“I don’t want my father to see me like this.” Many of us must have said this to ourselves during those times when we were not doing well in life and we didn't want to offend our father. Especially if our father has high expectations of us, we tend to hide our weaknesses and failures from him. We come to him only when we are fine and strong and at the top of the world. We want to show him how we have mastered ourselves and that we have clear directions in life. We want to please him. We want him to be proud of us. So, when we are not fine and our lives are a mess, we hide from him. We conceal our tears. We bear our suffering alone... because what we cannot bear is to see our father displeased and to experience being rejected by him.
This can be true to our spiritual life. How often we keep God at bay and allow our relationship with him to get colder each day because we have resigned to our feeling of unworthiness! I know, for instance, of someone whose prayer life is most intense when he thinks he has been doing well in life and he has been faithful to the Christian virtues. But when he thinks he has succumbed to his imperfections, he distances himself from God and waits until he has made himself fine again. It’s as if he can overcome his weaknesses apart from God!
Such is a lonely and wearisome life; because when things in life are in shambles, what we really need is a father’s embrace where we can cry our hearts out. In moments of huge failures, what we deeply long for is a father’s reassuring smile and a supportive pat on the back promising another chance.
In today’s gospel reading (Lk 15:1-3, 11-32) Jesus introduces such a gentle and loving Father through a parable. In the Parable of the Lost Son, it is striking to realize that when the wayward son comes back, the father does not care about WHY he comes back. He does not scrutinize his son’s motive which is not quite noble but is, in fact, still very selfish. The son returns not because of a perfect contrite heart and a burning desire to love his father this time around. No. He comes back for survival and self-preservation. He has been starving, so he thinks he’ll be better off as one of his father’s servants. But the father does not care whether or not his son comes back with a contrite heart. What he cares about is that his beloved son is back! So the father embraces his son without any conditions... without requirements. He embraces him as a son. The father accepts him not in the son’s conditional terms but in the terms known to the father—the terms of an unconditional love.
This thought is very consoling. The words of the spiritual writer, Henri Nouwen, bring this out well: “God does not require a pure heart before embracing us. Even if we return only because following our desires has failed to bring happiness, God will take us back... Even if we return because our sins did not offer as much satisfaction as we had hoped, God will take us back. Even if we return because we could not make it on our own, God will receive us. God’s love does not require any explanations about why we are returning. God is glad to see us home and wants to give us all we desire, just for being home.”
So why should we listen to the fearful voice that discourages us to come to the Father when we are not in good shape? We ought to listen, instead, to the voice of longing that calls out from the deepest recesses of our hearts for a gentle embrace of acceptance despite our hopeless inadequacies. Only God, our Father, can give us such an embrace. Only our Father embraces us as we truly are, warts and all.
This is why the season of Lent is as beautiful as the spring. It is a season when the Father’s loving embrace is waiting for us, his wayward sons and daughters, who have been chilling from the deadening coldness of our sins. God’s embrace is the warmth we desperately need in order to outgrow our freezing habits of sin.
In this season of Lent, we are invited to take refuge in God’s loving embrace. We come to him not because we are doing fine but especially because our mess is getting out of hand. We return to him not because our spiritual achievement is something that he can be proud of, but precisely because we are empty. We allow his arms to wrap around us not because we are whole but exactly because we are broken.
Father, I come to you in my brokenness repeatedly humiliated by sin. I’m ugly and not pleasing to you. But please... I beg you Father... embrace me just the same. Allow me to rest in the warmth of your love.
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