The Life We Claim. James C. Howell
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surprised by how much I love my children. But I can't get too maudlin about it, for I am also continually surprised by how frustrating and numbingly exasperating being a father can be. I have been dizzied by unanticipated delights, and my heart has been broken in places I didn't know were there. Question: is it like that for God? If God is our Father, our "Abba," does God look down at us and at one moment it's an unexpected delight, and then the next moment God's heart is broken? The prophet Hosea speaks directly out of God's heart: "I have been a father to them, I love them, but the more I love, the more they run from me, they bolt away and I can't decide whether to rage with anger or hang my head and weep" (11:9, paraphrase). Is it like that for God?
Closeness. I want to be close to my children, and they to me. But how shall I say it? Even if you have lucked into the best relationship imaginable with your father, or if as a father you have cultivated the best imaginable relationship with your children, the truth is there's some dysfunction in the heart of that, there's some mystery. You may think you know your father thoroughly, but then you look at him and his life again, and there's something profoundly important you'd totally missed, something you flat-out can never comprehend. Indeed, the saddest stories I hear are from parents and children who cannot decipher meaningful connections between what the other one says, does, and means. Norman McLean, in A River Runs Through It, says, "It is those we live with and love and should know who elude us."8 We live with God, God lives with us; we should know each other. Yet God eludes us; we elude God. Did Jesus let the disciples overhear him praying intimately to God as "Abba" so they might get themselves prepared, so we might not throw up our hands in despair when life with God really does mirror life with the dads we have known, loved, wounded, missed, misunderstood, been wounded by, and even lost?
Somewhere over the Rainbow
When my daughter Sarah was just four years old, she went on stage for the very first time to sing in our church talent show. Cabaret style, I perched her on the piano with a candelabra next to her, and I played as she sang "Somewhere over the Rainbow." I can tell you without any bias at all that Judy Garland never sang it so beautifully. The song ended, my church members erupted into a standing ovation (what else do you do for the preacher's daughter?), we took a few bows, and then we walked offstage where no one could see but us except a single crew person, one of my most stalwart church workers. I hoisted Sarah up in my arms, twirled her 360 degrees, kissed her and said "Sarah, I love you so much." Two feet away, the crew person looked at me with eyes I cannot quite describe and said, "I wish my father had done that." A little slow on the uptake, I asked, "You wish your father had played the piano?" With a choked pain in her sixty-year-old voice, she said, "No. I wish my father had loved me."
I don't know if her father loved her or not, but what I do know is that there is some ache at the heart of our lives. There is some place where a father is supposed to be, and I wonder if God didn't anticipate the darkness of that place and decided, "I will be known as father to my children, because I cannot bear for them to struggle with no hope. I will be Father, however dimly grasped, by those who have pretty good fathers, by those who struggle with fathers among the quick and the dead." People have politicized and militarized the term 9/11 as a code, but every time I hear 9/11, I think about children I don't know personally in some apartment in Manhattan or in a bungalow out in Connecticut. It's been three years now, and they go to bed at night where a father used to live down the hall, but now there is no father down the hall, because he went to work for them one day, on 9/11. The politicians and pundits wax with no eloquence at all about 9/11, but for this boy, for this girl, daddy isn't there. They cannot look up at anyone and say "Daddy." "Abba." God knew this. God is always our father.
When Frederick Buechner was five years old, he heard shouts and screams outside his house. He ran down the stairs and saw his father lying in the driveway, people frantically working over his body. Suicide. A couple of days later they found a note his father had left, stuck in the last page of Gone with the Wind. To young Frederick and his mother the note said, "I adore you and love you, but I am no good. Give Freddie my watch. I give you all my love." Thinking back to this unspeakably horrible moment, Buechner quoted Mark Twain: "Losing somebody like that is like a house burning down. It's years before you know the extent of your loss." Buechner suggested that his father really died of heart trouble.9
How shall I say it? God is never gone with the wind. God is our father when we have heart trouble. We see the Father Almighty most clearly in the best story ever told by the Son who knew him best. A man loved his son more than his own life, but the son preferred to be self-made, to indulge in pleasures far from home. So the son bolted, and broke his father's heart. But one day the boy decided, "I won't put up with this two-bit life for one more day. I'm going home to my father." He comes home, not to a father who does what human fathers do (heatedly demanding, "Where have you been? How much did you waste? You'd better apologize and repay every cent!"). This was not the Abba Jesus knew. Instead, and so very fortunately for me and for you, this father sees the son coming. He's been waiting, looking, longing every day forever. He runs. Before the boy hardly gets a word out, the father scoops up that boy and twirls him around, hugs him, kisses him, weeps on his shoulder, and says, "I have missed you so much. I love you so much. Welcome home. Let the party begin" (Luke 15:11-32, AP). This is the truth of our lives. This is our hope. This is the God who is so almighty he bends down to us and whispers in our ear, "Please, call me 'Abba.'" We believe in God the Father Almighty.
Notes
1. From "Strength to Love," in A Testament of Hope: The Essential Writings and Speeches of Martin Luther King, Jr., ed. James Washington (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1986), 508.
2. Nicholas Lash, Believing Three Ways in One God: A Reading of the Apostles' Creed (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1992), 21.
3. Jürgen Moltmann, The Crucified God, trans. R. A. Wilson and John Bowden (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1993), 223.
4. Julian of Norwich, Revelations of Divine Love, trans. M. L. del Mastro (Garden City, N.Y.: Image Books, 1977), 59.
5. Karl Barth, The Christian Life, trans. Geoffrey W. Bromiley (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1981), 79.
6. N. T. Wright, The Lord and His Prayer (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1996), 19f.
7. Henri Nouwen, The Return of the Prodigal Son: A Story of Homecoming (New York: Doubleday, 1992), 12, 96-99.
8. Norman Maclean, A River Runs Through It and Other Stories (New York: Pocket, 1976), 113.
9. Frederick Buechner, The Sacred Journey (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1982), 39-41.
C h a p t e r T h r e e
MAKER OF HEAVEN
AND EARTH
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LESSON 8
MAKER OF HEAVEN AND EARTH
(PART 1)
In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.
(Genesis 1:1)
Gregory of Nyssa called the universe "a marvelously composed hymn to the power of the Almighty."1 Saint Thomas Aquinas wrote, "In God's hand were the ends of the world: when his hand was opened by the key of love, creatures came forth."2 Dante spoke of "the love that moves the stars."3 The almighty God who is all love expressed that love by creating the universe, the earth, me sitting here writing, you sitting there reading, and this is our good fortune.
How God did it is best understood by the scientists. The Church has had an embarrassing relationship with science. Galileo is only the most famous of so many scientists we revere who were upbraided by Church authorities. Southern religious leaders cheered when a Tennessee court ruled to censure a teacher of evolution named Scopes. Too often, theology has fled science, fearing that science would pull the curtain back on God, as Toto did to the Wizard in