I hope that today is a joyous Father’s Day for each and every one of you – a day that we celebrate our dads and the fatherly figures in our lives and in our self! I know that many of you are fathers, and I hope that today serves as a reminder of both the great value and joy that you bring into the world by just being yourself, but also particularly in your fatherly attributes - your work to raise others with care and vulnerability, as well as the Divinity that you help spread through your goodness, love and wisdom. We are so blessed by each of you and the other fathers in our midst!
Today I can’t help but think about my own dad, of course. I see his face although I haven’t seen it in years, and I’m reminded of his tremendously wonderful, beautiful, and good attributes as well as some of my more constructive opinions of him, let’s just say. I’m sure each of you could relate in one-way or another.
My dad would always strive to be with my brother and I, even though my parents divorced when I was young. I value that in my dad, his continuous efforts to see us, connect with us best he knew how. Let’s all take a moment to think of some of the positive qualities about our fathers and the fatherly in our lives, knowing that Divinity, “the Universe,” was embodied in those gifts.
Although I can think of many other positive attributes of my father, unfortunately, I also can’t help but think of what I perceive to have been destructive elements. Qualities that made it hard for many of those closest to him to want to be around my dad, things he didn’t want to see about himself let alone change. Despite the hardship though, I’ve come to value even these things in a way because I’ve learned so much from them. The harsh reality that my father often cultivated helped me to realize that deep selfishness, narcissism aren’t easy yokes on anyone, especially not the conveyor of them.
And despite the hurtful memories, the traumas that are hard to shake or even accept that we each may have in relation to our fathers or other men, there are bright, glorious counterpoints that often outshine those things even in those same men: the image of Divinity shining through truly fatherly actions and orientations over the millennia. May we each allow that Divinity to transform the aspects of our lives that promote its opposite.
In fact, even if we grew up with a distant father on the material plane, we each can probably remember a number of fatherly examples that have positively impacted us, either directly or indirectly. Sometimes this can take place through books or TV, through school or other activities. I’m reminded of the many scripted fathers of my childhood, those on sitcom after sitcom, from Full House to Family Matters. In a sense, the actual fathers (men or women) that I glimpsed in the acted fathers on those shows were the writers, directors, crew, and producers - crafting stories that illuminated what they collectively thought would be good images of fatherly lessons. I remember, they often ended the episode with a loving, warm and supportive sit-down between child and dad, where the compassion and insight of the father brought the story full circle and wholeness is felt by the audience due to the power of love and life manifesting itself so perfectly.
These stories and our relationships with our fathers are so vital because they are deeply personal and they help the Father/Mother within to teach us how to live healthily, righteously, lovingly. They connect to our own stories right now and our walk with Father God, as well as his hope to continue to sit with us, heal us, and bring us back full circle. And I think that the popularity of this metaphor goes back a long, long time for these reasons. We see it in the Hebrew Bible from Genesis to Revelation, as well as in our reading today about the “Prodigal Son.” Although God is not always called “Father” in scripture, that gets its heyday in the Christian Gospels from Jesus (from today’s story to his own use of the term for Divinity), God is often characterized and can be read as a metaphorical father of humanity, one who strives to help us realize that the true parent of our life is the Holy One, because all good parenting, all goodness, come from him. This isn’t a critique of celebrating our fathers, but serves as a reminder that what we are called to celebrate as we also celebrate our Dads is God(dess) with us, goodness with each of us, and this helps us celebrate ourselves and others without ego. Celebrating our fathers and our Father today helps us diminish our relative judgments and appreciate all the ways that Divinity has shined into our lives through the tremendous gifts of our dads: their willingness to be vulnerable, loving, supportive, and wise.
In our scripture today we essentially get an amazing episode of Full House, clearly a parable meant to illuminate our relationship with Father God and our reception of his fatherly qualities. We can place ourselves into each of the characters and gain some insight I think: whether it’s putting ourselves in the shoes of the son who leaves and reportedly squanders his inheritance, or the son that stays and gets jealous of his father’s continued warmth and support of his seemingly reformed brother, or even the father himself who forgets the destructiveness of his son once the son is able to move past it in his life. We clearly get a sense of a moral lesson from Father Christ in this tale, and the importance of welcoming and supporting others once they have relinquished their hurtful ways.
But I think that this story works even better as the spiritual metaphor it was clearly meant to provide, because in that light we can apply what we know of God to it and allow that to illuminate the dynamics of the fatherly lesson further. Reading it as a spiritual metaphor also helps us to relinquish quibbles like, “What if the son who came back was lying, or what if he leaves again? Wouldn’t the older son be proven right and the father proven a fool?“
In a spiritual light, we know that the Divine Father/Mother never truly leaves any of his offspring because of her deep love for us; the son who heads into a disastrous city of his own making is still in the presence of God although he’s turned away from it and has come to love a spiritual, internal state where he no longer orients his heart and actions on goodness, love, and wisdom. With that knowledge we see that coming back to God must be a process of transformation, an internal turning back toward wanting to be with Divinity and her qualities, and not just a whim for more cash and comfort. It’s true though, often the walk back from a selfish heart starts as the simple recognition that we are now destitute, and that true wealth is found back with the love of God, on the heavenly farm where we take part in the work of that love and not just take its produce for our own destructive desires.
Another beautiful thing about this story of Divine fatherly love is the lesson that it is never too late to receive your inheritance as a being made in the image of God. It’s never too late to find that wellspring of peace and love within, to center ourselves on it, and go about the work of internal and external change toward justice and compassion as well as all the joy that brings. Our Father is always there, ready to sit down with us and help us come back full circle into a realm of warmth, rationality, and healing. It’s a process though. Like the 18th century scientist turned mystical visionary, Emanuel Swedenborg, I think that many have a walk with the Father/Mother, not just Christians, but sometimes, if we have set our hearts upon evil, to find our way back to the path of the Father - which Swedenborg believed refers to Divine Love in scripture - takes a transformation of heart like we see in the Prodigal Son. Like a good dad, the God of Love walks with us holding our hands no matter our terms of endearment, as long as we’re willing to truly, spiritually walk with him, and not misuse the gifts he has given us.
I believe that there hasn’t been a day of any of our lives that a truly Holy Father, a Divinely Present Love, hasn’t been deeply involved, watching, caring, providing insight, strength, and circumstance that may eventually truly comfort us and allow us to shed the dreadful habits of our forebearers in the destructive cities of their making and instead adopt more of the loving orientations and habits of our true forefathers, the angels in our midst and within, welcoming and supporting warmly the child that we were and will become.
