A Father's Day Thought
Every time Father's Day comes around I certainly think about my own biological father, but my mind always turns quickly to the "Our Father," that simple and beautiful prayer of Jesus...

The word "father" can make us think - depending on our experience of our own parent - of anything from an oriental despot to a drunken bum.

Still, that mental connection doesn't invalidate the insight into God's essential nature.

God is most like the very best that an earthly father can possibly be, whether or not we happened to be blessed with that particular father within our own nuclear family.

I think there are several important implications to our being invited by Jesus to think about and address the Creator of all the worlds as "Our Father":

1. It takes God out of the "vague oblong blur" category and puts us at least on the person-to-person level of acquaintance.
2. It helps us understand and truly believe the rather astonishing reality that we are beloved children and, ultimately, heirs of all that is or ever will be.
3. Fatherhood and family implies at least the possibility of siblings-sisters and brothers who are equally beloved and precious in God's eyes - so that, while our relationship to God can be personal, it can never be private. We are our brother's keeper if we really understand all persons to be members, along with us, of God's family.

Parent, child, brother, sister - very ordinary common words, but in them there are essential clues about the Christian Gospel.

To acknowledge God as "Our Father" is to accept God's love for ourselves, but just as importantly, to accept the responsibility to be a sister or brother to every other human being.

by Bob Hansel
from "A Father's Day Thought"

A few years ago, I received a Father's Day card from my son Tim. On the front of it was a picture of a little boy sitting up in bed.

Terror was written on his face. His hair was standing straight up, and the card said, "Dad, I want to thank you."

Well, I wondered, a Father's Day card with this boy terrorized, had I done that to my son?

I opened the card up and it said, "I want to thank you for helping me kill all the dragons of my mind so I could go out and fight the real ones."

You know, we all have our dragons of the mind. My old professor, Conrad Sommers ... said, "There are five drivers that get in the saddle and drive us." ...

Here are the drivers he listed:

• Be perfect.
• Please everybody.
• Try harder.
• Be strong.
• Hurry up.

by Brooks Ramsey
from "A Father's Day Card From My Son"

I contend that the second half of life can be our journey to wholeness, a deeper engagement with those aspects of life that we have tended to neglect in our earlier years. ...

... For most of us, particularly men of the middle and upper-classes, the first half of life was about mastery. ...

It was about fighting wars, raising families, shaping our communities. ...

Our lives and our religion concerned taking charge of ourselves and transforming our world.

But in the second half of life, we meet a whole new set of factors, which require a whole new approach to religion. ... the second half of life demands that we move from religion to spirituality. ...

In the second half of life we can remember what we have forgotten; we can attend to the things we' ve neglected.

For many of us men, this spiritual reorientation is a daunting prospect because we are not accustomed to turning inward.

Many of us do not really have much of a personal "spirituality" or even know what spirituality is. ...

by Mark Muesse
from "Men at Midlife"