Good Father

Kathryn Mulderink

by Kathryn Mulderink

What father begets his son to this?
An iron-pierced God is no god at all to
eyes natured to wholeness;
limbs stretched on limbs like winter’s black meat
drying in the sun,
a star that averts its eye.
A lamb abandoned to the force of every darkness.
What father forsakes his son to this?
Tongue of paste struggling to free itself to testify
on behalf of those who take
cheap shots in stone
or spittle or sarcasm,
lungs crushed to desperate uselessness, exhaling
weak, hot over brittled chords for sound.
Bloodblinded eyes seeking faithlit hearts.
Utterly forsaken, abandoned by the Father,
his distant God.
What father chooses this for his son?
Surrendering to all that is
hideous and loathsome,
embracing every abomination wholly,
pulling every sin into the flesh,
the heart, the spirit,
making it his own.
Becoming all sin.
Transforming every refusal to love,
reversing every “no” with the
definitive “yes” to the Father.
Suffering sin into nothingness.
What father requires this of his son?

A Father who is one-in-being with the Son;
who, with all His power to beget, opens to another
as “other” an autonomous, personal selfhood
within Himself, begets this other
to be the same that He IS,
within the one Be-ing of God,
holding back nothing which is possible as
substance and as
absolute be-ing-in-oneself –
a Father who, as love, is simple movement
toward the Son,
God and Person only as Father;
His self-possession as person attained only in
His unreseved self-giving to the Son;
and this where Be-ing subsists as pure IS

-Trinity being the primal mystery,
the first impulse in the
heart of Absolute Meaning.
Being is communicatio; Being is love.
The Father turns toward the Son as
the Son turns toward the Father, both give
to one another their one mutual love,
their total
being-in-one-another,
the Spirit attesting to the difference-in-oneness,
filling it with fire,
His be-ing the unity of this unsurpassable love,
the personified culmination and seal of this
fullness of God’s shared be-ing and giving, the
exponent of absolute divine freedom and the
ground, the energy
extending the intra-divine movement
beyond the Trinity –
the immanent self-distinction of God.
Being is always relation.

Being always rises as gift from Father-Son-Spirit love.
Creation is Father-love, his desire
to extend fatherhood beyond this Trinity,
and to designate man a place within the
locus of the Son, the Beloved.
We are sons in the Son
through whom all things were made;
through Him, with Him, in Him, all things
return to the Father.
Being is always relation.
Being is communicatio; being is love.
Personhood only actualized in truth when we
respond fully to the call of our
be-ing children of God.

Sin is rejection of our ontology.
Rejecting our call to sonship.
Refusing to allow “I” to become the earthly place
of the trinitarian act whereby
Father and Son turn toward one another
eternally.
Sin exists because God loves.
Because God loves completely, recklessly,
because He has so abandoned Himself to us,
given us so complete a freedom
that we can really wound its Source.
The flow of trinitarian love depends on
our utterly free will, depends on
our choosing Him, our allowing Him to love through us.
Our “no” is the iron that can pierce
the oneness of the very Heart of God,
the core of Absolute Be-ing,
the very love of Love,
the meaning of Absolute Meaning.

What can transform this “no” and save us?
Who will stand in the breach, at-one what is divided?
What can heal the wounded Heart of God?
Forgiveness cannot be conferred from above,
descending upon us unbidden, unmerited.
Sin must be “borne away” by one of us,
one willing to become suffering love,
a love so pure that it can suffer sin into
nothingness. Unblemished Lamb.
The Son must fulfill Eden’s covenant by being
sent by the Father into the
flesh of sin.
What Father asks this missio of His Son?
You are this Father who suffers in the Son,
Who redeems a fallen creation through suffering,
Whose passionate love for man is the
passion of the Son, Who desires to go through sin,
not around it, to
reach us and help us to
find You.
The cross is Love confronting sin and
inviting us to return love for love,
inviting us to share Its burden,
to choose to know
this good Father.