Fathers: Why Your Kids Care More About Your Work Than You Think
Work may replace you without a pause, but your family cannot, and when fathers share their work with their children it turns a job into an act of love and responsibility.
The economy used to mean families working together at home. Family life matters more than ever. When fathers share their work stories, kids learn that work is about love, responsibility, and helping God care for the world. Check out Deacon Eric Paige’s post:
The word economy comes from ‘oikonomia,’ Greek for household management. For centuries, most families lived on farms and managed their economy by planning, planting, raising and harvesting crops. They worked side by side and going to work meant walking outside to the field or downstairs into the shop.
The industrial revolution changed all that. Going to work meant commuting to a factory or office just about every day. Fathers’ became unfamiliar to the family and we came to see the ‘economy’ as this impersonal thing everyone participated in but no one really understood.
Since Pope Leo XIII and the encyclical Rerum Novarum (in English “of the new things”), the Church has been concerned with the way this new industrial ‘economy’ affects families. Naturally, Leo and his successors bemoaned how economic disruptions often leave families unable to address their material needs. But, behind the social teaching, was a spiritual concern.
For centuries, the Church has used the analogy of a divine ‘economy’ to describe the ‘household’ of the Trinity where the love of the Father begets the Son and the Spirit proceeds from their shared love. Family life, with the mutual love of the mother and father begetting and caring for children provides an analogy for the love of the trinity. The more we see natural dynamics of the family with its free give and take, the more prepared we are to understand what God intends for us.
As much good as they do, the public and private institutions of our economy don’t work the same way. They run on exchange rather than love.
My father has always encouraged me to have no illusions about my participation in the institutions that make our economy go. He assured me that the day after I leave any job, the institution will move on. That’s what it’s built to do. No matter how good we are at our jobs, we are always replaceable.
Family life is different. There, we cannot be replaced. We can be misunderstood, resented or forgotten, but not replaced.
One the greatest gifts my father has provided is talking with me about his work. In hundreds of conversations large and small, he shared with me what it’s like to manage in a public organization. It gave me a window into his experience and ultimately helped prepare me for my career. It also made the institutions we must navigate in our modern economy seem less impersonal as I came to know more about the people who make them go.
Let’s take seriously this responsibility of being a father and look for opportunities to share with our children a little about the ins and outs of what we do. Let them know how our work not only earns money but that it participates in God’s ongoing work of creation and, properly understood, also expresses our love for our family where we encounter a foretaste of the divine economy.
Deacon Eric Paige
Director of Deacon Services, Archdiocese of Seattle
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