Fr Ben Garren

"We believe in one Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of God, the begotten of God the Father, the Only-begotten, that is of the substance of the Father. God of God, Light of Light, true God of true God, begotten and not made; of the very same nature of the Father, by Whom all things came into being, in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible."

A man became a widower when his child was twelve. He was wealthy and cared for the child he loved and when the child was eighteen he provided a hefty dowry in hopes of obtaining a son in law. A husband for his child and a man to be the inheritor of his property. As a betrothal loomed his child ran away and as the years passed was presumed dead. The father was heartbroken.

The years passed and the man grieved and came regularly to a nearby monastery for spiritual direction. After a decade or so the prior put him in the spiritual care of a hermit of the community who was coming to the end of life. After a few years the hermit knew death was nigh and that a truth must be spoken. The hermit told the man that his child was not dead, that his child was alive and in fact his spiritual director. The hermit and the father reconciled, at the hermits death the man prepared the body of his child, gave away his wealth, and joined the monastery his child had fled to when confronted with the prospect of being a wife and living as a woman.

The monk was Saint Euphrosyne of Alexandria and this story is held up as a reversal of the Father-Son relationship, where the child becomes the spiritual father of their own parent... the parents guide to a sanctified life. Their relationship allows us to more deeply understand the relationship between God the Father and God the Son. Our tendency is to look at the relationship between father and son as one of inheritance and lineage, of a clear superior and inferior. This was the type of reality that Euphrosyne's father was looking for in a son-in-law. The relationship between God the Father and God the Son is one outside of these tendencies, outside of our expectations. It is a relationship of two equally begotten and uncreate persons within a mystical trinity with the Holy Spirit. Just as Euphrosyne's father had to search for a different relationship with his child so do we need to search for a different understanding of God the Father and God the Son than what we tend to do when thinking of the relationship between parent and child.

Pax,
Ben