40 Days: Week Two: Praying with Confidence

Question: 

If God is a caring, consistent, close, and competent Father, which of these characteristics has the Greatest meaning to you?

Answer: 

The quick answer is that addressing God as "the Father" doesn't tell me anything about Him at all.  At least not in my mind. Our prayer group's meeting on this topic only reinforced my opinions about this. It seemed like an invitation to discuss our "father issues" and relate them to the Divine.

In today's world, I wonder if addressing God as the "Father" is counter-productive to faith in the Divine. Fathers are considered disposable. And the culture has a growing hostility to men in general.

Jesus popularized this view of God, but his perspective was not a simple one. He added the idea of "the one in the skies" and "in the hidden". To me, this means the Divine beyond the world we know and can know. The fact is that the Divine is not something we can comprehend. We can pretend that God is like us, but we should know that we are just pretending to address the limitations of our understanding.

We can only conceive of existence from the perspective of being at one place at one time. We cannot understand the Divine as eternal and all present, existing in all places at all times. To the Divine, every moment of the past and future is just as accessible as what we think of as now. To the Divine, every location in every dimension of space is just as accessible as what we think of as here. The smallest distances within the Planck constant everywhere to the entire expanse of the universe is known at once. 

Since I cannot grasp the Divine, for me, addressing the Divine as the Father says more about what I am meant to be than it does about the nature of God. Jesus taught us to pray this way to re-frame our thinking about God. Before Jesus, the Judean God was addressed as "the Master,"  the same term used for a ruler or an owner of slaves. When we use it, we see ourselves as subjects and slaves.

In teaching us to address God as the "Father" Jesus was telling us that we are not slaves, not merely subjects. We are heirs to the Divine. We are not disposable, but cherished as a father cherishes his children. Yes, we owe Him everything, but He forgives our debts if we ask. All he asks in return is that we treat each other as brothers and sisters, not fellow slaves.

Our prayers do not change God. Calling Him "father" does not change how He feels about us. God IS. He does not change.  Our prayers do not change Him. He knew our prayers when He created the universe.

The purpose of prayer is to change us. God answers our prayers by changing our hearts and the hearts of others. We act as the Divine's messengers bringing the answers to prayers to each other. 

By call God the Father, we are saying that we have a spark of the Divine within us. That we too are potentially eternal. And perhaps, as we grow, we can exist less shallowly than we do now.