Lost Sons: God's long search for humanity

Preface

This book began life as a series of Holy Week addresses in Durham Cathedral in 2009. Then there were five ‘lost sons’; to them I have added four more and rewritten and greatly expanded the original talks. To lead people as discerning as this Cathedral community through the journey of Holy Week is a privileged task. I am grateful to my colleagues for the invitation to give these addresses and for subsequent discussions about them.

I am also grateful to family, colleagues and friends who have taken the time to look at drafts of these chapters. I want especially to thank the Reverend Tony Bryer and the Reverend Professor Walter Moberly for their illuminating and invaluable insights. If not all my readings of texts carry their unqualified nihil obstat, I must take responsibility. My wife Jenny is an analytic psychotherapist and her practised eye has been vital in my reading these texts as stories of human beings and family encounters.

My son Aidan has scrutinized these chapters as an English teacher and literary critic. I am especially grateful to him for pointing me to Ben Jonson’s marvellous poem about his son quoted in the first chapter. More important still, he has read the manuscript as his father’s only son. To him, I dedicate this book with admiration and love.

1

Sons lost and found: A Bible story

This book is about a disturbing theme: how children can be lost.

Children whose parents have died are pictured as lost ‘babes in the wood’ looking for love, shelter and support. Their helplessness touches us. When we hear of children who have gone missing, or are abducted, murdered or abused, our hearts ache for them. Our hearts ache for their parents and families too. If we are parents ourselves, we imagine how we would react to such a crisis. We instinctively know that there is no bereavement worse than the loss of your own child.

In a transept of Durham Cathedral, there is a powerful depiction in wood of the Pietà by a local sculptor, Fenwick Lawson. The inert body of Jesus is lying on the ground, while his mother stands over him. His dead hand is held out towards her, and her right hand reaches out to him. In her face is captured all the sorrow and desolation of the ‘Stabat Mater’: what parent does not feel for Mary weeping over her lost Son as the foretold sword pierces her heart with grief?

Nearby on the wall is a touching memorial plaque from the turn of the nineteenth century. It reads: A tribute of affection to the memory of two children by their afflicted parents. Two lost sons of the Barrington family are commemorated. One died at the age of seven, the other was just 11 months. In a triumph of hope over sorrow, their dates of birth and death tell us not that they ‘died’ but that they were ‘released’. It is poignant to reflect on that plaque, positioned as it is so close to the Pietà. Lost sons are all around us in that corner of the Cathedral: sons human and divine.

The seventeenth-century poet Ben Jonson lost a son, Benjamin, at the same tender age of seven as the elder Barrington boy. He too is an ‘afflicted parent’, who wrote one of the most moving tributes to a child in all of English poetry.

Farewell, thou child of my right hand, and joy;

My sin was too much hope of thee, lov’d boy.

Seven years thou wert lent to me, and I thee pay,

Exacted by thy fate, on the just day.

Oh, could I lose all father now! For why

Will man lament the state he should envy?

To have so soon ’scaped world’s and flesh’s rage,

And if no other misery, yet age!

Rest in soft peace, and, asked, say, Here doth lie

Ben Jonson his best piece of poetry.

For whose sake henceforth all his vows be such

As what he loves may never like too much.¹

Benjamin was his eldest son. The name in Hebrew means ‘son of my right hand’, with all the connotations of love and affection that fill this elegy to his lost son. The poet looks for meaning in what has befallen them both, father and son, and blames himself for investing too much in him; after all, he was only loaned for a while, not given permanently; now, it is time for that loan to be repaid. In an exquisite phrase, he sees his son as ‘his best piece of poetry’, the opus of which he was most proud.

The loss of a child, always a kind of death, can happen for many different reasons. Sometimes a child simply wanders off, or leaves home without telling anyone where they have gone. The back pages of Big Issue have heart-rending notices about the ‘lost’: people who have disappeared, and have sometimes not been seen or heard of for many years. Some of these ‘disappeared’ are teenagers, not long out of childhood. Sometimes parents conspire against their own children to drive them away, or worse still, abuse or torture or even kill them. We would not think such behaviour possible were it not for the evidence of our own eyes as we follow their stories in the media or, in the case of some of us, work professionally with some of their victims. ‘To deny the darker inevitabilities of separation, loss, decay and death is tantamount to inviting the forces of destruction to enter by a side door.’²

How we treat children is an index of the degree to which we are a humane, civilized society. In a world where children are exposed to risks undreamed of by our forebears, this raises particular questions for us. Rowan Williams wrote in 2003:

The consideration of the fate of our children is one of the few areas in which, it seems, we are still capable of being frightened back into reflection on [our] responsibility. Nearly everyone in our society with any direct involvement with children experiences directly and painfully the sheer unsafety of the child today. Half-defined terrors lurk behind every corner, scarring events like the Dunblane massacre leave us both terrified and helpless. But the fact that the greatest incidence of child abuse occurs in the home, or in a supposedly ‘controlled’ environment … ought to give us pause. Some damage to the corporate psyche seems to be taking place, some loss of the burden and gift of nurture, for this to be quite so prevalent. What if children need to be protected from contemporary adults, quite simply? Because contemporary adults have abandoned their role and trust? That is an absurdly extreme idea; but does it contain enough to worry us constructively?³

The threat of the child who is lost or snatched from safety is a common theme in fairy tales: it plays to deep, archetypal fears. But even in the Bible, a supposedly ‘safe’ book, the theme surfaces with surprising frequency. Indeed, it is the theme of some of our best-known, best-loved Bible stories, although we do not always recognize them as focusing on ‘lostness’ in this disturbing way.

Each day at the Cathedral where I work, it falls to me to read one of the Bible readings at morning and evening prayer. In the morning I take the Old Testament reading, in the evening, the New. I love reading the Scriptures out loud. So much of the Bible is meant to be heard before it is read. Our forebears understood this and made much of it: daily Bible reading, to the family gathered round the meal table or to children at bedtime, was a common practice in devout households until the twentieth century. But there are two passages that I am apprehensive about reading when they occur in the lectionary cycle. One is in the Old Testament, the other in the New. It is not that I do not care for these readings. It is the exact opposite: it is that they are such powerful narratives that I wonder if I am going to get through them without faltering for the effect they seem to have on me. They are among the greatest of all stories, not only in the Bible but in all of human literature. The New Testament story is the parable of the prodigal son.⁴ The Old Testament story is the binding (or as it is often wrongly called, the ‘sacrifice’) of Isaac.⁵

It will no doubt take a lifetime to get to the heart of why I feel this way, but I am coming to realize that it has to do with the family relationships that lie at the centre of these stories. Each is about a father and a son. Each tells of a father who loves his son in a way that the text can only hint at but which suggests that there is nothing he would not do for his beloved son. But these two stories are not only about attachment. They speak too of separation and loss: this is the whole point. The love of these two fathers is tested to the very edge of what a man can endure in a relationship of human intimacy. That test involves renunciation: saying farewell, giving up the object of their love, and in the sense in which it is right to use the word, sacrificing the son.

In the parable, the father must watch his younger son embark on a fateful journey away from all that family and home symbolize. As soon as the young man asks for his share of the inheritance, the father knows with a dreadful certainty what is coming. He gives his son what he wants, for there is no choice about it; he must step back and watch while he packs his bags, leaves behind the home and family which have been the only world he has known up to now, and sets out for the far country. Where are his mother and elder brother while this drama of separation is being acted out? Indeed, where is his mother at all? We can only guess why St Luke spares us this detail. Perhaps it is because the evangelist wants us to focus exclusively on what is going on between father and son in this bitter moment of loss. I think we are meant to give our full attention to these two men in the different ways they are experiencing their separation.

For the son, his drastic decision entails discovering who he is, or at least wants to be. Knowing who we are, realizing ourselves, depends on our being able to separate from the ties of our parents and become adults in our own right. It is often a difficult, turbulent process and we should not imagine that the younger son is without his own feelings of loss and sadness. But I imagine him successfully concealing these from his father, for there is something rebellious about his action. To demand his inheritance while his father is still alive is tantamount to severing their relationship.⁶ His eyes are full of eagerness and expectation for the new life that is opening up before him. Once gone, he will not look back as he sets his face towards his adventure.

But Luke is, I think, more interested in the father at this point. Indeed, it would probably be better to call this story the parable of the loving father, for this is its true theme. And how different is this moment of leave-taking for him! I imagine the father fighting his tears as he gazes forlornly after his child who is disappearing over the horizon, for surely he will wait and watch his child leave. The enormity of his loss hits him as he returns to the house empty of the son he loved. And yet for him too, this bereavement is necessary. There is no hint that the father contests the son’s right to go away, or tries to argue him out of it. He accepts that this is how it must be, and he must renounce his son for good – as it must seem to him. It is heartbreaking, for he does not entertain the thought that he will ever see him again. The ‘far country’ underlines the finality of it all. The younger son has become a lost son.

In the Genesis story, it feels similar. The details are not the same, though the two stories have a journey in common, and what is more, the destination is another ‘far country’: the story underlines the fact that Mount Moriah, where Abraham is to lead his son Isaac, is ‘in the distance’, and even after three days walking it is still ‘far away’. But this time, the father accompanies his son. ‘Take your son, your only son Isaac, whom you love, and go …’. Abraham knows, and we know, what Isaac does not: that this is a walk towards death, for Mount Moriah is the place where at God’s awful and impossible command, the father must bind his son as a burnt offering, and slay him with his own hand. And as we shall see later in this book, the storyteller prolongs the agony by spinning out this terrible walk that father and son must make together. It is inevitable that as we read it, we ask how a father, any father but most of all one so driven by faith and probity as this father, could contemplate the murder (which is what we would call it) of his own child. What torments does he undergo, what crisis of faith, what sense of self?

It is a story, of course, and perhaps we should read it in the way we read the parable. I mean that it is better not to linger on the unanswerable question of why God should demand such an extraordinary act of Abraham (or why the storyteller should attribute it to him). Instead, I believe that we need to read the text on the story’s own terms and reflect on what it conveys about this father for whom parental love and obedience to God rush towards each other with the prospect of an impossible collision. And if we put ourselves into his place, and walk alongside Isaac as he does, our emotional and spiritual world does not seem a thousand miles away from the world of the prodigal’s father. It is the same experience of being pulling apart by having to lose a child. However doggedly Abraham trudges on towards the hateful mountain while his uncomprehending son is by turns chatty and silent beside him, we know that the story understands the torment in his soul, his inward fear and trembling. This is the poignancy in God’s command that the story underlines so carefully: ‘Take your son, your only son Isaac, whom you love’. That love is the frame that holds the entire story. And we are with the father as he contemplates what lies ahead, the certainty that he will be the bereaved parent of an irretrievably lost son.

We know, because we have read them many times, that these two stories of lost sons do not end there. In both, there is a rescue from the far country, a homecoming. In Genesis, God intervenes in time to stop Abraham’s hand from descending upon his son, bound and ready to be offered up on the altar he himself has built. Abraham has passed the test: God’s promises of blessing will be realized through Isaac and his descendants. We wish that the story did not appear to forget all about Isaac as it tells how Abraham comes back from the ordeal. (It hasn’t forgotten him, of course: Isaac’s survival has been the point of the conclusion and Genesis goes on to tell how he subsequently fares. Indeed, Isaac’s curious invisibility at the end of this episode underlines what I suggested was also true of the parable: that it is the father whom we are meant to focus on.) But there is no doubt what the outcome of the story is. Isaac was lost to his father. Now he is found.

In St Luke, the parable maintains the emotional tension it began with. The son, destitute and abandoned, ‘comes to himself’, recognizes that there is no future in his self-imposed exile, and resolves to go home. ‘I will arise and go to my father and will say to him, "Father, I have sinned against