A New Dad’s Guide to Playing God: Reflections on the Vocation of Fatherhood

by James Penrice

Alba House, 2006

130 pages, $12.95

(800) 343-2522

albahouse.org

When an author spends a chapter defending his book’s title, he likely has chosen the wrong title. James Penrice has written a likeable, anecdotal and informative book that fathers — and as the title suggests, new fathers, especially — will relate to. That is, once they get past the awkward title.

The author opens by pointing out that all people are, in a sense, called to “play God,” since we all are made in his image and likeness and must act as he would on earth. Yet halfway through the opening chapter, he backtracks a bit, further explaining: “Perhaps this is the real key to ‘playing God’ to our children, constantly opening ourselves to God to allow him to use us as his instruments, realizing that by ourselves we can do nothing, but through us he can do everything.”

The word “Playing” in the title should be replaced by “Imaging,” since that is what Penrice really wants to say, anyway. To say that fathers must “play” God sounds too prideful on the one hand and too playful on the other. Yet, as Penrice makes clear, though fathers have serious responsibilities that can affect the future of their families, they are merely the fallible human images on earth of God the Father in heaven. To fulfill their vocation, fathers do not take God’s place, but give God place in their lives. In the process, they must open themselves to his promptings and commandments.

Penrice gets it just right in his second chapter’s discussion of husbands and wives, addressing directly the “third rail” passage from St. Paul’s Letter to the Ephesians (5:22-30): “Wives should be subject to their husbands as they are to the Lord.”

Following Pope John Paul II’s view, Penrice explains that St. Paul is not saying that a man can lord over his wife, who must follow his every whim. Noting that, in the same passage, the apostle commands men to love their wives, “just as Christ loved the Church and gave himself up for her,” and that husbands and wives must be “subject to one another,” Penrice says that a husband is to serve his wife, giving up his own desires and interests for her sake. Because the two are “one flesh,” husband and wife are equal in dignity.

In a chapter headed “Be a Regular Joe,” Penrice offers St. Joseph as a model for fathers, extolling his virtues of total devotion, prudence, patience and obedience to God. The author also makes a good argument for the perpetual virginity of Mary, explaining that, when the angel Gabriel told her she would bear a child, she asked how this can be since “I do not know man?” This question makes no sense if Mary and Joseph had planned to engage in normal marital relations, since normally a young woman would be expecting to bear a child soon after marriage. Further, Penrice points out, once Mary’s womb was filled and sanctified by the conception of Jesus, true God and true man, it would be totally inappropriate for another merely human child to fill that same womb.

“Like Joseph, you are to listen to God’s messages to fulfill his plan for your domestic church,” writes Penrice, “and as such to bring about their salvation and build up the broader Body of Christ.”

In the final chapter, “They Don’t Need Another Hero,” the author gives encouragement to all fathers, especially to those who feel ordinary or inadequate. The true test of fatherhood is not in the big, heroic acts, he says, but in the small acts of love and the consistent virtue and selfless service that any man can exercise each day. Any family would be blessed to have such a father. And any father would be blessed to read this book on Father’s Day.

Maria Caulfield writes from

Wallingford, Connecticut.