Lent – Who’s Your Daddy?

Who’s God, anyway? Is God, after all, in the middle of this messed-up world at all? Does he exist? Does he care? Frederick Buechner has written more than 30 books, all flowing from the same primordial question: “Can this possibly be true?” He refers to the question that is deep inside each of us, whether there is a loving God, who is not just a father, who planted a seed and let nature take its course, but a daddy, who continues to care, who longs for us.

Father McKendrick, we called him when we first met him. But as he became a close friend, Kathy and I came to call him Norm. He’d come by on his bike for a glass of iced tea and conversation, to enjoy Kathy’s smile and our children’s antics and unfolding complexity. My favorite of the interesting tee shirts he would wear said “Any man can be a father, but it takes someone special to be a Daddy. He, the brilliant Jesuit, was Father. But he came over to our house where he recognized and honored me as Daddy.

This Good Story of the Prodigal Son shows us the difference, and suggests an affirmative answer to Buechner’s question. Read the story (click for a link) until you can enter it, and this time focus on the father, on everything he does.

• When one of his sons asks for his inheritance right then, rather than waiting until the father dies, the father divides his property between them. Imagine yourself that father. How do you feel?
• When the prodigal returns, the father catches sight of him while he is a long way off, and is filled with compassion. Are YOU filled with compassion, or are you still stuck with hurt or anger?
• He ran to his son, embraced him and kissed him, ordered his servants to put a fine robe on him, gave him a ring, and declared a feast. Can you imagine doing that yourself?
• The second son, the one who stayed home, was upset by the father’s behavior. The father said to him, “My son, you are here with me always; everything I have is yours. But now we must celebrate and rejoice, because your brother was dead and has come to life again; he was lost and has been found.”

Do you see the brother’s point, like I always have? But some days ago in this blog, I gave the secret away: God’s love is mad. The story is telling us that God is more than Father, planter of seed and provider of need. God is beyond logic and law. God is a Daddy, who longs for us when we are distant, and weeps for joy when we are close enough to touch, to embrace.

Do we hold ourselves away, looking at God with logic and law, judging him for inconsistency, for not complying with our expectations? In Robert Bresson’s 1951 film “Diary of a Country Priest”, the young new pastor finds a woman who has isolated herself from her family and from her God after the death of her young son. Like the prodigal, she had left this god, who did not satisfy her. who did not fulfill her expectations of a love that followed rules. In anguish he tells her, “If our God were the god of the pagans or philosophers, though he might take refuge in the highest heavens, our misery would drag him down to be with us…He is not the master of love. He is love itself. If you would love, don't place yourself beyond love's reach”

Perhaps if we reject God who is Father and thus place ourselves in misery of isolation, this Good Story appeals to our broken hearts to notice, out of the corner of our eye, the sight of this foolish Daddy God running down to us there in a heap on the path that we thought was too far from Him.

 FreeLemonadeStand by John J. Daniels is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.