He Wasn't My Son

“The simple point is that institutions are to humans what hives are to bees. They are the structures within which we organize ourselves as groups. You know when you are inside one, just as a bee knows when it is in the hive. Institutions have boundaries, often walls. And, crucially, they have rules.”

― Niall Ferguson, "The Great Degeneration: How Institutions Decay and Economies Die"

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Dear Kate,

We all know the Parable of the Lost (Prodigal) Son, one of the most heartwarming stories Jesus has told, about a son who has done everything to not be a son and a father who has stayed being more than a father, and at the end, after the son has done his "everything," he came home, apologized, to a father who has already long been waiting "at the end of his road" to forgive and restore to him his proper sonship, his "everything."  No questions asked, at least not within this storytelling universe.

The parable, of course, is much more than that.  To begin with there was another son, and the title is ambiguous about whether the singular "Son" is not actually about this other son.  You can read the very short story here (Luke chapter 15), maybe again for the first time, as I am going to do with you now.

The Son has done bad things.  He asked for his share of inheritance when his father was still alive and kicking, literally wishing him dead.  If his father had a heart condition or an ounce more of pride in him, he would have dropped his body and a case of attempted murder could be made.  This story should come with a trigger warning.

But the Father was strong, took all the insults, a crumbling defeat that's hard not to take personally, rather like a stoic, almost like a flat character: he simply gave the Son what he asked for, the Father's emotion, motivation, even a mere facial expression all off-screen, nondescript.  He was standing in for God, after all, who hasn't a face.  In any case the storyteller had his mind on something else.  So let's move on.

The Son went on to "squander his wealth in wild living."  "What exactly did he do, oh dear Sunday School teacher?"  I wish I had asked.  Let's just say he has done everything he found pleasurable that money can buy, things that would demand more money to undo the downsides of pleasure, come usually the next morning.

So what if, instead of merely buying sex, he was buying his way to exploit others sexually?  What if his buying power has to do with buying up resources to sustain his privilege, enhance his "lifestyle," and such resources could involve the heads of others served to him on a plate, people standing on his way of success, to "find" and "be" his "Self," to fulfill his "vocation," to show his backwater family the new economic reality and how to strive in it?

My supposing too remote to you?  It shouldn't be.  Every moment darkness is perpetuated on our behalf, at our behest, in this peaceful time, a "globalized" world, by the "invisible hand" of the market economy.  Oh, you don't know about that?  I am glad you've chosen ignorance over insanity.

But let's bring it back home, to something that I am sure all parents can relate.  What if the Son was asking for a car, no need to be a very fast one, but a car that can hit and kill.  Any car, that is, with one step on the pedal.  And the Father, of all people should be the one to know his son best, that the boy is totally distracted by his smartphone 24/7, worshipping whatever god that happened to flash across the rectangular oracle blessing him with however frivolous an epiphany, and yet, bland as the Father is in his action as in his morality, still granted the Son's nagging wish to take the car.

The day the Son came back, you see, he wasn't exactly sorry about what he has done to his father.  (If given the choice, he would do it again.  Why not?  Seriously, if no pleasure, why live?)  It was because the police were after him, about something that involved underaged girls, pleasure-giving lethal chemicals originated from a squalid basement that was his last address, or, let's not be melodramatic, that the front bumper of his father's car was dented in the shape of a skull: a little skull, almost like a child's.  Someone else's son's.

As I said before, this story is not about human parents, even less a blueprint for how to be a good one.  It's a story full of warnings without pulling the trigger.  But there is a trigger.  It's by grace that it wasn't pulled.  We all deserve a degree of hellfire.

One time I used Tim Keller's brilliant rendition of the parable (Part One and Two) in my church small group, and a man who has never come came that day, I still remember his face, and by the end of the video, he was in tears.  He said he didn't know why he came that night, but somehow a voice called him to.  But of course he now knew, that it was the Spirit, calling him back home.  He pledged to come again the week after, as far as he could see then.  I took down his email address, emailed him the next day, expecting nothing.

He never came back.

That night, when he was on his way out to the door, I so wanted to catch his elbow and say what a true father would have said, "Son, it will take much more to come home, let alone staying there.  And I don't mean loitering in church once a week."

I didn't do that.  He wasn't my son after all.  I was afraid he would report me to the church board.

Yours, Alex