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CaFE Growing in the Father’s Love
During the filming of interviews for the forthcoming Creed series Fr Ernest Sievers, a German Missionary priest, working in Uganda, shared his reflections on God the Father.
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For many years, as a priest and a missionary, God the Father was just a far-away hazy kind of reality that I couldn’t relate to. I grew up with a deep father wound as I had a problem with my own father who was always very critical. He was a scientist and a doctor and I could never come up to his expectations. Because of his own upbringing he didn’t know how to be an affectionate father. So for me, without the experience of a loving human father, the heavenly father was always very far away. Then just before my father died I was able to be reconciled with him. I was able to admit that I had rejected him for so many years. Up to that time I had always felt that I was a victim of his not loving me but then it occurred to me that I was rejecting him and not responding even to his small attempts to love me, in his own way. I realised that I had to go to him and ask him for forgiveness. When he was seventy nine years old I went to see him. He was sitting in his armchair, already quite weak, and I reached out to him and said, “Dad, I am sorry. I have not been a good son.” Then he reached out to me, touched my arm and started stroking it. It was such a moving experience, I got goose bumps! Then he said, “Son, I ask you for forgiveness because I have not been a good father to you.” It only lasted about fifteen minutes but in that time somehow a curtain was pulled back and I discovered what fatherhood meant. After that experience I went to Israel and there, near the lake of Tiberias, God’s fatherly love broke into my life. I was meditating particularly on Jesus’ own experience at the Jordan, when He had experienced the Father’s love and heard the words “You are my beloved Son, my delight rests on you!” when the Father’s love broke through into my life and I knew, and I knew, and I knew that what the Father had given to Jesus, he was also giving to me, two thousand years later. That made all the difference for me. For over ten years
now I have been walking with that experience. I have been able to move
ever more into my own fatherhood. People have been calling me “Father”
for most of my life but without the knowledge of my Heavenly Father,
I couldn’t live that very deeply. I realised that I had been very
like my own earthly father, very demanding on people and very critical,
a great perfectionist. Some of that is still there and some of it has
gone but at least consciously I am ever more aware that the Father is
calling me to become a loving father, the image of God the Father, to
those I serve in Africa.
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“We
can know God the Father but not in the way that we experience him as
our physical father because there is always mystery. We cannot see him
but there is the touch, the affection, the inner assurance that he is
with us and that I am a beloved son. But it needs the faith dimension.
without faith you will not be able to experience that love.