God as Father means that he is loving, he is good.
Have you planned your funeral yet? I have! This may seem like a slightly morbid way to start a Restoration article, but it is Lent, after all, and perhaps the contemplation of one’s mortality is not amiss.
In Madonna House we are encouraged to not leave things like that for our poor, overworked director general to figure out when the time comes. So, even though I’m still relatively young, in pretty good health, and not anticipating an early exit, a few years ago I put it all together, down to my preferred hymns and Mass settings.
For the Gospel, I chose one not given among the suggested funeral readings. When I lie in my coffin with my loved ones gathered around me, I want one Gospel only proclaimed, and I want the priest celebrating to preach specifically on that Gospel.
And that is the Gospel of the Prodigal Son, Luke 15, which comes up on the 4th Sunday of Lent this year (March 31). While it doesn’t speak much of death and resurrection as one might expect at a funeral, to me this passage is the deepest revelation we have in Scripture of who God is, who we are, and what the essential journey is for each human being in this world. What could be better for a funeral?
Who God Is
He is a Father, full stop. But since the word father may have different connotations, depending on one’s lived experience, we need to elaborate. God as Father means that he is loving, he is good. He is the source and origin of our being, and he provides, protects, and gives all he has and all he is to his children in the context of deep, warm personal relationship and engagement. My son, you are always with me, and all I have is yours (Lk 15:31).
Who We Are
We are children of God who have forgotten we are children of God. The younger son takes what he can and runs off to do his own thing in a great outburst of hedonism and debauchery. The older son stays home but experiences his life as drudgery and servitude. Much is made usually of the contrast between the two sons, the one free-wheeling and loose-living, the other stodgily virtuous and hardworking, but I think we don’t understand the parable correctly if we miss that they are essentially the same person.
Both of them live outside the Father’s house, one by going to that distant country of sin and rebellion, the other by practicing virtue without love. I believe the whole point of this parable is to highlight the essential identity of these two ways of living. Both have become sons who no longer know they are sons.
The Essential Journey
I will arise and go to my father (Lk 15:18). Not to keep harping on my funeral arrangements, but this is the actual verse I want on my memorial card. For me, this is the journey every one of us is on, this the deepest meaning of Christian death. Death for us is not a cessation of biological processes, an internment in the earth, an inevitable process of decay to dust and ashes. Death is rising, death is going to the Father, entry into the house in which we were born (whether we know it or not), an entry accompanied by music and dance, rejoicing and laughter, food and drink, all beyond our wildest hopes and expectations.
But this arising and going to the Father is not just about death and what comes after. If I may reflect a bit on my personal story, my entire life has been nothing but a continual arising and going to him.
Due to painful experiences in my childhood and a very poor relationship with my own dad, I entered adult life with very little sense of God as Father or of what that could possibly mean. When I said earlier in the article that we need to unpack the connotations of father, I was speaking very personally; when I was a young man that word didn’t mean any of those things to me.
My whole life as a believing Catholic, a member of Madonna House, and a priest has been one great arising and going to the Father’s house. To know — really know and not just hear about it in some notional way — that the God we believe in is loving, good, and so personally invested in me (and you), is truly the journey all of us are on. If you, reading this article, truly do not know God in that way, get on your knees and humbly pray that the Father reveal himself to you as he truly is, for to know him is the joy of the human person.
The younger son did not believe this, and so he followed his carnal desires to their natural ends — degradation and impoverishment. The older son also did not believe this, and so his life devolved into a bitter drudgery, doing all the work but without knowing himself to be beloved of God.
For all of us, flagrant, outrageous sinners, or good little duty-doing boys and girls, or some combination of both, the journey of life, of faith, and of Lent is just that: arising and going into the Father’s house, into the Father’s embrace, into the Father’s heart.
The younger son in the parable makes it there, but we all know that human beings are a flighty bunch, and that he might just light out again for some distant country after a good meal, a shower, and a change of clothes. The older son’s fate is left unknown, and this leaves all of us with the solemn duty of writing that ending for ourselves.
What will it be? The house is open, the music is playing, the smell of roasted calf wafts out at us. We can enter in and be happy, be loved, be embraced, be joyful. That is Easter, that is heaven, that is the life of faith, hope, and love which the Father holds out to each one of us today. Let’s choose wisely.
Restoration March 2025
[image: The Return of the Prodigal Son by Murillo]
