Just a thought

"We are forever sorting out our sense of God. Jesus took a big gamble when he called God our father. God is beyond gender, beyond our imagination, and if we have bad associations or memories of either father or mother, we risk contaminating our idea of God with them. Those who have known a father as a tyrant or drunk, will have strange overtones to ‘Our father in heaven.' It takes many years of reflection to see what mother and father did to us, for better or worse.

Yet if we look for the North Star of Jesus' heart, the point to which he returned with joy and longing, we find it in one recurring word: ‘my father', meaning God. Philosophers and theologians speak abstract words about God, the First Mover, Creator, Transcendent and everlasting. Jesus' picture is different: it is the father in the story of the Prodigal Son. His clearest picture of the Father shows God coming out to meet us as soon as we turn God-wards."

~Sacred Space