The Prodigal Father

This morning the Anchoress, who is always at her best when writing about the human heart, graced us with the following. Check her site for more.

We all know the story of the Prodigal Son. It is (as Msgr. Charles Pope says here) almost “overly familiar”.

At mass today Fr. Dyspeptic -my favorite homilist, because he is scholarly but witty, and always blessedly brief- suggested that it is easy for us to identify with either of the sons, the prodigal or the ignored-feeling obedientiary, who has toiled in his father’s field, “but the story is not about either of them. It’s about the father.

The father who created you in his image, and loved you enough to give you free will; the father who steps out daily and casts his eyes upon the horizon, looking for you to come back. The father who “does not allow cultures or conventions to dictate his responses,” but who -when he sees you returning- cannot hold himself back, but instead runs to meet you and pulls you into his embrace, and blesses you.

The father who says “come back. I am here. I am waiting for you to return.”

Fr. Dyspeptic is not a parent, obviously, but he understands the unconditional and very vulnerable love of the parent. He understands that God -our divine and mystical parent- shares with human parents this endless longing to have our children near, even as we face their grown-up choices. Our children do not stay with us; they leave the nest. They develop their own sensibilities, sometimes in direct contrast to our own. Even if they are near, they distance themselves, and that is normal, and healthy; they need to discover for themselves all they do not know.

But we miss them. And we fret that even though we’ve taught them to swim, they may be facing more dangerous currents than they can handle, have moved too far from the safe shore. We toss and turn on wet pillows some nights, wishing them well, hoping they’ll be borne back on the tide, and land at our doors. We pray for them, and in the wee small hours we talk to photographs of their six-year old, smiling faces, and we say, “You are far away from us; you’ve chosen a distant path, but I will not give up on you. You are forever my beloved child.”

And God is sharing in that, on a meta-level. “Even now, says the Lord, return to me with your whole heart…”

This is a post I'll be saving for myself and those wee small hours.