Christmas, a fatherhood to be rediscovered

The most beautiful gift that God has given to man is to have made himself close, to have made himself known as "God with us", to have communicated to us that he is Father.
We have not been catapulted into chaos and we do not live in randomness, but we are known by God. He communicated this to us by giving us a Son, he, his Son, with a face that many have physically seen and caressed. Jesus revealed to us that God is Father: we discover this in some of the most beautiful pages of the Gospel. “The Father himself loves you, because you loved me and believed that I came from God” (Jn 16:27).

God is Father: he is not a mystery of faith, he is the certainty of our belief. A good father helps his son with example and with time to grow in turn with a father's heart, a fatherhood that could judge but instead waits, a fatherhood that never tires of having its arms open to envelop us all, to one by one.
There is no hardness that he cannot dissolve, nor sin that he cannot remedy. He can do nothing only if we close the door. And even then he doesn't go away. He remains behind the door, always ready to enter.
Today there are many wrong fatherhoods.

Just think of the many unworthy fathers who abuse their children, or who reject them, or who only know how to give them money as long as they don't ask for anything else, or who still claim to raise them in their exclusive "image and likeness".
I met street children who had received nothing but violence from their fathers, who cursed the word father, who were afraid just to hear it pronounced: they gave up hope only when they found someone who knew how to take them by the hand with the firm tenderness of a authentic dad. Today there is not so much fatherhood, but God insists on being Father and on loving us as authentic children. I wish everyone that this Christmas will be decisive for many in feeling this paternity of God.
He took the steps. It's up to us to answer them.

Ernesto Olivero
Editorial
NP December 2023