Those precious faithful followers of my intellectual meanderings will remember me mentioning a while back a suggestion from my spiritual father that I attend ACA meetings in order to perhaps come to better grips with my inner anger.  Adult Children of Alcoholics and Dysfunctional Families is built upon the foundation of the 12 Steps of AA. Within this group are not only people who suffered from being raised in an alcoholic family, but those who endured various levels of crazy in families that were far from normal.  We talk about various topics relative to our lives. Sometimes it is reliving old hurts and patterns of behavior we developed to survive. Other times the discussion may be around something that has been learned in a week of what is called “working the program,”  which means that you are applying one or more of the 12 Steps to your life.

This morning I sent my spiritual father a piece I had written last week in which I was fighting with depression and my struggle to trust in God and His goodness. I will not post the piece here. It is a piece of crap, quite frankly, of the kind of self-pitying, morose nonsense the mind comes up with when the devil is attacking and you offer little if any resistance to his attacks upon the goodness of God. The thumbnail of this reflection is that in it I complain about God as being just like my earthly father, a man who was, as a father, distant, uncaring, and unappreciative of the little boy who was starving for his affection. Christian psychologists and counselors will tell you that this is not uncommon among men and women who have grown up in an abusive household. The idea of God as Father easily translates to God-is-the-same-as-my-father in the psyche of the believer. For those with loving earthly fathers, this is a blessing, making it easy to rest in the arms of the loving, heavenly Father.

For those who had fathers like mine (or worse than mine) however, this becomes a nightmare to our faith. I cannot speak for others like me, but in my case, I have come to discover that much of my behavior over the last several decades has been motivated by a compulsive need for the affirmation I never received from my father. One of these compulsions, for example, is a dreadful perfectionism. This need for the perfect comes from the unconscious thought that if I just do something perfect, perhaps my father will stop calling me “stupid,” and give me a hug. And if I don’t succeed at one chosen activity -perhaps playing on a winning team or hitting the game-winning home run – then soon I will find something else to do, all in that subconscious hope of approval from a father who who will one day die having never told me, “I love you, son.”

Yeah, it was that kind of relationship and that kind of crazy.

The problem with this is that it never stops. Or as my spiritual director said this morning regarding dysfunctional behavior in general: “It’s the gift that keeps on giving.”  By that he simply meant that not only will I probably struggle with the detritus of this reality for the rest of my life but that it has passed down from one generation to the next.

“Do you realize,” he asked me, “that perhaps your father couldn’t give you what you needed as a boy because he never got it himself?”  I do.  You can’t give away that which you have not been given yourself, and from the descriptions of my paternal grandfather given to me by my mom, grandpa was every bit as cold and distant as my father was with me. Dad never learned what it was like to be appreciated – therefore, he couldn’t do it himself.

My biggest problem in this regard has been that I put demands on God which might be reasonable for an earthly and seen father, but are completely out of line to demand from God. Part of my self-indulgent whine in the paper I wrote was that God keeps Himself so distant. I want that which 99% of all Christians do not get. I want to feel His nearness, experience His love in a very bodily and tangible manner, and perhaps even see something from the other side. I want visible and physical proofs of His love for me, the same kind of overt affections I longed for from my father.

Father Deacon Elias was very gentle with me this morning. He said nothing in reproof, did not scold or berate me for the awful things I wrote (and from which I have since repented in Confession), and quietly urged me to think about certain things relative to my struggles. At the end of our talk, he said something (I can’t remember the exact words) in which he thanked me for the opportunity to be an expression of God’s love to me in the world.  At the end of our talk I was in tears. Fr. Elias makes me feel cared for in a manner that I have never experienced before. He is the intimate friend I have never had in my life. Some parish is going to get a wonderful priest when he is ordained in May.

I got up from that talk thinking about him and a sequence of thoughts occurred to me. Firstly, I thought of how loving Jesus must be if Fr. Elias can be this gentle and loving as a mere man. Then my mind went to thinking about something that I had heard on Ancient Faith Radio in which the speaker mentioned Christ living through us. Putting this all together, it came to me that Fr. Elias was really an incarnation of Christ’s love, and that I am looking in all the wrong places and in all the wrong ways to experience that love. I could easily imagine gentle Jesus speaking to me in the same manner – loving, encouraging, and giving me practical ways to increase my devotion and love for Him.

At the 29th Parallel Coffee Shop where I frequently stop  in for my morning java, a large and broadly smiling man greeted me warmly and asked what I was having.

“I’m buying.”  He announced. “Just want to share God’s love with you this morning.”

And there it was – a validation of my thoughts about God’s incarnate love. Jesus is the Incarnation of God. He is the Incarnation of God’s love to a world in dying need of that love. But more than that, I realized that I – along with all Christians – am called to be the incarnation of Christ’s love to others. I need to remember that I am not called to do great things or to experience great things. Great things are flashy, and they might make me feel good about myself for a few minutes, but perhaps what someone really needs from me is not so much to see a shining halo visible above my head as to have me give them a hug and words of encouragement when their life has turned harsh and difficult to deal with.

Jesus bought me coffee this morning, through a man I did not know, just to remind me that in little acts of love from others, I can feel His love. His love was made incarnate to me this morning through simple acts of listening and encouraging – and buying me a cup of coffee.  I am going to work on taking that message, and those little acts of love, into the rest of Lent.

And then beyond.

*Image of Coffee With Jesus used with permission from Radio Free Babylon