The Holy Family

Writing in Berlin on the eve of the Great War in 1914, a German philosopher called Arthur Oberhammer had declared : 'As long as human beings live in well-integrated families, belief in God shall not disappear from Europe. Dissolving the family is the only way ahead.' I had come across this statement all the way back in 1999, but it was only this morning that its truth was driven hard into me by a group of teenagers. A friend of mine introduced me this morning to a vicar of a church in the town of Shipley in West Yorkshire, England, and when he came to know that I am a student, technically speaking, of 'Theology and Religious Studies', he asked me if I would like to talk to a group of young people who came from nominally Christian families about Christianity.

I took up the challenge, somewhat rashly it might seem, and was introduced to four girls (Edna, Pauline, Jessica, and Natasha) and five boys (Robert, Ted, Thomas, Jonathan, and John), all of them in the age group 12 - 16. I started off by telling them about how God, according to the Bible at least, has created the world, loves humanity, and desires to bring all of us towards a blessed state of communion in the new life after death. Things went along pretty fine until I had the sudden thought that as a good student of Trinity College I should also tell them something about this exalted doctrine of the Holy and Undivided Trinity, and I decided to expound it to them forthwith. So I told them that God is Tri-Personal, God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit.

Now it so happened that nobody in my audience understood the phrase 'God the Father' and stared at me with eyes wide-open. Since reading books written by atheists and other God-bashers is part of my daily bread, I jumped to the conclusion that my young friends had an issue with the word 'God'. But no, they told me, they understood pretty clearly what 'God' referred to, but they had no idea what the word 'Father' was doing there. It took me some time before I was able to unravel the mystery : it so turned out that the parents of all of the four girls and the five boys had got divorced when they were only one or two years old, and they had been brought up by their single mothers. Consequently, they had no idea what it meant to refer to God as a 'Father'.

Very good, I said, let me try a different tack now. What about God the Mother, I asked them? To this, they gave me various replies, all of which can be summarised as : 'Yuck! God as Mother? That would be horrible. I hate my mother. She is the source of all my misery in this world.'

So well, that was the end of my exposition of the doctrine of the ineffable Trinity. Oberhammer was indeed correct : the quickest, and perhaps the only, way to uproot belief in God is to dissolve the family.