By the Rev. Paul Graves
As I imagine him, the father looks to the horizon every time he comes out on the porch. Even when working the farmland with his older son, the old man glances up on occasion to look down the road.
His young, restless hothead son really did it this time! Still, the father searches for him on the horizon, but mostly in his heart.
Imagination is a helpful tool for us. But I doubt that any of us who are parents need much imagination activated to identify with that yearning to know our child/children are safe, healthy, and maturing into more whole persons. Our hearts always seek for our children’s wholeness.
So why should God’s heart be any different? As long as we choose to better seek God through human-centered images and feelings, let’s assume God’s heart works like ours, but more so. We hope God’s heart is always searching for us on the horizon, always seeking our wholeness.
So why do we even use language, or think thoughts suggesting God “abandons” us? I suppose it’s partly because there are biblical stories of people who felt that way — abandoned by God. I suppose it’s also because we’ve had moments when we have truly felt abandoned by God.
But what if our feelings weren’t based on God-facts, and only on our own desperation? Would that make any difference to you?
Look with me at a surprising twist to a familiar quote by John Wesley. In his sermon “A Catholic Spirit”, he utters a sentence used often by preachers and lay persons to make the point that we really can get along. “Is your heart as my heart? (Then) Give me your hand.”
Two surprises in that quote:
1) Those are not Wesley’s original words: and
2) the original context for the quote is quite bloodthirsty. John took those words from II Kings 10, out of a story of two warrior-types in ancient Israel, Jehu and Jehonadab.
As they destroyed people all around them they saw as enemies, when they encountered each other, there was an unidentified change of perception. So Jehu said, “Is your heart right, as is my heart with your heart?” To which Jehonadab replied, “Yes, it is.”
“If it be, give me your hand,” Jehu said. I’m not sure if they saw in each other a common hatred for others, but that may have been the case.
Yet John Wesley turned that vengeance-seeking heart quotation into an invitation to dialogue between persons who perhaps were “enemies”. He called upon people to seek their common hope, not their common hatred. He was seeking God’s heart, for God had sought his.
I sometimes struggle against the simplistic humanizing of God for what I hope are good reasons. Yet at the same time, the notion of Incarnation always draws me toward a better understanding of how God works in us and through us. “Incarnation” is the technical term, isn’t it?
While we can nitpick Incarnation nearly to death – “it means this”; “no it means this” – it does help us better understand God as we look ever more carefully at who Jesus was. Jesus used the Prodigal Son story to focus on a father’s undeterred love.
God’s love is like that, the parable suggests.
Sometimes we paradoxically search for God through our obsessions, our chronic distractions, even our religious devotion! But we just can’t find God on those terms because we get in our way.
In a way contradictory to our thinking, God searches for us by patiently waiting for us in plain sight. Even when we hide from God, or actively run from God, She is as close as our very breath, waiting for us to catch a glimpse of Her in the most ordinary of things.
The prodigal father couldn’t see his son until he was closer than the horizon. God sees us every moment of our lives, yearning for the moment when we stop working so hard, when we let go enough to just “see”.
The Rev. Paul Graves serves as the chair for the Conference Council on Older Adult Ministries.
This article was featured in Channels 60. Visit the archive, here.
