2 of 4
But why would someone such as myself, a 64-year-old grandmother, suddenly want a father? Maybe because a child is what I often feel like these days. Fearful and impotent, and in need of comfort. I'm not ashamed of slipping into the persona of child when I kneel there at my bedside. I want a Parent. I need a Parent. Someone who cares for me as unfailingly as the mother I lost two years ago.
As for my father, World War II kept me from meeting him until I was four years old. Unfortunately, this meant we never formed a close natural bond. Moreover, at 88, my father has become the child while I have taken on the role of parent in caring for him.
In some ways this blank spot in my psyche has been beneficial. Many women have trouble with God because they identify him with an oppressive earthly father. For them, patriarchal oppression is a problem. But calling God Father at this point in my life doesn't put my ideological nose out of joint. I don't spurn or suspect any fatherly consolation he's likely to offer. In fact, crawling into God's lap and going to sleep in his arms seems about the best ending to a day—or a life—I can imagine.
Still, to be honest, Father has to be a conscious choice. "Lord" is the mode of address that automatically springs unbidden to my lips. In my experience, it is also the name most often used among Christians to speak about the lump-sum Trinity.
Why is Lord so routinely spoken? After all, it is an archaic word, one we never use outside of a religious context unless we're British. Such a word doesn't fit in our contemporary culture, except in certain kinds of science fiction and fantasy (The Lord of the Rings, for example). Like Father, Lord puts us in a position of dependence. But Lord implies even more. Not only do I depend on this Great Unknowable for my very breath, but with that word I acknowledge a kind of feudal relationship in which I play peasant to his patron.
Yet I've never been in such a relationship. Our word "boss" is about as close as we commonly come to Lord, but the ties between employer and employee in our capitalist democracy are not nearly so close or strong as those between Lord and liegeman. So should I call God Boss? It would be our own Americanized way of acknowledging God's sovereignty, or at least his right to be in control.
But Boss carries its own baggage, not all of it good. There's a whiff of irony, even sarcasm about the name. Boss means, "Okay, you're in charge here. Do it your way. Just don't blame me when it doesn't work out." Calling God Boss shuffles all the responsibility for my flaws to him. Which I'm already all too tempted to do.
So I'm back to Lord. Even though it isn't native to our times or tongues, it leaps unbidden to our praying lips. It's the name which most of us have heard most frequently, both in and out of prayer, whether talking to or about God. Because Lord, either in lower- or all uppercase letters, stands in for several Hebrew divine monikers, it appears more often in Scripture than any other name. We often use Lord in offhand colloquial expressions such as, "The good Lord willing and the creek don't rise." We take our troubles "to the Lord in prayer." And I use such exclamatory phrases as "Good Lord" with no hesitation whereas I would shrink from using God in the same mode.
One synonym for Lord is Master. This hits me on a deeper level. Slaves have masters. Trained animals have masters. Disciples of whatever craft or discipline have masters. Much more than Lord, calling on my Master puts me in a place I know instantly and instinctively. My personal history connects with that name as it must for anyone who grew up in the segregated South. The history of the slave-master relationship sets up internal seismic shock waves.
share this page
RSS Feed
