The Prodigal Son's Father: Who's YOUR Daddy?

What are our fathers like, those who walk the earth, who walk the paths of our memory?

During the first two weeks after the discovery of my aneurism, I thought often of my friend Marv who had died suddenly of a cerebral hemorrhage while doing one of the things he loved – participating in a cross-country ski competition. The paramedic who responded to the call of a man down on the trail had given his wife some consolation suggesting that he had died instantly, painlessly. When Kathy and I drove up from the old neighborhood in Detroit that we had shared with Marv and his family, we found Joni courageously coming to find her husband in everything she saw and touched in the little house he had built for the two of them up in the woods. And we found their four adult children without a father. His sudden death had spared them all the grief of a slow and painful death, but the price was this aching lack of closure, like tears that burn but won’t fall. In my mind’s eye, I still see his son Mark sitting there playing uncomfortable chords on his dad’s guitar, as I remembered his dad playing Harry Chapin’s song of distance and regret, “Cat’s in the Cradle”. Please bring your own father to mind as you watch this video, his wife’s introduction, his son’s comment. Harry Chapin had died suddenly at age 38. (Click here to see the four-minute video)
Notice that his wife, the mother of his newborn son Josh, was the one who wrote that song.  She knew that it is easier for Dads to be distant, that fathers plant in a moment the seed that occupies the mother for nine months, and never really leaves her body.
The Good Story of the Prodigal Son is perhaps more importantly the story of the Father. Each of us has a father. How does he rest in us? Who is your father to you right now? That day in Marv’s house it was clear to me that a father is forever, that a father who is distant remains in the child’s heart, holding or haunting. Lent is a time of unwrinkling, returning to our whole-iest selves, by engaging our desire and our will within the sacredness of the Jesus story. And Jesus tells this story to give us another angle on his Father, who he tells us is Our Father too. Last week the gardener was the Father character, wanting to save the tree that was me, that was you. This time he makes it a little clearer for us by making the father in the story His Father, Our Father. Give the story a first reading. Don’t get hung up on the foolishness of the son and miss the father’s behavior. Marv was like this Father, standing at the top of the hill watching for the first sign of the lost ones, ready to run down and embrace us.

Perhaps some of the unwrinkling we do, stretching to our full height, is through coming to closure with our own fathers. Luke’s Good Story chapter 15 is the doorway through which we enter. (Click here for a link)


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