Prodigal in Mercy

My father was only eight when his father died. Having learned this fact as a small child, I conceived a conviction—never expressed but fairly insistent—that my dad, too, would die when I was eight. The year came and went as I held my breath, and then it was gone, and my father remained, as indeed, thanks be to God, he does still. Yet the death of my grandfather continued to cast its shadow upon my own limited reflections on fatherhood. My father had known his father’s love for so short a time, and his solicitude for me and for my brother both left an aching sense of my grandfather’s absence and deepened the sense of mystery I felt in the person of the Father whose love admits such suffering while also rushing out to assuage it.

It is Christ who reveals to us the Father who is rich in mercy, as St. John Paul II reflects at the outset of Dives in Misericordia. And the Father has been abundantly merciful to me, both in my father and, now, in my children. What’s more, the need for the Father’s mercy has been daily made more manifest by my experience of fatherhood. For while the Father Christ revealed to me in Scripture when I was a child was one whose goodness was readily recognizable in the person of my own father, the life of fatherhood has demonstrated to me ever more the vast gulf which yawns between man’s paternity and God’s. 

When we encounter Scripture early enough, it tends to take on an ineluctable character. Of course the prodigal son wastes himself in a distant country. Of course he seeks to return to his father. And of course the father rushes out to meet him. Could a father behave otherwise? The stories which first shape our imaginations tend to fix themselves in our minds for better and for worse. If they are good stories, we can be assured of a primal sympathy with the goodness of creation, which is itself an effect of the Word. So powerfully do these stories shape our minds, though, that to reflect on them deeply, to draw fresh images from them, can be as difficult as reflecting on the very way we think.

 
As a father myself, then, and one having now encountered many forms of fatherhood in the world, I realize now that the father in the parable of the prodigal son behaves in a way not by any means to be taken for granted. Many are the sons who have wronged their fathers, and many are the fathers who have said their sons are dead to them. If the son is prodigal with his father’s substance, then the father is prodigal, too, with a generosity of spirit which is willing even to abase itself and which the elder son has sadly not learned to trust. Indeed, the older brother reflects the original mistrust which drove Adam and Eve to eat the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, a suspicion that the Father was withholding some good which ought to be theirs. If the younger son is prodigal with goods, he is nonetheless also prodigal with trust, bold enough to ask his father to die for him and bolder still in asking his father to accept his return from the land of the dead.

 
If we fathers are not prodigal in our love, are we at least adequate in its exercise? Consider again Christ’s question to the crowds: “What father among you would hand his son a snake when he asks for a fish? Or hand him a scorpion when he asks for an egg?” (Luke 11:11-12). So vivid, so nearly absurd, are the alternatives proposed that we almost laugh at the question. Of course no father among us would do such a thing! And yet, as Jesus goes on, we cannot help feeling ill at ease: “If you then, who are wicked, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will the Father in heaven give the holy Spirit to those who ask him” (Luke 11:13). Do I know how to give good things to my children? I have never offered them a scorpion or a snake in place of an egg or a fish. Yet I have given them silence when they asked for my voice. I have given them excuses when they have asked me to play. The goodness Jesus describes, the goodness of the Father, may be a simple thing. But my own heart is not yet so simple. 

Very often it is our children who lead us in play. Yet perhaps it ought to be the case that their play emerges from the play we have shown them, and that their readiness for joy should meet with like readiness in ourselves. The play of fathers and sons echoes that of the Father and His Son, after all. Chesterton suspected that part, at least, of the reason for Christ’s going off alone to pray was that the apostles could not have understood the mirth they would have witnessed, the intensity of play between Father and Son.

If fatherhood is in crisis, we might do well to ask ourselves how prodigal, how playful, how merciful we are. For mercy is prodigal, is playful, is gratuitous, yet the “present-day mentality, more perhaps than that of people in the past, seems opposed to a God of mercy, and in fact tends to exclude from life and to remove from the human heart the very idea of mercy,” as John Paul II reflected. A world of zero-sum games is a world leery of a God who would give beyond what we deserve. It is a world which mistrusts fathers because it has not seen the Son, and it is a world which has not seen the Father because its fathers have forgotten how to give good things. 

This, then, is the task set before fathers today: to know the Father by being made one with the Son, and to give forth the Father’s mercy even to the prodigality of the cross.