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In answering this question, we not only enter into a contemporary cultural debate, but we proclaim our vocation as Knights, fathers and husands
During a retreat for priests 20 years ago, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger said, “We are not allowed neutrality when faced with the question of God. We can only say yes or no.” How easily did the future Pope Benedict XVI identify not only the fundamental question for each person, but also the fundamental question for each culture: Yes or no to God?
Today it is a commonplace to speak of a secular culture and of society’s neutrality toward the question of God. We have come to expect, at least from the standpoint of political correctness, a kind of cultural agnosticism.
Thomas Jefferson’s phrase regarding a “separation between church and state” has been used to drive out acknowledgment of God from many of our public institutions.
Jefferson himself would have been astonished by this development. Consider, for example, the Virginia Statute for Religious Liberty. Jefferson considered this law among his greatest accomplishments, second only to the Declaration of Independence. It begins: “Whereas Almighty God has created the mind free.” Jefferson’s great defense of human liberty in both documents describes our rights as gifts of the Creator.
Today, our culture has made a decisive turn against this view. This so-called “neutrality” toward God is increasingly becoming a loud “no” – a no that assumes the Christian way of life is no longer consistent with man’s pursuit of happiness.
Pope Benedict suggests a direct response: We must all be witnesses to “the great yes of God to man and to life.” We must respond to the “yes” of Jesus Christ with our own very personal “yes.”
This is especially true for members of the Knights of Columbus. It is up to us to bear witness to the truth that the Christian way of life is not only consistent with man’s true happiness, but that it is the way to live life more “abundantly.” Those of us who are fathers carry a special responsibility for bringing this message into our homes in a practical way.
Recently, brother Knights participating with me in the Supreme Knight’s Book Club read, Listen My Son: St. Benedict for Fathers by Dwight Longenecker (Morehouse Publishing, 2000). The author, a former Anglican minister and convert to Catholicism, draws lessons for fathers from the centuries-old Rule of St. Benedict.
In Chapter 31 Longenecker discusses St. Benedict’s rule for the “cellarer” – the monk responsible for the physical welfare of the monastic community: “The kind and quietly efficient cellarer also highlights our vocation as Christian fathers.
We are to provide for our families with the same wise, mature and generous heart as that with which the cellarer provides for the monastery, and God provides for us. Whatever our job, it is not primarily to provide us with an interesting occupation, or a ladder to promotion and ever-increasing status. Instead, our work is the way we fulfill our primary vocation of providing for our family.
In co-operation with our wife, the day-to-day provision of physical food, clothing and shelter is also a spiritual vocation. Constructing a secure, loving and creative home provides the peace of mind children need for good spiritual health. A secure and abundant home life reflects the life of heaven, and as we mirror the cellarer in the home we also provide our children with an intimate – if imperfect – icon of God the Father” (page 160).
Father’s Day is a good time to reflect on how each of us can say “yes” to the great question of God in our lives and in what ways that yes is lived in our families.
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