy which paints father as powerful and important, yet primarily fearsome.
Gender in relation to God’s personal nature confuses human fatherhood, as well. “Personal” is defined in Webster’s New World Dictionary as “involving persons or human beings (personal relationships).” Since people are either male or female, it is easy to confuse sexuality (biology and sex roles) with the definition of personal. So, belief in a personal God can become relating to God the Male or God the Female. Some who worship God the Father may assume that they are worshipping God the Male.
But the human father who introduces transcendence is first sensed by the child as the first other, not the first male. If one can see how the human father introduces God the Father as God the Other, the Transcendent, as opposed to God the Male, then one could see the logic behind the idea of God loving his children as a father rather than like a father.
Human father’s primary power is not his maleness, but his ability to reinforce values. Beginning in infancy, father conveys transcendence which unconsciously readies the child for a conscious dialogue about values later.
Bradshaw, in his program “Where Are You, Father?,” cites a recent study which shows that the mere presence of father increases the child’s moral development seen in situational standardized tests. Because Freud’s vision of man does not include a spiritual dimension, he overlooks much of father’s positive contribution in infancy and portrays the birth of the conscience or super-ego as an essentially traumatic ordeal as opposed to a natural evolutionary process.
And if fearsome power has characterized cultural ideas of maleness, and God the Father is perceived as male, then fearsome power may characterize God in many peoples’ eyes. So even fathers who believe in God may connect fatherhood with fearsome power while overlooking the spiritual privilege of parenthood. Sadly, this distortion may partially account for our cultural alienation from spirituality in general.
¶ Resolving Conflicts About Fatherhood
So few men have close relationships with their fathers or with other men. Consequently, men suffer, marriages suffer and families suffer. Those who never feel the protection of a loving father often have trouble delaying gratification, causing other disorders like overeating, drug addiction or alcohol abuse.
How can we break this chain of neglect and despair? Emotionally, we have to grieve. According to Bradshaw, first we must demystify our fathers, discover their pain and understand their wounds. We must grieve and eventually come to forgive them. Then we can grieve for our own childhood loss and open ourselves to father-nurturing from other people, friends or mentors.
Intellectually and spiritually, we need many forums for discussing fatherhood from the dinner table to the classroom to the pulpit.
There are so many dimensions to the problem. Some fathers may feel an emptiness from missing the I-Thou experience with their own fathers. Others may feel split by the cultural heritage of fatherhood which denies a spiritual concept of a loving father in favor of a powerful but fearsome father. Still others may feel pressured to be nurturing in the same way as women, not understanding that father-nurturance may be different from mother-nurturance.
In order to be meaningful, any debate about father’s evolving role will have to center around values. These idealized goals can provide the inspiration necessary to affect personal behavior as well as determine a basis for social change. Only when fathers feel the inherent importance and dignity of their role from all quarters of society will the tide of family breakdown be reversed. Until then, the power of father-love remains largely untapped.
¶ Testing the Theory
After completing the conceptual groundwork, I decided to test the assumption that father’s role is predominantly spiritual in infancy, by interviewing 100 fathers of preschool children in San Francisco. These fathers ranged from unwed teenagers across the spectrum to wealthy professionals, as well as many ethnic and religious denominations.
The results of the survey were very clear. Not only do fathers pass on traditional values from institutional religion, but they also convey spirituality through a trust-based parenting style. Some fathers who don’t participate in institutional religion nonetheless believe in absolute values, like truth, beauty and goodness.
If fathers know how and why they matter to their children, especially in the first few years of life, then their involvement will bear fruit, changing patterns within the family and in the world at large.
¶ Recommended Reading
- Beane, W.C. and Doty, W.G. eds. Myths, Rites, Symbols: A Mircea Eliade Reader, Vol.1. New York: Harper & Row, 1975.
- Blos, Peter. Son and Father Before and Beyond the Oedipus Complex. New York: The Free Press, A Division of MacMillan, Inc. 1985, p.35.
- Colman, Arthur M.D. reported by Levis, Leonard, Chapter 1: Birthing, Bonding and the Infancy Stage of Fathering.
- Erikson, Erik H. Young Man Luther. New York: W.W. Norton & Co. Inc., 1958, p.124.
- Fowler, J.W. Stages of Faith. San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1981.
- Grief, Esther Blank, Chapter 6: Fathers, Children and Moral Development.
- Kagan, Jerome. The Nature of the Child. New York: Basic Books, 1984, p.35.
- Lamb, M. ed. The Role of the Father in Child Development. New York: John Wiley, 1976.
- Mahler, M.S., F. Pine, and A. Bergman. The Psychological Birth of the Human Infant. New York: Basic Books, 1975.
- Sayers, R. Fathering: It’s Not the Same. Larkspur, CA: Nurtury Family School, 1983.
- Wagner, S. et al. “Metaphorical Mapping in Human Infants.” Child Development, 1981, 52, p.728-31.