It was always a lot of fun teaching philosophy and showing students how human reason is able to demonstrate the existence of God, just through deductive reasoning alone, especially Leibniz’ proof: “If the Necessary being is possible, then it exists.” However, what human reason is able to know about God in the end is very limited; basically, there is a First cause, a Necessary being, uncreated, and there is only One. It is very abstract. With the Old Testament, however, we see that God revealed Himself to Abraham and made a covenant with him; God reveals Himself in His historical relationship with Israel. However, although the God of the Old Testament is much richer in content than the God of philosophy, He is still absolutely One.
And yet, with the coming of Christ, God is revealed as a Trinity of Persons. This is new, and it is the central mystery of the faith: that God is One, but at the same time three; not three beings, not three spirits, but three distinct Persons: God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit. This is incomprehensible to us, because in our experience, when we encounter three distinct persons, we encounter three distinct beings. But in God, we have three distinct Persons, but One being. God is one, but mysteriously He is an eternal community of Persons.
And it was the 2nd Person of the Trinity, God the Son, who joined himself to a human nature in order to reveal the face of God the Father, to glorify the Father, because the Son loves the Father with a perfect, eternal, and infinite divine love. The Father in turn loves the Son with an eternal, perfect, and infinite divine love. That love is a distinct Person, the Third Person of the Trinity, the Holy Spirit. All three Persons are distinct, and yet all dwell within one another (perichoresis).
Divine grace is nothing other than the indwelling of the Trinity. Through grace, we are brought into this eternal community of Persons. In the Eucharist, we receive Christ, who is God the Son, and so we begin to live his life, to love the Father with his love. But his love is the Holy Spirit. So, the Eucharist brings us right into the heart of the Trinity. The Trinity dwells in us, and we dwell within the Trinity, and eternal life will be a complete and perfect and eternal life within this Trinitarian community.
I know of a Deacon who ministered to prisoners, and for Mother’s Day one year he purchased a box of Mother’s Day cards for the inmates to send to their mothers, and every one of the cards was used up, taken and sent. But then Father’s Day was coming, and he did the same thing. This time, however, there was no interest in filling out a Father’s Day card and sending it off. Unresolved anger towards the fathers. The more I came to know human beings through my work as a teacher, a chaplain, and a deacon in these past 37 years, the more I came to understand how important fathers are in the emotional well-being of their children and how much human brokenness and woundedness in the world is rooted in a broken relationship with fathers. The life of Christ is a revelation of his love for his Father and the Father’s love for the Son, and that love includes us because we came from God the Father, through the Son, and Christ came to seek out what was lost, namely humanity, in order to restore us to the Father, that the Father may be known and glorified for eternity.
My first 10 years of teaching were in the Jane and Finch area of Toronto, and so we had some very difficult challenges in the classroom. There was always a gang of criminals in the school, and one day I was talking to one of them who said to me that he’s an atheist. About a month later I was given about 65 brown scapulars, and so that day I decided to tell my students the story of Our Lady of Mount Carmel and St. Simon Stock, the meaning of the brown scapular, consecration to Mary, etc. I only had 65 scapulars, but 90 students, so I wanted to be sure to give one only to those who really wanted one. In the middle of the day, during one of my classes, two of those gang members that I mentioned were peeking through the window of my classroom door. I thought to myself: “I wonder what they want.” I went to the door and asked them: “What’s up?” The one just grunted: “Scapular.” “What?” I said. “Scapular. Scapular. We want a scapular.” “Oh,” I said. “You want a scapular.” Word got around that I had some, and they wanted one; for these things are an important part of their culture. So, I was in a bit of a dilemma. Then I remembered that he said he didn’t even believe in God. So, I said to the one: “You told me a month ago that you don’t even believe in God. So why do you want a scapular?” I’ll never forget his answer. He said “I don’t believe in God, but I believe in Mary.”
I was so confused at that moment, but something in me just said give them a scapular. But I thought about what he said for the rest of the day. And of course, it finally occurred to me: this is the genius of Catholicism. He doesn’t believe in God, but he believes in Mary. The only person in his life who really loved him was his mother; his father left him as a child, and that pain has everything to do with his anger and his criminality, and his atheism. The role of the Father is to introduce his children to the love of God the Father, to be a channel of that love, and when that goes wrong, that affects the child’s ability to relate to God the Father. But he was open to Mary.
St. Maximilian Kolbe speaks of the Holy Spirit as a kind of Motherhood in God. He refers to the Holy Spirit as the Uncreated Immaculate Conception, the uncreated love conceived by the Father and the Son. Kolbe says that the greatest desire of a mother is to see father and son united in love. This led him to say that the Holy Spirit, the uncreated Immaculate Conception, is that Motherhood in God, who is the Personified love between the Father and the Son. Mary, of course, is the created Immaculate Conception. To love the created Immaculate Conception is to begin to love the uncreated Immaculate Conception.
The life of the family is a reflection of the Trinity. Christ’s life is all about the love of the Father, the love that the Father has for us, a love that has no limits, a love revealed in the sending of God the Son into the world, to seek us out, to die for us, to redeem us by his death, and to rise from the dead as the definitive sign that he has conquered death for us, so that we might have life and have it abundantly. This life is about learning to allow ourselves to be loved like that, to be loved by the Father, who, like the woman who lost a drachma, goes searching for it and will not stop searching until she finds it—another image of God as woman. Once we begin to know that love, which, as St. Augustine said, is a love directed to us as if there is only one of us in existence to love, once we begin to taste that love, our life becomes truly wonderful, peaceful, and joyful. The mission of the father in the family is to be a channel of that love, to dispose our children to receive that love of the Father. And the task of the children of those earthly fathers is to forgive the sins of their fathers and to honor them, even while acknowledging their flaws and imperfections. Honor father and mother is the one commandment that has a promise attached to it: .”..so you may live a long life.” Unforgiveness destroys, but forgiveness brings new life.
Image: By Tahc – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=20715266
Douglas McManaman was born in Toronto and grew up in Montreal. He studied philosophy at the University of St. Jerome’s College (Waterloo) and theology at the University of Montreal. He is a permanent deacon of the Archdiocese of Toronto and ministers to those with mental illness. He taught Religion, Philosophy and the Theory of Knowledge for 32 years in Southern Ontario, and he is the current chaplain of the Toronto Chapter of the Catholic Teachers Guild. He is a Senior Lecturer at Niagara University and teach Marriage Prep for the Archdiocese of Toronto. His recent books include Why Be Afraid? (Justin Press, 2014) and The Logic of Anger (Justin Press, 2015), and Christ Lives! (Justin Press, 2017), as well as The Morally Beautiful (Amazon.ca), Introduction to Philosophy for Young People (Amazon.ca), Readings in the Theory of Knowledge, Basic Catholicism, and A Treatise on the Four Cardinal Virtues. He has two podcast channels: Podcasts for the Religious, and Podcasts for Young Philosophers. He currently lives with his wife and daughter in Ontario, Canada.
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