The Father’s Love in Lent
Return of the Prodigal Son
Yesterday in Catholic Churches across the world, the gospel story we read was the story of the Prodigal Son. This is a story that has always been important to me. Too often I feel like I’ve told God, I wish you were dead, now give me what’s mine and leave me alone. But every time I do this, I fail, I fall, and I come limping back to God. And yet there he is, not just waiting for me, but running out to meet me.
Sometimes, I think we look at God as though he were simply static and it is our job to move toward or away from him. And of course, God is, in a sense, static. He is the Unmoved Mover. Nothing we can do changes him. And this can seem bleak, until we learn more about God’s nature. Once we understand that God is Love, and understand that this means he loves all that he has created, then we learn it is never really a case of God turning away from us, but of his constant pursuit of us, and our constant attempts to turn away from him.
In the midst of Lent we remember this story about God, because it also shows us the depths God pursuit of us goes to. Yes, in the story, the father runs out to his unclean son and embraces him, taking on that uncleanness himself. But the reality goes much deeper. Christ did not just take on our sins, but descended into Hell to redeem us. There is nowhere the Love of God cannot be found. Sometimes, it isn’t even a case where we need to go running to the Lord, but we just need to stop and be embraced by his love, the Love that will one day transform us into itself.
These are some of the images I tried to illuminate in my Lenten poem, “The Robe” from my newest collection of poetry, Liturgical Entanglements.
“The Robe”
Lift me up out of the mud and mire,
And bring me into your eternal glory.
Set me in the blaze, the refiner’s fire;
Mine me from the sins which are my quarry.
In oceans I have sunk into the depths,
And lost my way in caverns in the mountains.
In dark woods, I lost my sense of right and left,
And in the desert, I drank from the false fountain.
So now I’m stuck in the swamp of sin and darkness,
Waiting on the road to Jericho,
Waiting for the end to all this starkness,
This sense that death will deal its final blow.
So lift me up before I sink too deep
And wrap me in the robe that’s mine to keep.
Please consider buying my new book of poetry, Liturgical Entanglements, out now with Resource Imprints.
