Gods and Monsters/Film/Easter

Gods and Monsters/Easter/Film 

"Our fathers were our models for God"  Chuck Palahniuk 

"At the heart of the human condition is daddy issues" 

              - Mike V ( a good friend of mine)

When I watched the film, Fight Club, at the age of thirteen, something in me changed. A new awareness opened up inside of me. It broke all the rules of films I'd grown up watching; mostly action flicks like Die Hard, Men In Black, The Mummy, Godzilla (1999 remake), James Bond movies, and Anything with Jackie Chan. The protagonists in all these films were more or less, level-headed, masculine heroes and often had a comic element to them. But in Fight Club, the protagonists is tragic and mentally unstable. His adversary turns out to be himself. This "self" spends his time trying to cause chaos and disorder in society and to liberate a "generation of men raised by women". 

     The idea that my teenage anger was something being repressed and that I had a right to act  on it, appealed to me. While I find that concept laughable at this point in my life, the line "Our fathers were our models for God" stays with me and continues to evolve and change in its depth of meaning. Tyler (Brad Pitt's character) elaborates further: "you have to consider the possibility that God does not like you. He never wanted you. In all all probability, he hates you. This is not the worst thing that can happen" to which a terrified Edward Norton replies, "it isn't?". In this instance Tyler seems to be speaking of God as a metaphor for ones father or maybe they're one in the same. We see our parents as being God-like because as infants our parents were God. They moved about gracefully, catching our small clumsy bodies as we adjusted to the reality of gravity, sustained our lives with food and nourishment. We were completely helpless and they were our only solace from the trauma of being born. Thus when we feel rejected by our parents, it's as if we are being rejected by God. 

     I've come to believe that part of the human condition is this deeply innate fear of abandonment and rejection from the masculine parent. We all our bonded to our mothers at the very least because of the time spent living in their body as a fetus but our fathers' are this strange counterpart. Somehow it hurts more if they don't approve. Even Jesus had issues with his "father", crying out in the cross, "my god why have you forsaken me?". In that moment he was hurt, that his heavenly father had abandoned him and left him to die. 

        My issues with my father stem from a broken familial structure caused by a nasty divorce in which my sister and I were helpless victims. My father didn't attend my wedding, he's been absent for most of my music gigs, and tends to really not put in an effort to reach out. He can't seem to shake his resentments of the past and that I am 50% of the DNA of a person he hates. But there is another layer to this all. Let me back up. I had very religious upbringing mostly in the Catholic Church but partially in the apostolic church. My father was the music director therefore I never missed a Sunday mass, in fact I might even catch a few in a week. We were quizzed on the gospel afterwards to make sure we paying attention. We had to participate in service work which for me meant being an altar boy. I was baptized, received my first communion, the sacrament of reconciliation, and confirmation. We had family prayer at night.  For many years I hated God and anything associated with religion. I didn't want to hear anything else about God because the God I knew was the one in which my father believed. God himself was personified by my father. It took me many years to come to my own understanding of God and untangle it from that of my father's. I realized that my resentments toward christianity and the religious people of this world were misdirected. I used to gloat at the hypocrisy of some religious people and thought of them as weak. As I've grown older though my heart has softened and I've become much more open to other beliefs and to the idea of God. And strangely enough it seems to have correlated with forgiving my dad and letting go of my anger toward him. With that being said, my father was my model for God. And his rejection was a burden I carried around until I replaced him with another kind of father, a God of my own understanding.