3 Attributes of God: Omnipotent - Omniscient - Omnipresent

God is a Spirit, infinite, eternal and unchangeable, in his being, wisdom, power, holiness, justice, goodness, and truth. Westminster shorter cathechism 

God has many attributes. We understand that they can be grouped under these three best known ones that we learn in the catechism and that begin with the Latin word “omni” which means all. Feuerbach would say that these three attributes are human projections, or anthropomorphisms. However, we think that they are more likely the origin and entity where each of these realities resides in its maximum potency and we, being human, know and accept that we will never completely dominate any of these realities.

In contrast with other living beings, we recognize that we have some power over the Creation, but we also know that this power is limited; the omnipotence resides in God alone because he is the Creator and we the created beings. With the advancement of science and technology, we understand more and more. However, we still bear in mind, like Socrates did, that before the immensity of things to know we humbly recognize just how little we do know; the full knowledge resides in God, only he is omniscient.

Time and space are the coordinates of our earthly life; we occupy a single space during a concrete time. However, we recognize that in God is the origin of time and space, and because he is eternal, he is omnipresent. Unlimited in HIS power, not confined by time or space for whom there is no mystery, and thus God is.

Negative theology

I only know that I know nothing, and the fact of knowing this puts me in a position of advantage over those who think they know something. (Socrates)

We are inherently incapacitated to define God, that is, to say what he is and how he came to be, because to define somehow means to know, to encompass, to assimilate, to comprehend, to enclose, as if we could put God inside of us, inside of our mind, like we do with the things and people we know.

In this respect, the Spaniards have a very interesting expression, “te conozco como se te hubiese parido”, I know you as if I had given birth to you. When we want to express how well we know someone, we turn to the figure who knows us the best – our mother. Now, it is not possible to know God very well or well enough. This is how negative theology became confused with the belief of agnosticism, the application of Socratic humility to God as is applied to wisdom in general.

The idea of negative theology was already practiced by the Jewish people, who in recognizing the ineffable immensity of the mystery of God, even avoided pronouncing his name. Along this same line, Saint Matthew the evangelist substituted the expression “the Kingdom of God” used by other evangelists for “the Kingdom of Heaven”.

Even after the apostolic age, negative theology, that is, the idea that it is easier to say what God is not than what God is, remained a constant throughout theological reflections: 

Gregory of Nyssa (335-394), Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite (Sixth Century), Albertus Magnus (1200-1280), Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274), Duns Scotus (1266-1308), Meister Eckhart (1260-1328), and reached its peak in Nicholas of Cusa (1401-1464) who was called “docta ignorantia”, the learned ignorant. And, still in our time, Dietrich Bonhoeffer (1906-1945) and Harvey Cox (1929).

Negative theology is a response to the precept of representing God in images (Exodus 20:4), which runs the risk of quickly transforming them into idols. It is also an escape toward the anthropomorphic tendency of projecting our desires and ideals onto God. Very dear to this theology is the idea of human suffering, already dealt with in the Bible in the book of Job, the problem of evil and the silence of God. Negative theology presents God in his capacity to save without exerting any violence on men’s freedom and reason.

We can know a sufficient minimum about God

Then Jesus cried aloud: “Whoever believes in me believes not in me but in him who sent me. And whoever sees me sees him who sent me.” John 12:44-45

We know that we cannot know God fully, to encase, to put his mystery within us. We also know that there is and will always be more of what we don’t know about God than of what we do know. However, we do not want to have the attitude of all or nothing towards God like the agnostics: since I cannot know all then I’m not interested in the subject and I don’t want to know anything.

“We are the people of his pasture, and the sheep of his hand” (Psalm 95:7). It is true that the sheep do not know the shepherd fully, but they can know enough and, more importantly, can distinguish the Good Shepherd from the hired hand (John 10:1-21). Because of this, and because we thirst for God like some Greeks during the time of our Lord, we too want to see Jesus (John 12:21) and like the disciples of John the Baptist, we want to know where he lives. 

And Jesus is interested in making himself known to us and tells us to come and see (John 1:36-39). The creature may come to understand the Creator somewhat, like a child understands his mother enough to have life and life in abundance (John 10:10), and for the Creator to be glorified in us, his creatures.

Beloved, let us love one another, because love is from God; everyone who loves is born of God and knows God. Whoever does not love does not know God, for God is love. 1 John 4:7-8

On one hand, we know from John that God is love. Now then, we cannot love what we do not know, nor can we know what we don’t love. Things, however, can be known without us loving them; but precisely because knowledge implies dominion over the known, we can only know people and make ourselves known to them if we love them.

In this sense, faith is much more than a consent or a yielding of reason: it is to let our heart govern over reason, understanding love, of course, as a need and not as a feeling. We need God’s love, but for this to happen we need to love him as well. In speaking of the vital union between the vine and the branches, Jesus concludes, “Apart from me you can do nothing” (John 15:5).

It is possible to gain a sufficient knowledge of God to establish a relationship with him, and this task has been made much easier after he was revealed in his Son. Jesus of Nazareth is God made man, through whom this relationship has been made easier. In fact, he came to us so that we could go to him; in Jesus, God is less mysterious, in Jesus and through Jesus we can know God enough to love him and to be loved by him. 

We certainly don’t want Feuerbach to laugh at us, so we will not be anthropomorphic, that is, we will not project on God “what we want to be when we grow up”, our dreams, desires, fantasies and delusions of grandeur. Let us use the Word revealed in the Bible, and we will not state anything about God that has not been affirmed there, privileging that word that became flesh in Our Lord Jesus Christ. Surely in this way we will not err, because we hold to the inerrancy of the Bible.

The Kingdom of God is ALREADY present among us since Jesus came and initiated it. But we know that it is STILL NOT present in its fullness. The same can be said of our knowledge of God. We already know something, enough to establish a relationship, but still not everything. One day we will see him as he is. In the meantime, let us contemplate him like the young Francisco, the little shepherd of Fatima, who on referring to his cousin who had seen Our Lord “in that light from Our Lady which penetrated our hearts” and entranced by such beauty, exclaimed, “How wonderful is God!”

Omnipotent

O Lord God, you have only begun to show your servant your greatness and your might; what god in heaven or on earth can perform deeds and mighty acts like yours! Deuteronomy 3:24

Am I not allowed to do what I choose with what belongs to me? Matthew 20:15

I believe in one God, the Father almighty, Maker of Heaven and Earth, of all things visible and invisible… Catechism of the Catholic Church

With respect to himself, the omnipotence of God manifest itself in the fact that God is autonomous, free, not dependent on anything or anyone, and self-sufficient, not needing anything or anyone. For “just as the Father has life in himself, so he has granted the Son also to have life in himself” (John 5:26). He has neither a beginning nor an end, because "he himself is before all things, and in him all things hold together" (Colossians 1:17).

In relation to us, the omnipotence of God manifests itself in the creation of the world, in the plan of salvation, in the incarnation of his Son, because for him, “nothing will be impossible” (Luke 1:37), and also in the sustenance and maintenance of the creation, where everything is ordered with perfection and intelligence.

God is the Lord and Master over all his creatures, and he has unrestricted absolute power and jurisdiction over them. This necessarily follows from the fact that he is God and that the creatures are dependent on him for existence and activity. In the exercise of this power, God is not accountable to anyone; he does not have to justify himself to anyone. “To want is to be able” says the proverb, and we want to believe that this is so; for God, in fact, to want is always to be able but for man, not always.

God is the Lord of all

Yours, O Lord, are the greatness, the power, the glory, the victory, and the majesty; for all that is in the heavens and on the earth is yours; yours is the kingdom, O Lord, and you are exalted as head above all… and you rule over all…” 1 Chronicles 29:11-12

“Do you know what I have done to you? You call me Teacher and Lord – and you are right, for that is what I am. So if I, your Lord and Teacher, have washed your feet, you also should do as I have done to you. Very truly, I tell you, servants are not greater than their master, nor are messengers greater than the one who sent them.” John 13:12-16

The dominion and the lordship of God over the world and over each one of us is a service of love. God is the magnanimous King who reigns with justice, slow to anger and rich in mercy. Christ exercised his lordship by washing the feet of his disciples, performing the service of a slave, to tell us that if his lordship manifests itself in service, so then all power must be manifested in this way. The power of God is not abusive, his nobility is not one of blue blood, and his authority is not authoritarian. His dictate is not dictatorship.

God is Love

But Zion said, “The Lord has forsaken me, my Lord has forgotten me.” Can a woman forget her nursing child, or show no compassion for the child of her womb? Even these may forget, yet I will not forget you. See, I have inscribed you on the palms of my hands; your walls are continually before me. Isaiah 49:14-16

Beloved, let us love one another, because love is from God; everyone who loves is born of God and knows God. Whoever does not love does not know God, for God is love. 1 John 4:7-8

Since God does not need anything or anyone, his love is therefore purely unconditional. Since whoever does not love does not know God, then he cannot love God without loving his neighbour; the one in conflict with God is the one who chooses to be and to remain in conflict with his neighbour. 

Omniscient
You know when I sit down and when I rise up; you discern my thoughts from far away. You search out my path and my lying down, and are acquainted with all my ways. Even before a word is on my tongue, O Lord, you know it completely. Psalm 139:2-4

And before him no creature is hidden, but all are naked and laid bare to the eyes of the one to whom we must render an account. Hebrews 4:13 

This means that God knows all things in a way that is complete, absolute and definitive. His knowledge is infinite and is not subject to any limitation. He does not need to ask for information and he has no doubts. Since he is the Creator of all, nothing remains hidden from him; he knows all our thoughts and is an eyewitness to all our deeds. He knows who is guilty and who is innocent.

Therefore, for God there are no perfect crimes, or things that will never be known; there are no financial or professional secrets, no private lives; everything is public and known to the eyes of God. Nothing escapes him, because he is always attentive. The impunity, the lack of justice, is possible before men, but not before God. Contrary to what happens within us, his knowledge does not increase or decrease, he does not lose his memory and our crimes do not prescribe.

God’s knowledge of the future is as complete as his knowledge of the present and the past. What God knows will happen in the future, will happen unquestionably, because God knows not with possibility, but with certainty. God’s knowledge does not come from things nor does it depend on their behaviour nor because they exist or will exist, but because he, who existed before all things, ordered them to exist and to exist for a determined purpose. For example, God knew of the crucifixion of his Son and foretold it many hundreds of years before his Incarnation.

Is this synonymous to predetermination, that everything is predestined and predetermined by God? No, the fact that God knows what our choices will be does not make us any less free when we do make them. He knows what our choices are going to be, because nothing is unknown to him, but he does not interfere in our freedom to make them: they are entirely our responsibility.

Omnipresent

Where can I go from your spirit? Or where can I flee from your presence? If I ascend to heaven, you are there; if I make my bed in Sheol, you are there. If I take the wings of the morning and settle at the farthest limits of the sea, even there your hand shall lead me, and your right hand shall hold me fast. Psalm 139:7-10

God is not limited in any way by time and space. His presence is infinite in such a way that he is present simultaneously at all times and in all places, with all the fullness of his being. This is possible because God is not a material being, but spiritual. God is spirit, and those who worship him must worship in spirit and truth (John 4:24). Since God is Spirit, he is also invisible to our eyes and inaccessible to any of our senses. But to him, we are not invisible, we cannot hide anything from him.

God is Transcendent and Immanent

Am I a God nearby, says the Lord, and not a God far off? (…) Do I not fill heaven and earth? Jeremiah 23:23-24

“… he is not far from each one of us. For “In him we live and move and have our being…” Acts 17:27-28

To declare that God is transcendent is to say that he is distinct and greater than all his creation, he lives and exists outside of the creation without needing it, because it was him who created it. To state that he is immanent is to say that he is together with his creation, participating and guiding it, and within it in its entirety and in each of its creatures, he is the center, the heart of all things. Nothing that happens is foreign to him.

God is Eternal

Eternity is the negation of time; it is the concept contrary to time and temporality. “Fugit tempus, carpe diem”, time is fleeting, it is in continuous motion, one time gives way to another; eternity however is static, a continuous and stopped carpe diem or seized day. This is one of the attributes that God has and which he shares with us (John 10, 28).

God is Infinite

Even heaven and the highest heaven cannot contain you… 1 King 8:27

Man is finite and limited in his bodily and physical dimension, with well-defined parameters; God, on the other hand, is not defined by any parameters or by any limits, the concepts of infinity and omnipresence are identical in God.

God is Perfect

The God who made the world and everything in it, he who is Lord of heaven and earth, does not live in shrines made by human hands, nor is he served by human hands, as though he needed anything, since he himself gives to all mortals life and breath and all things. Acts 17:24-25

The perfection of God is one of the consequences of his infinite being; everything that is limited and finite is imperfect or perfectible, since the expansion of the parameters implies the approximation to a higher degree of perfection. Consequently, something without limits is better and exceeds in perfection to something that is limited. What holds true for perfection, holds true for the rest of God’s moral attributes such as holiness, justice, mercy, truth, goodness, patience…

God is Immutable

For I the Lord do not change; therefore you, O children of Jacob, have not perished. Malachi 3:6

“...the Father of lights, with whom there is no variation or shadow due to change.”  James 1:17

The immutability of God has to do with the fact of being perfect; because of this, he is not in the process of growth, or any process of becoming better. He does not change with time, because he is always beyond the time and space that encompass his creatures. Indeed in the Bible, God introduces himself as “I AM WHO I AM” (Exodus 3:14): God is self-referring. And since he has no one above him to swear by, he swears by himself (Genesis 22:16).

Mutability makes reference to a created entity, to incidents or circumstance or to will. Each creature, in one form or another, is subject to changes and has within himself the potential for change or being changed. God, however, is absolute and, in all aspects, is immutable both in his essence and his will; even the possibility of change is completely foreign to God.

Therefore God’s immutability is the consequence of his perfection; changes only take place in those who recognize themselves as imperfect and this only happens to the created beings who recognize themselves as imperfect before the perfection of their Creator. God also does not change his mind, because he is true, knows the truth of everything, and in everything he acts wisely and thus does not err. Jesus Christ is the same yesterday and today and for ever (Hebrews 13:8).

God is Faithful

Know therefore that the Lord your God is God, the faithful God who maintains covenant loyalty with those who love him and keep his commandments, to a thousand generations… Deuteronomy 7:9

When God established the first covenant with Abraham, he ordered him to kill some animals and cut them in half, laying the halves side by side. The custom was that anyone who enters into this covenant should pass through the midst of the divided animals, symbolizing that “what happened to the animals would happen to me if I fail to keep my word”. 

Recognizing the unfaithful nature of man, his inability to keep his word, God passed through the middle, but did not let Abraham do the same. Therefore, if we are faithless, he remains faithful –for he cannot deny himself. 2 Timothy 2:13.

God is Provident

Father of orphans and protector of widows is God in his holy habitation. God gives the desolate a home to live in; he leads out the prisoners to prosperity… Psalm 68:5-6

“Is there anyone among you who, if your child asks for a fish, will give a snake instead of a fish? Or if the child asks for an egg, will give a scorpion? If you then, who are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will the heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to those who ask him!” Luke 11:11-13

God is Father and provident, rich in mercy to all who call upon him, to whom nothing is alien, for he knows when we sit and when we stand. He takes care of us as his children, for we are his people, the sheep of his flock. The type of Father he is, we will never be lacking in anything, therefore, just as children absolutely trust in their parents, so we must be like these children, for only they may enter the Kingdom of Heaven.

A child has this radical trust in his parents and knows that although they will not give him everything he asks for, they will never deprive him of anything that he truly needs. So he asks, asks, and asks, but knows that not all of his requests will be met. Those that are not answered, the negative answers, he receives them thinking that his parents know what is best for him. It is in this spirit that we should receive God's silence and when our requests are not answered; not by being disinterested in God, but with the faith that God knows better than we do what we need in the short, medium and long term.

A child who does not worry about tomorrow, lives carefree but busy; he delegates any concern to his Father, and so we must do the same. For it is not in our power to increase one day of our lives, and however much we may be concerned with what we wear, we shall not dress better than the flowers in the field, and these, God dresses them (Matthew 6:25-34).

Fr. Jorge Amaro, IMC

3 Roles Within the Human Family: Father - Mother - Son/Daughter

The myth of the Androgynous Being
In Plato’s Symposium, Aristophanes the philosopher stands up to make his speech on the nature of love, to explain why lovers experience completeness when they meet their beloved. Aristophanes explains that in the beginning, Zeus created an androgynous being, something like a man and a woman joined at the back forming a single being.

In its plenitude and happiness, the Androgyny grew insolent and refused to honor and venerate the gods, and even tried to attack them in their dwelling place in the mountains. Zeus, a little envious of its happiness and also out of revenge, punished the Androgyny by dividing it into two, following the old idea of “divide et impera” or divide and conquer. Hence the origin of the word “sex”, which has its root in “section”, “sect”, or a part of the whole.

According to Aristophanes, we spend our lives looking for the part that was amputated because without it life has no meaning, and is depressing and dull. With it, we feel complete, we return to fullness and perfection. Love is therefore the force that causes the man and the woman to gravitate toward each other until they meet and fuse into the single being they once were.

Love is what is felt when we find the amputated part, and affectively and effectively establish the primordial union. In Portuguese, people speak of their husband or wife as the other half of their face or the other half of the orange.

It is said that Aristophanes is the father of romantic love and also of platonic love, the type of love where the lovers gravitate around one another without ever merging into one, as would be in their conscious or unconscious desire.

The biblical myth of creation of man and woman
“Let us make humankind in our image, according to our likeness; and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the birds of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the wild animals of the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps upon the earth.” So God created humankind in his image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them. Genesis 1:26-27

Then the Lord God said, “It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him a helper as his partner.” (…) So the Lord God caused a deep sleep to fall upon the man, and he slept; then he took one of his ribs and closed up its place with flesh. And the rib that the Lord God had taken from the man he made into a woman and brought her to the man. Then the man said, “This at last is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh; this one shall be called Woman, for out of Man this one was taken.” Therefore a man leaves his father and his mother and clings to his wife, and they become one flesh. Genesis 2:18, 21-24

The Jews arranged two mythological accounts to explain what the Greeks explained in one: first, that the man and the woman are equal in their dignity, they are two versions of the same human being, and neither of these versions is superior or inferior to the other, and second, that at the core they are one, that they were once one, and now they try to be one.

We tend to think that in the beginning God created the man and took the woman out of him, but this is not what the Bible says. God, in the beginning, made the human being, the Man with capital letter, which in Greek is Anthropos and in Latin Homo. From this human being, God took the woman and what was left was: Vis virus, which in Portuguese gives “man”, the true word that designates a male human being. 

When speaking of marriage, it is interesting to note that Jesus, almost like the Greeks, quotes the first and not the second creation account in saying: from the beginning of creation, God made them male and female (Mark 10:6), because he was more interested in the equality between man and woman which is something that did not exist during his time nor in the centuries that followed until now.

Jesus then proceeds to the second part of the second creation account in the book of Genesis to solidify what marriage means: “For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh.” (Mark 10: 7-8)

Greece invented the romantic love and our tendency to seek out our other half, the perfect love, the perfect man, the perfect woman, the soul mate, and Israel invented the marriage institution and the marriage arranged by families, without love between the individuals, with the sole purpose of procreation and of establishing alliances between the peoples in order to avoid wars.

When one equals three
The boyfriend knocked at his girlfriend’s door. “Who is it?” asked the girlfriend from behind the door. “It is I”, said the boyfriend. “Go away, in this house we cannot fit you and I.” The rejected boyfriend wandered into the desert, meditating for months, considering and reconsidering the words of his beloved. At last, he returned and knocked at the door again. “Who is it?” “It is you,” the boyfriend replied this time. And the door immediately opened wide.

This God who is a community of love created man in his own image and likeness, so that a human being is also one and triune, and also called to be a community of love; to the Trinity of God corresponds a human trinity.

A human person is free, autonomous, indivisible and independent, and yet he is not self-sufficient, but needs two other people: his father and his mother, with whom he forms a relational triangle. Father, mother and son or daughter are the only categories of human life; every human being always belongs to two of them.

A man is not a father without having a wife and a son/daughter; a woman is not a mother without having a husband and a son/daughter, every human being is a son/daughter of a father and a mother; there are no single mothers. The Trinity consists of an individual coexisting with two others; the existence of one implies always the existence of the other two with whom he has affective bonds, forming a triangle of love.

The bond that we have with our parents is so intense, so strong that they are a part of us and us a part of them. When they pass away, even in old age when they are more dependent on us than we are on them, it can feel like the world is collapsing on us. “To leave is to die a little, it is to die to what one loves,” as the French poem rightly puts it. When they leave, we die a little and we will never be the same again.

It comforts us the possibility of building another relational triangle and of being parents ourselves, but we never recover completely from the clash that we suffered from their deaths. The mourning for parents will always be an incomplete mourning; I will always remember how my mother in her old age would still shed tears for my grandmother although she had passed away a long, long time ago…

Because Man is one and triune, the human being is whole within himself, but also at the same time, part of another whole: his family. Human life is always a triangular life: outside of the triangle there is no human life. When a son/daughter leaves the triangle of his/her family with another individual of the opposite sex, he/she forms another triangle. The relationships between all these triangles form the social fabric, the family, the clan, the tribe, the people and the nation.

But from the beginning of creation, “God made them male and female.” “For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh.” Mark 10: 6-8

For a Catholic marriage to be valid, it must be “ratum et consummatum”, ratified in the Church where the priest, citing the gospel, declares the two a single flesh, and consummated in the intimacy of the conjugal or sexual act, where the two become one flesh. And at the very moment when the two are one, there are three: from this union a new being arise, so that the human being is One and Triune.

We are either a father, a mother or a son/daughter, each of these individuals implies the existence of the other two. Human beings don’t exist by themselves, they coexist in a trinitarian bond of love, just like God.

Humans are Intrinsically interdependent

• Genesis 1:27 - God created humankind in his image, (…) male and female he created them 
• Genesis 2:22 – (…) the rib that the Lord God had taken from the man he made into a woman 

The advantage of the androgynous myth about the creation of humans by God, over the first biblical version, is that in this account is stated that we are at the same time free and interdependent, a whole and a part. The first biblical version of creation, on the other hand, says that we are first free and equal in dignity and only after we are interdependent and belong to one another.

Having the two truths of human nature separated into two different accounts, however, created a problem. Over time the second account was dismissed as being male chauvinistic and the first became overly evaluated.

“Male and female he created them” sounds as if humans could exist in two different completely independent and unrelated modalities. The original idea behind the Greek myth, that they were once one and are now broken into two interdependent halves that seek to become whole again, is lost.

The individualistic modern Western culture, born out of the French Revolution, has over-stressed the value of the person above the community, freedom over equality, and fraternity, independency and autonomy over interdependency. There are all sorts of philosophies and philosophers that back these values in detriment to the value of the community and interdependency. 

There are no philosophers and philosophies that advocate individuals as being just half, incomplete, intrinsically indigent, and interdependent at the core of their existence. In fact, only God is whole in himself and complete, humans don’t exist like islands in completeness and self-sufficiency; they only exist in halves and have to find completeness outside of themselves together with other humans.

So rather than debating over the two different modalities or versions of human existence as if they could exist on their own or by themselves, male/female should refer to incompleteness, to indigence, and should be for us a permanent reminder that we are somewhat incomplete, insufficient, imperfect, partial, unfinished, only half of a human being, not just at sexual level, but at all levels; we are interdependent because we are incomplete.

Full humanity and the sense of completeness can only come when we enter into an intimate relationship with another human being. So, male/female instead of being regarded as a different modality or version in which humans exist, they should be looked at as if in themselves, on their own they don’t make sense.

In all honesty, with human nature there is no existence without coexistence, so we could as well get rid of the word and concept of existence and use only coexistence. If we are honest with ourselves and true to our human nature, we will have to admit that we don’t exist, we coexist.

Tridimensional thinking
“The children conditioned my existence, since they were born I have not thought in individual terms, I am part of an inseparable trio,” says the Chilean writer Isabel Allende about her own family experience.

As we have already said in speaking of the divine family, we are at the same time a whole and a part. Every single one of our cells, even though it is only an infinitesimal part of our organism, contains within it by way of DNA the complete information of the entire organism. It was on the basis of this principle that the sheep Dolly was cloned. This is possible because all of our cells are daughters of the “marriage” between the two half cells that united when our father and our mother consummated their marriage in the conjugal act.

The cell, being a living being in itself (like the amoeba being the unicellular organism), a unit, is a part of our body. The family, being a unit in itself, is a cell of a clan; several clans form a tribe, several tribes form a people, and several peoples form a country. There are no people who is not formed by other peoples. Being simultaneously whole and part is inherent of the human nature.

Why is there no human life outside of the family? Because we are at the same time a whole and a part; on one hand, we are free autonomous individual beings, and on the other, we are part of a family, a tribe, a people, a nation, and we will always live in this tension between the individual and the community. Our individual thinking cannot be individualistic, but must be tridimensional.

Often when I celebrate a wedding, I tell the bridegroom, “From this day forward, you will never drink a beer by yourself”; to which he answers, “But my wife doesn’t drink…”, “Yes, she does,” I say, “And your son drinks too.” The consequences of your actions will not only fall on you, but also on those who are triangularly united with you. And if the consequences of your actions also fall upon others, your thinking must also be tridimensional, that is, you must take them into account, and share and make decisions together, even on seemingly individual matters.

I cannot have the Frank Sinatra’s mentality of “I did it my way”, nor by the French expression of “to each of his own” or the Spanish one of “everyone knows of himself, God knows it all,” or the Italian “do for three what you do for yourself”. But rather, “Where is your brother?” God asks of Cain (Genesis 4:3-13), I need to always know where my brother is.

The Nonviolent Communication teaches us that there are ways to meet our needs without being at the expense of or at the detriment to the needs of others and vice versa. Either everyone wins or everyone loses, because no one can be happy at the expense of another person. Someone has said that a camel is a horse designed by a group of people. Following the process is more important than the final result. Both in the corporate and business world, knowing how to work with others is very important because this leads to greater well-being and productivity at work.

The love triangle or the Bermuda triangle
“That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind,” said Neil Armstrong as he took his first step on the lunar surface. The opposite is also true: we are all a family, an individual setback is a setback for the humanity.

Once upon the time there were two hedgehogs who were great friends. It was summer and they spent their time playing. Soon came autumn and it started to become very cold; the hedgehogs sought shelter under the leaves. Then winter came and the leaves were no longer enough for warmth. They then noticed that other animals slept together, clinging to each other to protect themselves from the cold. 

They thought that this was an excellent idea. But as soon as they tried to do the same, it was only to find each running as fast as it could to its own corner. Each had pricked the other with the sharp quills on its body and blamed the other… it was necessary to find a way to settle in without injuring its friend. Night after night, they became more and more used to one another. With a little trick, they lowered their quills and lay down side by side, with a thousand care, so not to hurt nor to be hurt.

We are called to understand each other, as there is no plan B, there is no alternative, there is no going back. In the conquest of Mexico, the Spaniard Hernan Cortes  ordered his caravels to be burned so to leave no escape route. All that was left for his soldiers was to move forward if they wished to survive. A little of this mentality would be very useful in Portugal today, where in every 100 married couples, 70 get divorced.

There were days I used to jump thirty yards to see you/ today I would jump thirty or more yards not to see you – says a popular song… Legend or truth, the Bermuda triangle is renowned for being a place in the Gulf of Mexico where it is said that ships and planes that come close to it would mysteriously disappear. How many love triangles turn soon enough into Bermuda triangles where individuals get lost.

The Father
You shall eat the fruit of the labour of your hands; you shall be happy, and it shall go well with you. Psalms 128:2

His absence may be physical, affective, cognitive and spiritual. This lack deprives the children of an adequate model of paternal behaviour. The growing working commitment of the woman outside the home has not found sufficient compensation in a greater commitment by the man in the domestic environment. (Synod for the family, 2015)

In the evolution of species, the paternal figure begins by having no role in the reptiles and mammals, and begins to play some role in the primates. The figure of the absent father is something that is still in the genes of the history of mankind; the absent father today is the same nonexistent father at the dawn of our evolution.

Unlike the woman who relates to the new person for nine months before it is born, the father is absent from this process, because he only planted the seed and is always a foster parent, absent. Without being able to feel the same as the mother, the modern father accompanies step by step the gestation of his child, feels with his ears the first kicks and assists at the delivery.

It is necessary that He must increase and I must decrease (John 3:30). Paraphrasing this verse of John the Baptist, it is necessary that the omnipresence of the mother in the life of the child decreases and the presence of the father increases. A mother hen will the worst kind of mother-in-law as she never cuts off the umbilical cord and believes she still has the right to her child.

So instead of pushing the child out of the nest as the swallows do with their young at the end of the summer, she wants to hold on to her child, and considers the daughter- or son-in-law as an enemy who “stole” her child from her. Children are not parents’, as they did not give them life because this was also given to them. Now they are called to pass it on to their children, they do not give, because they are not owners of life. They simply transmit what themselves have received – life.

An absent father ends up losing both his wife and his children. Since the providence of parents towards their children is assured by law, the woman easily converts an absence of fact into an absence of right.

For the children, it is more difficult to have this reasoning, because they are always children. A boy who grows up without a father, grows up without discipline, without a model he can identify with, and lives confused and lost. A girl who grows up without a father lacks a positive experience with the first person she meets of the opposite sex. In search of a father figure, she will date too early and will repeat with many men the relationship that she failed with her father.

The Mother
Your wife will be like a fruitful vine within your house. Psalms 128:3

A more attentive presence of the father allows for a longer absence of the mother and a professional fulfillment of the latter, as well as individual growth of both. The time of the submissive homemaker has ended and Jesus was already and truly against these two clichés that throughout the centuries have enslaved women:

The vocation of a woman is motherhood
In those days when Jesus was speaking to the crowd, a woman in the crowd raised her voice and said, “Blessed is the womb that bore you and the breasts that nursed you!” But Jesus said, “Blessed rather are those who hear the word of God and obey it!” Luke 11:27-28

Jesus gives importance to this praise, and more important than physical motherhood, Jesus considers worthy of praise the motherhood of discipleship, to listen and to incarnate the word of God, something that Mary his own mother did, having been a disciple first and then a mother. Being a mother is a temporary role that fundamentally ends when the children are raised and educated.  This is so among the mammals and, in some way, should have been incorporated into humans because it is the natural order of things.

A woman is also called to be a disciple, to follow the Master as did the male apostles, and to be fulfilled professionally as such. There is a place for her in the society. Historically, humanity has been going around in circles because it rows with a single oar, it has been flying like a bird with one wing. We want more women in the government and in all cells of the social fabric to make the world more balanced.

The woman’s job is to do housework
“Lord, do you not care that my sister has left me to do all the work by myself? Tell her then to help me.” But the Lord answered her, “Martha, Martha, you are worried and distracted by many things; there is need of only one thing. Mary has chosen the better part, which will not be taken away from her.” Luke 10:38-42

Mary who sat at the Lord’s feet, listening to Him, was in the position of a disciple. Jesus places being a disciple above doing housework; here again the personal professional achievement of women should not be set aside for domestic work.

Of course someone has to do the housework, and this someone is all the members of the family: father, mother and children. Each one must do what each one can do. In other words, this also applies to the children: if they can already sweep the floors, clean the house, do the dishes and make beds then they should do them. The parents are not benefiting themselves or their children when they end up doing all the chores and not delegating age appropriate chores to their children.

The Child
Your children will be like olive shoots around your table. Psalms 128:3

From the moment the two halves of human cells unite to form a single human cell, it forms something that no one can separate. The cell, as the building block of life of this planet, is indissoluble. The atom, which is the building block of matter, can be separated, as indeed has happened, generating atomic energy in the process; but a cell is indivisible, inviolable, and is made bulletproof: we can kill it but we cannot separate it.

Abortion is a crime, it is a disgrace of humanity. The human species, which is thought to be so advanced and rational, is the only species among all the animals that kills their own children. All of us alive today were once a single cell who are fortunate enough that no one had intervened in the growth and progress of our life from conception to birth. The same cannot be said of so many human beings on this planet who are called to life, but whose life was taken from them without having the opportunity to live it like the ones who killed them.

On the other hand, it is simply logical that the indissolubility of the cell that needs eighteen years of
guidance and protection to become an authentic human being, would require the indissolubility of the bond that gave rise to it. The model of a human family exists only in the human species; there are no families among the reptiles, because they have no childhood, as they are born adults. By the direction the species are evolving, the presence of the family seems to be increasing. Among the mammals, there is a time when the newborn lives with the mother and among the primates, there is a time when the newborn lives with both parents.

The human being is the living being that is the most vulnerable at birth and who needs the longest time of protection before reaching adulthood. That is why there is a human family. If human beings were born adults like the reptiles, the human family would not exist, they would copulate like the reptiles, but would not spend much time together. Faced with divorce, it is often forgotten that what is fundamental is the well-being of the children, their education and protection. Sadly, however, the reality is that the children are used as weapons to hurt and blackmail the other spouse.

Divorced parents believe that they will be forever free from each other, but this never happens. They will have to deal with each other for the rest of their lives, as long as they have transmitted life to a child. It will be a meeting at a crossroad or roundabout while the child spends a weekend or the vacation with the father or the mother, it will be a presence at an important occasion of the child, like at a birthday party – whatever it may be, the separation will never truly occur, because the same child speaks about the father to the mother or of the mother to the father.

In the past, there were orphanages for the many children born without a father. Nowadays, one calls these places homes and the users of these homes are children who have parents who are negligent. There are no institutions that can replace the family: those who are not loved unconditionally will never love unconditionally, and those who do not love unconditionally will never be truly happy, as they will never reach adulthood.

In these homes and in the educational centers, the State spends millions of euros on professionals and sophisticated therapies, almost without success, when all these children really need is the unconditional love of a mother and a father, however ignorant the parents may be of the latest techniques on how to bring up their children. The unconditional love of two parents would certainly have more success than all the professionals in education with their fancy therapies.

To transmit life, even an animal can do it. That is why today more and more people differentiate between biological parents and parents; not all biological parents are parents, not all parents are biological parents. To give birth without educating is like giving a person a machine without teaching him how to use it, without giving him the instruction book, the manual, to prevent him from ruining the machine. This is what happens when you bring a child into this world without educating him later.

It is not uncommon to find good professionals, who are also parents, who think that a son or a daughter is like a dog or a cat, and that as long as the child does not lack water and food it is enough.

A young couple, very successful professionally, searched in a store for a doll suitable for their daughter. But it seemed that they could not find it, despite this being the best doll store in the area, where one could find the most sophisticated dolls that could say “Mommy” and “Daddy”, and could even go pee.

After having tested various models and as they were still undecided, the assistant approached them and asked what kind of doll they wanted for their daughter. “Look, we are two very busy people and we spend a lot of time away from home; we would like to get for our daughter a doll that can entertain her in such a way that she’ll not miss us.” The assistant looked at them indignantly and retorted, “Sorry, but in this store we do not sell parents.”

Friendship is also trinitarian
The friend of my friend is my friend too – Portuguese proverb
The enemy of my enemy is my friend – English proverb

Whether you prefer the more positive Portuguese proverb or the more negative and treacherous English one, both proverbs imply that even friendship is somehow trinitarian; that is, there is never a bond that involves only two people even when they call themselves best friends. Friendship tends to expand, we see this in society when friends ask favours, jobs or positions for friends and relatives, and they are granted on account of this friendship much more than on academic qualifications.

Fr. Jorge Amaro, IMC