Eleventh Sunday In Ordinary Time And Father's Day

A man was out on the golf course. He spotted another man who seemingly had four caddies. “Why so many caddies?” the first man asked the second.

The second golfer replied, “It’s my wife’s idea. She thinks I should spend more time with the kids.”

I suspect he’s the same Dad who was asked by his wife when they brought home their first baby to help with changing diapers.

“I’m busy,” he said, “I’ll do the next one.”

The next time came around and she asked again. The husband looked puzzled, “Oh! I didn’t mean the next diaper. I meant the next baby!”1

Comic Robin Fairbanks says, “I have an 18-year-old; her name is Alexis. I chose that name because if I hadn’t had her, I’d be driving one.” (Reader’s Digest)

We get the word automatic from the Greek mentioned in our Gospel from Mark 4:28, “Of its own accord the land yields fruit, first the blade, then the ear, then the full grain in the ear;” it’s done by God Himself; it’s automatic.

It reminds me of “The Garden,” by Arnold Lobel: Toad loves Frog’s garden so much that he decides to grow a garden for himself but Toad gets impatient and yells, “Now seeds! START GROWING!” The story offers a friendly reminder of how lacking patience can fill our lives with unnecessary anger and frustration. But did Toad really need to work as hard as he did, or would the garden have grown anyway?2

If a Dad just shows up at home and is reasonably patient with his family, God will bless the family automatically because Dad is there.

e.g. In 2021, students at Southwood High in Shreveport, Louisiana, had serious gang problems where groups of boys and girls fought. The police were being called to the school each day and some students were arrested. As a dad of an 11th grader, Michael La’Fitte did not like what he was seeing. He knew he had to take action. So he spoke with some other involved dads. They met with High School Principal Kim Pendleton and she welcomed their help. And that’s what started Dads on Duty!

Dads on Duty is now made up of 40 fathers who spend time at the school to help keep watch and create a peaceful environment. They talk to kids. They make bad dad jokes. They walk the hallways. Tell students to get to class. They don’t replace security guards; their presence is preventative, and in an age where many students do not have a male figure at home, they have changed the atmosphere of the entire school. People interviewed by the media said that they interact with the all the kids like they are their own father. They take an interest in their home lives, talk about being an entrepreneur instead of the dead-end life of juvenile delinquency; they sponsor essay contests, and they make sure that every kid has someone safe they can talk to.

Dad’s on Duty show us that a father, head of the household, as Saint Paul says, has a sociological, and spiritual role to play, and that biological paternity is not as important as the spiritual dimension. e.g. Saint Joseph was not the biological father of Jesus, but Mary and others still refer to him as Christ’s father (Luke 2:48; 3:23; 4:22; John 1:45; 6:42).

Going back to Frog and Toad, “There is a sense of virtue in Frog’s approach to gardening that is missing from Toad’s.”3

A father is the patient gardener of his family. You build a life, and it builds you. You actually have to design a way of life for your family. That means that forming your child is more important than your job. It takes priority. Joseph was a trained carpenter who trained and taught Jesus this trade. Mark 6:3 says, of Jesus; “Isn’t this the carpenter?”

One spin-off application of the Frog and Toad story is the question, “Is it possible to have too much patience?”

Aristotle believed to be virtuous means having a certain kind of control over yourself and an ability to judge the correct actions to take in a given situation by trying for a middle course between an extreme of excess and an extreme of deficiency.4

Too much patience in Aristotle’s sense is that you are willing to wait forever for something that will never happen. If the seeds you plant are all sterile, they will never sprout.5

E.g. I did everything right. I sent my kids to a Catholic school, etc.--That is not good enough anymore. TV shows up. The internet shows up. They get ambushed by the culture, which ends up with the potential to depress teens and young adults, talking them captive. That is why gardens often have little walls set up.

E.g. looking at the school curriculum so Father’s understand when something is being taught against their Catholic Christian faith which is then identified, followed by a counter-balance measure that reduce the influence of that weed. Our Second Reading reminds us our task as fathers: “For we must all appear before the judgment seat of Christ, judged according to what we did in the body, whether good or evil.”