Fathers & sons
Nussbaum, Melissa Musick
THE LAST WORD FATHERS & SOHS Melissa Musick Nussbaum I have been thinking about mortal sin, grave abuses, and the fathers who name them. They're in the news. They're in Scripture. Like the son...
...We've been this kid, as well as his older brother...
...The young man wants for a solid roof and a hot meal...
...That, he says, would be a father who has forgotten, forgotten the smell of a newborn, his breath like freshly mown grass, forgotten the sight of a toddler, running to meet him and crying out to be swung to the sky...
...Won't there be a single selection from the paternal repertoire...
...Where are the consequences...
...Allowing the son to serve at table, maybe...
...Aren't there a few things this kid and his father need to get straight...
...It's just that no sin is so deep that the father's love is not deeper still...
...We know what it is to watch the road, relieved when the car pulls into the driveway...
...We come wondering if God has forgotten us, we, "who are not worthy to receive you," and the only answer we hear is a telling, again, of God's mercy, a call to be clothed, again, in the royal white garment of our baptism, and an invitation, again, to God's own banquet table...
...What he had to do is cat around, sucking the money up his nose with a straw or shooting it into his arm with a needle...
...The stern lecture about how slowly one builds trust and how quickly one can lose it...
...He doesn't chalk the son's selfishness up to childhood obesity or bottle-feeding or bed-wetting or failure to make the soccer team...
...We know this kid...
...The caution that the young man has run through his inheritance and there will not be another...
...My husband says he understands how glad and grateful the father is, but throwing this kid a party, killing the fatted calf for a son who's killed the father's retirement account, seems a bit much...
...And, no doubt, he does...
...He doesn't assume the son wants him dead because the kid didn't get braces...
...He's going to go home and apologize-words children learn to say long before they learn contrition- and hope he's in time for the pot roast...
...He tires of waiting for the will to be read and demands, "Give me my money now...
...this father knows a mortal sin when he sees one...
...He's speaking of another father, the one Isaiah says remembers us always, even when we always forget him...
...No penance at all...
...He understands the welcome, the running out to meet the returnee, the relief, "This son of mine was dead, and has come to life again...
...I've got things to do...
...When the money ran out, he had a revelation: his father's servants lived better than he did...
...Like the son (Luke 15:11-32) whose father wouldn't do the convenient thing and die...
...The news that the son will, in fact, be expected to work off the money he took, pay back the estate, and earn his room and board...
...Jesus is talking about the father whose face is turned toward us, even when we turn our backs to him...
...But then, Jesus isn't talking about my husband, the father of my children...
...Still, my husband says, little as he understands this story, what he could never understand is a father who would cast his son away, turning his back and shunning him...
...But then my husband is lost...
...He isn't a chump...
...but serving him...
...Forever...
...My husband, a lawyer, the father of our five children, says he tracks with the story so far...
...Still, the story continues to offend my husband's sense of fair play, his sense that the father in the story deserves better somehow...
...He gets the son's apology, believes it to be the least the ungrateful brat can offer...
...My husband says he doesn't understand the father's love, knows he couldn't let the matter rest without a word about the worry, the distress, the humiliation this son has caused...
...My husband is grateful for this much: the father in the parable doesn't excuse his son's behavior...
...He seems to know sin for what it is, the habit of grave abuses that can lead to mortal sin...
...He knows he couldn't go from weeping to rejoicing without some reproachful segue...
...But now we're parents, lying awake at night, waiting for the front door to open, willing the phone not to ring, wanting him home, needing her home, safe...
...Thaf s it, the whole understanding: Life in my father's stable is better than life in this flophouse...
...Whatever the son has done, or failed to do, is as nothing before the father's mercy...
...What my husband doesn't get is the father's silence...
...My husband keeps that sense of justice denied right until the moment we walk into church on Sunday morning, our clothes stained and smelling of the various pigsties where we've taken up residence during the week...
...Not just yet...
...Let the feast begin," the father says, as all the prodigals come home...
Vol. 131 • October 2004 • No. 18
