I Understood God’s Love When I Became a Father

I spent years trying to earn God’s love. Fatherhood taught me I was already His son.

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I hope everyone had a great Father’s Day this past weekend, full of love, recognition, and hopefully a nap! As I struggled to contain my manic child in the pews on Sunday, I realized just how much has changed for me in the past two-ish years since I became a father, especially in regards to my faith.

You see, one of the biggest challenges I had to overcome in my faith life was actually my relationship with myself, and it wasn’t until I became a father that I truly began to understand God’s love, and learn how to receive it. I’ll explain how, but I have to set the stage first.

I can still remember the first time I felt truly depressed. It was the summer before I went into high school, so I was about to turn 15. I’ve always been someone who was both a deep thinker and a big feeler, so you can imagine how those teenage hormones were interacting with that sensibility.

I remember lying on my bed, staring up at the sanity-stripping, beige-painted ceiling. There seemed to be a grey haze lingering in the room, the pallid early-evening light casting the air with a weighty desolation. I felt battered by waves of complete sorrow, my nervous system stripped bare.

After transferring to a new school for sixth grade and junior high, I was about to transfer again to start high school, far away from all the friends I’d just struggled to make over the past couple of years. On top of that, I was hopelessly in love with a girl, my first real crush, who seemingly had zero interest in me.

All I wanted was to feel loved, but at the same time I rejected any possibility of actually feeling it. Somehow I’d gotten the idea that if someone loved me, I’d feel worthwhile.

What I hadn’t realized was that I felt this way because I had no love for myself. I couldn’t imagine loving myself as God did—or perhaps I didn’t understand how God could love me at all. Self-worth was an incomprehensible idea to me.

I still conceptually believed in God, but I had no relationship with Him… and that’s really the whole point of our faith, isn’t it?

This was the first of many depressive episodes that would haunt me over the next fifteen years. Looking back, it’s clear to me that my self-worth (or lack thereof) was rooted in worldliness, not God—which seems fairly common for teenagers, to be fair.

However, remember what I said about being both a thinker and a feeler? That’s not a good combination.

My thoughts became a labyrinth of self-loathing. Our minds look for ways to convince us that our feelings are true, and at this I was adept.

The solution I came up with was to make myself a savior to everyone. I always wanted to help people live better lives and solve their problems. The trouble was that I am completely incapable of saving anyone—that’s God’s work. If I’m being brutally honest, I think I must have felt that I had to convince people to love me by being useful.

Really, that should have brought me closer to Jesus. Knowing my own inability to carry that weight should’ve made me realize the profundity of what He did for me. Unfortunately, it had the opposite effect. I completely drifted away from my Catholic faith into a sort of vague deism mixed with a dabbling in Buddhism. Yuck.

While Buddhism’s emphasis on detachment did help me realize that my feelings of depression were not “the truth”, I ultimately found its worldview to be nihilistic. The belief espoused is that nothing here matters, that this world is nothing but suffering which we should seek to escape by enlightenment.

I could never square that circle. There were evils I simply couldn’t detach from—abortion, for example. This left me with an utterly confused ideology. I couldn’t achieve detachment, but I also felt totally distant from God.

It was ultimately beauty that led me back to the Church. My best friend, who is now the godfather to my daughter, spoke to me about Catholicism in a way nobody ever had before. We discussed topics like our favorite movies, TV shows, video games and art through a Christian lens. This really exposed me to the beauty and universality of the Incarnation and Resurrection, and, with my combination of thinking and feeling, it resonated with me.

Another way of putting it was the “fittingness” argument, coined by St. Thomas Aquinas, which is that God accomplishes His goals not through needing to meet certain parameters, but because it is the best and most aesthetically perfect way of accomplishing it.

For example, the incarnation: it was not necessary for God to become man—he could have accomplished it any way he wanted. Rather, it was fitting that humanity should be saved by Jesus, the new Adam. This “completeness”, which maintains God’s desire to choose Him by free will while also giving us the opportunity to become greater than we were even before the fall, is not just persuasive because of its logic, but because of its perfection. It demonstrates God’s supreme rationality, which has the effect of instituting Catholicism as something like a work of art.

This, in my opinion, does not diminish the value of our faith. Instead, it shows that what is true will always carry an innate beauty. During my reversion, it was beauty that claimed me first. Only then did I realize that it was beautiful because it was true.

So, I had intellectually recommitted to the Church, but my emotions still had a long way to go.

When I felt like I was properly living out the faith, I felt good about myself. But if I ever fell short—which was the majority of the time, let’s be honest—I fell into the same trap of despair and self-loathing that I’d always struggled with.

I wanted to be perfect. How could God love me if I wasn’t perfect? Just like when I was a teenager, I wanted to feel loved, but the truth was that I really didn’t understand how to be loved.

I think a lot of men struggle with that feeling—how do we simply feel loved? Most men I know are under the belief that they need to earn love. But that doesn’t really apply to our relationship with God, does it?

And while God certainly wants us to always be improving ourselves and learn to leave our sins behind, I know that He does not want us to walk around hating ourselves all the time either.

I don’t think I ever could have figured it out on my own—I have my daughter to thank for that.

When I held my daughter for the first time, and looked into those deep blue, sapphire eyes, I felt a love unlike anything I’d ever understood.

She would never have to “earn” my love, it was just there. And it wasn’t about “deserving” it, either. That may sound strange, but what I mean is that my love for her was more innate than “deserving”. My love for her simply was. It doesn’t wax and wane; it’s now a state of my being.

Finally, after so many years of struggle, I realized that my inability to feel loved by God was a matter of my own pride.

I believed God could love everyone else despite their flaws, but that I alone was especially unworthy.

Since becoming a father, there are times when I feel like I’ve stepped into something beyond myself. When I’m changing diapers, or giving her a bath, or a bottle before bed, I almost feel like I’ve become a figure rather than a person.

A father is an archetype that molds you to it, and not the other way around. We all find our own ways of doing it, of course, but we are all doing the same thing. This is, of course, what we are trying to achieve as Christians—to step into the archetype of Christ.

What I realized at this moment was that I was not terribly important. I was not different from anyone else (an idea which I now realize motivated my depression) and was, deep down, just like everyone else. Someone who God could, and does, love.

Would I ever say to anyone else that God didn’t love them if they were a sinner? Of course not. So why was I saying it to myself? Pride.

Moreover, if my love for my daughter is eternal, how much more perfectly does God, who doesn’t get tired, impatient, bored, distracted, or self-concerned, love her? And then I realized, it’s not just her that He loves like that—it’s all of us, myself included.

There was nothing I had to do to “earn” it, and I certainly didn’t “deserve” it, either. But there it was, and all I could do was decide how to live with that fact.

Instead, knowing that God’s love for me is always there, I take comfort in knowing I’m just like everybody else. The health of my faith doesn’t live and die every time I sin; I must simply confess, pick up my cross, and try again. I can be a better father, a better husband, and a better me simply because I’m not so caught up in me all the time.

Now, I can rest in humility, and in humility, I can be more and more like Christ every day—with God’s help, of course.

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