The SEEK Podcast
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The SEEK Podcast
The Father's Love: He Leadeth Me x SEEK
Join us on this episode of the SEEK podcast as we explore the profound concept of being a child of God with Fr. James Brent, a Dominican friar and the author of “The Father’s House.” This discussion delves into the transformative understanding of divine fatherhood and its impact on our identity.
Fr. James addresses the essential questions at the heart of our existence: What is my purpose? Who am I? And how do I find love? He enlightens us on how viewing God as our ultimate Father provides the answers to these questions, encouraging us to see beyond our earthly fathers’ limitations and recognize that they, too, are reflections of the divine Father.
Thank you for joining us this year on the SEEK Podcast.
Welcome to the Seek 25 podcast, featuring some of our favorite podcasters recorded live at the Max Studios podcast stage during Seek 25 in Salt Lake City.
Speaker 2:Welcome to he Leadeth Me. I'm Jessica Focus' Manager of Spiritual Formation, and today I'm joined by our friend Fr James Brent. Fr James is a Dominican friar and he teaches at the Dominican House of Studies in Washington DC and he's a big friend of Focus. He's often joined us on our summer projects and in our retreats program at our new staff training in the summer. So it's a pleasure to have you back today, Fr James.
Speaker 3:Thank you, Jessie. It's great to be here. I always love coming on the show.
Speaker 2:Now we are recording live today from SEEK Focus's national conference, and today is January 1st, the Solemnity of Mary, the Mother of God. So in my holy hour today, I was reflecting on Mary's motherhood and I was reminded of an icon I saw where the title of the icon called Mary, she who Points the Way, and I was thinking that's such a beautiful title for her because she points the way not just to Jesus, her son, but also to God, the Father. She shows us God's fatherhood of Jesus and also God's fatherhood of all of us. And I know that the fatherhood of God is one of your passions. It seems like whenever you join us in Focus, you start talking about what you've called the gospel of the Father's love. So that's what I wanted to talk with you about today.
Speaker 3:Sure Thanks for having me. It's great. It's a wonderful mystery the Father's love for us. We can never say enough about it.
Speaker 2:And you just wrote a book about the Father's Love. For us, we can never say enough about it. And you just wrote a book about the Father's Love. It's called the Father's House. I read it myself, absolutely loved it. Now, the title for this book is the same as the title of a focus retreat the Father's House. You helped write that retreat. Can you tell me just a little bit about how that retreat came about?
Speaker 3:Sure, years ago I was traveling on the road with my confrere, fr Benedict Kroll, and we were traveling with Focus and giving retreats and we were doing some work with you, and along the way we discovered that it was time to develop a new retreat for Focus and we were wondering what it should be, and I suggested that we do something on God the Father.
Speaker 3:Why? Because, as we were traveling and preaching retreats all over the place, a lot of people were really asking about God the Father. Tell us about the Father, tell us about the Father's love. Let's say, we hear a lot about Jesus, but we don't often hear a lot about the Father, even though Jesus is talking about the Father a lot all the time, and so that was really the original inspiration. It was sort of a felt sense that there was a desire or a hunger to know more the Father and his love for us, to know more the Father and His love for us, and so we decided to design a retreat specifically about that theme, and Zach Krieger and I worked together and we developed the retreat that has become the Father's House Retreat, and now it's been held all over the country many times for many years.
Speaker 2:Yeah, just recently there was a retreat where the bishop offered the Father's House retreat for his priests so that they could experience God's fatherhood through him. That's marvelous. Now both the retreat and the book start with the three questions. You say that every single person asks three questions. What are those questions?
Speaker 3:Yeah. So I'm convinced that there are three questions every human being carries in the depths of his or her heart. The first one is the purpose question. What is the purpose of life? It's a question we ask from the earliest age and we have to ask this question. It's how we sort of get an orientation in life. What is life all about? But then there's a second question the identity question. Who am I? This is another big question we ask, and it really dominates the conversation on college campuses a lot the identity politics that is everywhere. A lot of universities take advantage of the fact that students are asking this question and they basically propose a lot of strange answers to the question.
Speaker 3:And then the third question is the love question. How do I find love? And this is something that every human being needs. I mean, we're built for relationship, we crave relationship, we need love, and so these three questions are something we carry in the depths of our hearts. These three questions are something we carry in the depths of our hearts, and the gospel of Jesus Christ is an answer to the three questions. It tells us what the purpose of life is—to enter into the life of the Holy Trinity and to participate in the life of the Trinity. Who am I? Thanks to baptism, you and I are another Christ, each one of us. And how do I find love? Well, st Paul tells us in Romans 5, verse 5,. So the Spirit of love. And that's how the gospel of Jesus Christ answers those questions. And then, once we have an understanding of those answers, we can then begin the journey to the Father's house.
Speaker 2:That's beautiful. You know I've led this retreat many times for Focus, probably a hundred times. My favorite place to lead this retreat was when I was in prison. So one of our focus chaplains he was a chaplain for a few years. I led this retreat many times on his campus and he absolutely loved the effect that it had on the students' hearts. But then he felt God calling him to become a prison chaplain. So he joined the prison chaplaincy and I contacted him later and I said, father, god, put it on my heart that we should have missionaries and students go to the prison and lead this retreat for the inmates. And so we got our clearances from the government to go to the prison.
Speaker 2:It was a medium security prison. The inmates in the medium security prison, many of them were there because they had committed violent crimes and so they had 20 to 30 year sentences, and so I had to go through the background check and then I had a physical body check and finally I was in with these inmates, leading small groups and giving talks about the father's love and those questions that you mentioned. You know, what is the purpose of life? Where do I find love? Those three questions those inmates were also asking them, and it was so beautiful to see their hearts breaking open as they were being led in these small discussion groups by students and finding the answers to those questions. But one of the difficulties that they had is that we were talking about how much God the Father loves them, and many of them in fact I think all of them who are on the retreat said that they came from family backgrounds that weren't good and they didn't have good images of God the Father, and that's something that is very common, not just with inmates in a medium security prison, but also on our college campuses, in our parishes. Many people don't have the experience that St Therese of Lisieux had being raised by such a wonderful father.
Speaker 2:Of course, I know that the father is good because my father is so good, and so they need healing.
Speaker 2:And yet I also feel that the church has focused a lot on healing in recent years, and I've devoted a good portion of my ministry to healing. I pray with people for healing. I kind of feel like I'm a spiritual nurse, and the emphasis on healing right now, especially with things called father wounds, is kind of concerning to me, because it seems like you give a person an appropriate amount of medicine and they get well, but if you give them too much medicine then they get sicker, and so all the emphasis on healing. I start to kind of wonder are we talking about it too much so that people have this hurdle in their lives? My father wasn't a good father and they get stuck in that. So I guess I'm wondering, like I know you've encountered this as a spiritual director, as a retreat leader, what advice do you have for people who feel like they just can't identify with God being a good father because their own fathers were not an image of the father's love to them?
Speaker 3:That's a really good question. It's a common question. I think we have to start by saying there's definitely a way that people can break out of the bad experience of fatherhood that they've had in their lives. If people could not break out of that in any way, then we really would be sort of stuck right. Despair would be the reasonable course. But the gospel of Jesus Christ is the announcement that you don't have to live in despair and it is possible to be set free from the chains, the distortions, the lies that you have acquired down through the years, either because of your sins or because of the sins of others.
Speaker 3:So there is a way for people to come out of a poor understanding of fatherhood or a horrible experience of fatherhood, and it's not simply by trying to relate to fathers as they understand it or have experienced it in their own life.
Speaker 3:They need a new understanding that comes through considering the revelation of fatherhood that God has given us, and that's not only the revelation of God the Father, but a revelation of what fatherhood really is. God the Father, but a revelation of what fatherhood really is. That revelation has been given to us all throughout the entire course of scripture and, of course, sacred tradition as well. So it's by immersing ourselves in scripture and tradition we can learn first what a father really is, what a real father is, and also learn what God, the Father, is, and so we're not limited to just our human experience of fatherhood. That very thing is what the Lord Jesus came to heal. I mean, there have been human beings with bad fathers and broken fathers ever since Adam. So there's a way out, and that's precisely what the Lord has come to reveal to us, and that's what I spell out at some length in my book in the chapter on the Father's House.
Speaker 2:I like that you're mentioning that human beings in every single generation, have had difficulties with their fathers so often. It seems like this generation people are constantly pointing out oh, they're so broken, there's so much divorce and there's bad fathers and technology. They've just been through so much. This generation has more difficulties than any other and I have to think to myself yes, but they also have the benefit of the prayers of all the saints who have gone before them, so maybe this generation is actually the most blessed that's ever lived.
Speaker 3:Very, it could very well be. So I mean, the communion of saints is now larger than ever before and they're praying for us and they know what we go through. The struggle and the difficulty that is ours upon the earth was once theirs. So they're always there praying for us and they want us to receive the light of grace so that we can come to know God for who he really is and relate to him in the right way and learn to abandon all of our cares and our wounds and our hurts and our concerns and even our sin, give it to God and allow him and his mercy to work in it and to heal it radically, which he does.
Speaker 3:But it comes by sort of relearning what fatherhood really is. So, for example, in the letter to the Ephesians, st Paul says the Ephesians St Paul says I bow my knee before the Father, from whom every father in heaven and on earth is named. So there is a very interesting passage, because what he says is that the fathers on earth, they take their measure from God, the Father in heaven. So we tend to think of God, the Father in heaven, in light of the earthly fathers. The scripture is telling us it's actually the opposite. It's the earthly fathers that size up or not to the real Father, which is God the Father. He's the one. The more we get to know him, god the Father, the more our understanding of human fatherhood can be healed and renewed. We can come to understand the whole truth of fatherhood.
Speaker 2:Now Father. You mentioned that somebody who has had a difficult relationship with their father and they need to seek God's healing for that and come to a new understanding of God's fatherhood that person can look to fathers in scripture to better understand that role. So if we have a listener today who wants to better understand the role of a father in scripture, can you give them a few bullet points about what fathers in scripture did, what role they played in people's lives?
Speaker 3:Sure, this is what the whole chapter called the father's house, is about. So at the lastpper, the Lord says in my Father's House there are many rooms and I go to prepare a place for you. So that's an important passage, is a Jewish expression and it really is very expansive and it includes everything in family life in ancient Israel. So what we then need to do is look through the Old Testament to try to unpack what fathers in the Old Testament are and what they do in their houses, and that will give us a sense of what God, the Father, is for us, thanks to the work of Jesus. So when we look through the Old Testament, we find that the Father in the house has a huge and very important role. That's really quite different from anything we experience in our human families today, because the father's house in ancient Israel was, first of all, a very large unit. It would have somewhere between 50 and 150 people in it, and the figure the oldest male is the father and everyone else is sort of under his fatherly care, and his fatherly care was very rich, meaning there's a lot that was involved in it. So one of the things that the father does is provide temporal goods, right, the financial resources, so to speak, that we need to survive. Only in the ancient world that came in the form of land and livestock mostly. So the father's house is actually like a huge agricultural unit usually, and the way that people received their care and their financial support or network, I guess you could say is through inheritance. So every Jewish male had an inheritance coming to him from his father, the firstborn especially. But it was part of Jewish life to count on the father for his care in this way, for his material care. So that's the first thing.
Speaker 3:If you had a father you had everything you needed. If you didn't have a father, you had nothing. So that's the first thing. And then there was also the father would provide protection and all of the men in the father's house would form a military unit so they would go off to war and fight and the father would sort of direct the program and direct the campaign. We see this in the Book of the Maccabees and other places.
Speaker 3:So if you had a father you had protection, and if you didn't have a father you didn't have protection. So father meant safety. So it meant financial support. It meant safety. But fathers were also judges in their families. So when there was a dispute between sons in the family, they would bring their dispute before the father and they would make their claims and the father would judge the case. But that meant that every Jewish male knew that he had someone kind of looking out for his interests and basically when these cases were being judged, the person who was judging them had his own interests at heart. So there was like a sense of fairness in the whole thing, right.
Speaker 2:That's an incredible thought, just to apply to God, the Father, that we often think about God being a just judge and that kind of scares us like no, please don't judge me, but when you think of the judge being your father, just like you said, he has your best interests at heart.
Speaker 3:For sure. And actually St John Chrysostom has a wonderful analogy for that very point. He describes the judge, god, as a judge like. He compares God to a referee in a sporting competition where he sees both athletes in the competition sort of going at it with each other. But only in this competition. When one of the players is struck and goes down, the referee actually leans over and helps him get back up. Because in this competition, st John Chrysostom says, the referee is on your side.
Speaker 2:Oh, that's beautiful and that's why people shouldn't be afraid to go to confession. Because, yes, you are confessing that you've done wrong. And yet I remember once a priest asked me why do you think it's called the Sacrament of Confession? And I was like because I'm confessing my sins. And he says but then why is the priest called the confessor if it's named after you confessing your sins? I said well, I don't know. And he said it's because it's not named after you confessing your sins. It's named after the priest confessing God's mercy.
Speaker 3:Yeah, there's many, many things we could say about that. The sacrament of penance is a marvelous revelation of the merciful love of God the Father coming to us through Jesus Christ and the gift of the Spirit, of course, but it ultimately originates from the Father, and it's a marvelous thing to consider. That's what God is like. So if you want an example of how we today could learn what God the Father is really like, go to the sacrament of penance, confess your sins, receive the mercy and go forward with a whole new sense of freedom. And that's what God the Father is like. That's what he does for us.
Speaker 2:That's beautiful. Okay, so you said that God, the Father, provides protection, yes, and he provides justice, yes, and financial security. That's right. What else does the Father do?
Speaker 3:So another important thing that he does is he provides truth. In the Jewish family, in the Father's house, that's where they learned the saving history of Israel and that's where the story of the covenants and the law and the prophets came down to them. The Passover was celebrated in families and it was the father who would tell the story. And in the Psalms it talks about how, of the things that God did in the days long ago, our fathers have told us the story of the things you did in their days, the days long ago. So in Israel, in the father's house, it was very standard for the father to be the one who hands on the tradition and who teaches the truth of God and of the covenants and the law and the prophets the covenants and the law and the prophets. And we know today from studies of various kinds that in a family when the father practices the faith and is very open about that and obviously committed to the faith and openly practices it, 85% of the time the children will grow up to practice the faith too.
Speaker 3:But when the father does not practice and he sort of kind of shirks away from the faith or maybe even openly denies it, very often the statistics are very high. People will grow up and they will not practice the faith. So the father has an incredible role in conferring credibility on the gospel. And the father says you can count on this with your life. People take that seriously. Because he then says I have, I bet my life on this. Because he then says I have, I bet my life on this. And we know that Israel had really an amazing record of perpetuating the faith. They've been around for thousands of years beyond, you know, before the birth of Christ even and it's the fathers passing on the truth within family life. That has really been a powerful sustaining force.
Speaker 2:That's amazing and I suppose that with the passing on of the traditions and the truths of the faith, they were really passing on the identity of the people, the identity of that child telling, telling them this is who you are.
Speaker 3:Yeah, and so yeah, you mentioned, and we are the chosen people.
Speaker 2:Yeah, you mentioned earlier that identity is such an important question today, and that's what a father does. A father passes on your identity and tells you who you are. So you said it so well when you said that for the ancient peoples, if you had a father, you have everything. And that's true of us today. We do. We have a father and so we have everything.
Speaker 3:We cannot omit maybe the most important thing the father does in his house in ancient Israel he supplies love. The fathers love their children, and social scientists and archaeologists and others have been amazed, actually, at the difference between the relationship between fathers and sons as is recorded in the Old Testament and relationships between fathers and sons as it's recorded in the literature of surrounding pagans, pagan societies. It's very, very different. The pagan literature is full of hatred between fathers and sons and it's filled with stories of murder and patricide and all those horrible things. The Old Testament is virtually free of all of it and there's an amazing peace and bond of love between fathers and sons, as it's revealed in the Old Testament and scripture.
Speaker 3:Scholars have asked well, why is that? I mean what's so different? And it's because that in ancient Israel there's many ceremonies or rituals written into the law that helps to bond fathers and sons together. But one of the most touching would hand the boy over and the priest would take the boy and say is this your son? And the father would say, yes, this is my son. And then the priest would say, well, then pay the price. And he would hand over. The father would hand over a certain sum of coins right, it was different measures. And then the priest would hand the son back to the father and in this way, through this redemption ceremony which is described in the Old Testament and it's still practiced to this day, actually among some of the Jews, each Jewish son knew that he had been claimed at a price by his father.
Speaker 2:Wow.
Speaker 3:And so it established this incredible bond of love between fathers and sons. That's really unprecedented in ancient literature. And when we put all this together, right these various roles that the father played in the father's house in ancient Israel, it can start to give us a portrait of what a father is supposed to be. And I have gone and given this talk to many men's groups and the men appreciate it. They love it because they say no one has ever really explained to us what a father is supposed to be like this. I mean, there's so much we can gather from the scriptures. If we sit down and listen to the word of God and study it with care, it gives us a portrait of fatherhood. That's really amazing, Really amazing.
Speaker 2:That's incredible, and it really teaches us who we are and who God is to us. Now, the last thing that I wanted to talk about today was filial adoption. Sure, now, here's what I'm understanding. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think this is true that when St Paul wrote his letters and he talked about filial adoption, he was really relying on the social context of Roman adoption laws and, from what I understand, if a child was born naturally and given to the father, the father could choose to keep the child or if, for whatever reason, the baby didn't please him, he could expose it to die.
Speaker 2:But if you adopted someone, you could never exclude them, you could never make them not part of your family. You could never take the adoption back, because I think the thinking was, you didn't know what you would get into or come out with with this child who was born to you. But if you chose to adopt someone, that was your choice and so you can never go back on it. And St Paul is telling us that God will never go back on his adoption of us. Is that correct?
Speaker 3:God never takes back the adoption of us. I mean, once a person is baptized, you have the seal of baptism on your soul forever and God does not erase that. That's indelible. It's possible for us to run away. You and I can become runaways, but God does not abandon us first. He doesn't. This is a very clear principle that's enunciated, certainly, by St Augustine. And so, yeah, god doesn't just take back the adoption. No way, that doesn't happen.
Speaker 3:There's lots of comparisons we could draw between human adoption and the filial adoption that's ours by Carice in baptism. But there's also differences too. So in a natural adoption or a legal adoption, the adoptive parents, they have this child that they assume responsibility for. There's a legal bond between them and the child and there can develop in time an emotional or a bond of affection between them and the child, but there will never be the same blood. There just won't be the blood relation. It's just not there. So that's natural adoption or human legal adoption.
Speaker 3:When it comes to supernatural adoption, or the adoption that is ours into God, when we're adopted into the Holy Trinity by grace, yes, there's a kind of legal adoption there, but it's really, and there's certainly a bond of love there. But there's something even more. There's something similar to the bond of blood. We're like when a natural, when a husband and wife naturally give birth to a child, the child has the same blood they have when we are baptized.
Speaker 3:There's a way in which something of the very life of God, a share, a participation in the very life of God, is communicated or transmitted to our souls by grace. That's what baptism does and as a result, we have not simply a legal bond with God, nor simply a bond of affection or a psychological bond. We have like a real, you could say metaphysical bond, which is this life, the supernatural life, supernatural and divine life of God is communicated to our souls and so we belong to the house of God in a way that's more than just legal and more than just full of psychological affection. It's metaphysical, it's real, but it forms and shapes your very being.
Speaker 2:Well, Father, to wrap things up today, can you give our listeners some advice on how they can experience God's fatherly love for them?
Speaker 3:Well, this is a question that always comes up. When we would give the retreats, we would talk about God the Father and his great love for us and His compassion and kindness and the way he takes us into His life and how we become members of His house. But people would always end by saying that all sounds wonderful, but I want to know God the Father like personally, personally, really, for myself. And if someone's asking for that, what they're really asking for is contemplative prayer. That's what contemplative prayer is. It's the form of prayer that unfolds in our soul by virtue of the Spirit's gift of wisdom, and the Spirit's gift of wisdom gives us an experience, an experiential knowledge of God. So if you want to grow in this familiar knowledge of God and come to experience Him for yourself, what you and I need to do is first set off on the road of prayer. We always begin as beginners, but we grow towards contemplative prayer by following Jesus Christ and doing as he taught us to do. But the other thing we need to do is ask for the Spirit's gift of wisdom and ask for the grace of contemplative prayer and as we make our way down the road of metanoia and the road of conversion, following the path of Beatitudes. I outline that in the book as well. I have a whole chapter on the Beatitudes. As we live the Beatitudes and live according to the law of love, slowly, slowly, as we pray, our prayer will become increasingly more contemplative and we can come to sense, taste and see the goodness of the world for ourselves and we can come to know God the Father in that very personal way. That's precisely what Jesus Christ came into the world to offer us the knowledge of God in a whole new way that's unprecedented. That's ours by virtue of the gift of the Holy Spirit. So contemplative prayer is what you're seeking if you really want to know God the Father. And really in contemplative prayer what you do is you come to know God the Father, and he's the one you'll be seeking.
Speaker 3:The other thing is in the Eucharist. When we go to Mass, we have on the altar the man of heaven, the eternal Son of God, jesus Christ. His body, his blood, his soul is divinity. He's actually there with us. So there's a way in which, in every Mass, heaven and earth meet.
Speaker 3:The Father's house is in our midst because Jesus Christ is right there, and when Jesus Christ is there, he's not there without the Father or without the Holy Spirit. He's there with the Father and with the Spirit. So the entire Holy Trinity the Father, son and Holy Spirit, is there. The Father's house is there in every Mass, and when you and I go to Mass and participate in the Mass, we really do go to the Father's house. It's just that's a mystery of faith. You don't see that with your eyes or you hear it with your ears. It's something that transcends our senses. It's a mystery, a mystery of faith. But it's the truth and you and I, once we hear that and believe that by faith, then we can really begin to enter into the mystery of the Mass more deeply and come to know the Father in and through the sacrifice of the Mass.
Speaker 2:That's an incredible thought that every time we go to Mass we enter into the Father's house and we can experience his love for us.
Speaker 3:Absolutely.
Speaker 2:Well, father James, it's been such a pleasure to talk with you today, so I just encourage all of our listeners to believe in the love that God, the Father, has for you and also check out Father James's book, the Father's House Discovering Our Home in the Trinity. You can find this book wherever you buy your Catholic books, and also he has a new podcast called Contemplata, and you can check that out on the Dominican Friars YouTube page.
Speaker 3:Or wherever you listen to your podcasts.
Speaker 2:Wonderful Well, thank you so much for joining us today, father, all right.
Speaker 3:My joy and thanks everyone for listening.
Speaker 2:joining us today.
Speaker 1:Father, all right, my joy and thanks everyone for listening. Thanks for listening to this episode recorded live at SEEK. Miss the conference or want to relive your favorite moments? Seek Replay has you covered Access, powerful keynotes, inspiring talks and exclusive content to take your faith deeper, anytime anywhere. Thank you.
