For us Old Calendar Orthodox, today is Theophany, the day in which Jesus Christ was baptized in the Jordan. We had a priest assisting Father Matthew today, an old friend of his from the Pacific Northwest, Father Athanasius. The visiting priest delivered the homily, dwelling for some time on the words God the Gospel tells us He spoke from heaven at the baptism: “This is my Son, in Whom I am well pleased.”
Those words resonated so sweetly in my heart. For all my life, I’ve struggled with the fatherhood of God, and whether or not He was pleased with me. I was certain that He wasn’t. Yes, yes, I know what He says in the Bible, but I was prepared to argue with Him about it. It doesn’t take a psychiatrist to see that this is wrapped up in the sense of distance and exile I had from my own sometimes-difficult childhood relationship with my dad. I wrote about this in The Little Way Of Ruthie Leming. To some extent this was his fault, and to some extent it was mine; blame is not important here. The key thing was that I had stayed away for so long mostly because I couldn’t come home. My dad and my sister loved me, but were in some real sense disappointed in me (and in Ruthie’s case, angry at me) for failing to be the person they thought I should be. I knew they were wrong, but in some deep sense, I feared they were right.
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