Love Makes You Better

Part of my adolescence was praying for Charlie. Charlie was Bee's grandson. Bee was a super-faithful-prayer-warrior, a come-to-worship-every-Sunday-morning-and-every-Sunday night believer. Charlie was a handful, he was wild and Bee was trying her best to raise him. And then, he ran away. Each Sunday after he ran away from home when it came time to offer prayers Bee's hand went up. The pastor said, "of course we will pray for Charlie." Of course we will pray for Charlie.

              Years went by. Sunday after Sunday we prayed for Charlie. Bring him home; keep him safe; guard him; protect him. Don't let him be hungry, cold. Lots of prayers.

There was a moment, I must confess where I assumed he was dead.  Then he came home.  He was rough around the edges as happens when you live on the streets of Los Angeles.  Charlie had been only a few hours away all this time, but he was living hard, living all the sins making a tearful altar call confession.  He left the fervent purity of a hymn singing grandmother.  He lived hard.  Then he came home. 

              Felt like a miracle.  He was dead; now he’s alive; he was lost, but now he is found.  Bee’s euphoria over the return of her grandson was unbridled.  It was as if Charlie was a superstar, transfiguration, resurrection, parting of the Red Sea all wrapped up together because he was breathing. 

              Charlie came to a church for the better part of a year.  Then he faded.  He didn’t run away again.  He just could not be our miracle anymore.  He had been our prayer; then he was our miracle.  He needed to be Charlie without a spotlight, a story to tell, a praise to be offered.  He just needed to be Charlie.

              The parable of the prodigal son has many such Charlie stories.  Many churches, many families have a kid who ran off, took off, lived hard.  Many parents know the weight of hope against hope, the need to keep an eye on the horizon, an ear for the sound of the front door opening maybe this time, this day, somehow. 

              One of the most famous prodigal stories was the last painting of Rembrandt. The legend goes near the end of his life, broke, after selling all his paintings, Rembrandt kept one, refused to sell one painting no matter how desperate the circumstance.  The other part of the legend was how he refused to finish the painting, always kept it partially completed.  The painting was his “Return of the Prodigal” hanging today in the Hermitage museum in St. Petersburg. 

              The story goes; Rembrandt and his son had a falling out.  He was waiting to finish the painting once they reconciled, to embody the painting with his own emotion of redemption, with the joy of being so restored as the father is restored in the parable.  The party, the coat, the sandals, the ring, the kiss.  Rembrandt was waiting for this.  But it didn’t happen; they didn’t reconcile. 

Hence, if you look at the face of the father on your bulletin cover you can see, perhaps, the confusion, unbelief.  The expression on the father’s face is lost in awe, either awe of joy or awe of sorrow.  It is hard to tell which one he is feeling. 

              What is not as ambiguous is the judgement, the distance of his brother to the right, the uncle who is seated, and the mother who holds back, cloaked in darkness.  This is not a scene of celebration.  You could say Rembrandt has painted two parables into one: the parable of the prodigal son and the parable of the bitter son.  The climax of the prodigal’s return is there, the embrace; and shunning of the broken one not welcomed home is there too.  The climax is seen but so is the anti-climax: why not me, why have you just let him in, why a party for the one who disgraced you?

              Part of the brilliance of the painting is the inclusion of the mother.  For with her, the ease of the miracle is truly undone.  It is not just the older brother who is angered by the extravagant mercy of the father, it is also the mother.  The mother lingers in the background and evokes the divisions so often pushing marriages apart. 

Sitting with the parable many years ago I got lost in the line, he saw him at a distance and ran out to greet him.  I got lost in the line because I wondered how many times the father rushed out to greet the son only to find it was not him.  I got lost in the image of the father walking back to be greeted by a wife who resented his compassion, who felt twice betrayed.  First by the son who left and then by the husband who gave too much, who spoiled and ruined the child.  Rembrandt’s layers of glances and body language, light and darkness all evoke the murky water of being a family.

Bob Dylan wrote, “you can always come back, but you can’t come back all the way.”  The parable we read today is the longest parable of Jesus; it is also the most complex.  The extravagant mercy of the father is in constant tension with the bitterness of the older brother.  And if we are read the parable through Rembrandt there is the tension of marriage and parenting and family chaos. 

The realness of the parable, the clarity of the parable, while a strength, is also a great challenge.  Remember, a parable is supposed to challenge a basic belief, upend a deeply held conviction.  It would be easy reading this parable to just nod along and say, true, all too true: families are crazy, love is hard and messy, forgiveness is always fraught with danger.  This is not a challenge to understand.  We get this.  In this affirmation, though, we can stop short of the contradiction.  What is it in this parable we are meant to find undoing?

              I want to say my favorite interpretation of this parable is the play-become-movie A Trip to Bountiful.”  The movie retells the parable through the hymn "Softly and Tenderly." The movie has all the elements of the parable: family struggles, coming home, bitterness and love.  Yet it also has the contradiction of something we hold dear. 

Throughout the movie A Trip to Bountiful you can hear the hymn sung and played.

Softly and tenderly Jesus is calling
Calling for you and for me
See on the portals,

He's waiting and watching
Watching for you and for me

Come home, come home
Ye who are weary, come home
Earnestly, tenderly, Jesus is calling
Calling, "Oh, sinner, come home"

              A Trip to Bountiful tells the saga and journey of Mama Watts, an elderly woman with a bad heart who lives with her son Ludie and his awful wife Jessie Mae.  They live together in a small one-bedroom apartment in Houston where Mama Watts is prone to running about, too much hymn singing and pouting.  Mama Watts and Jessie Mae don’t get along, but they need Mama Watts’s social security check to make ends meet. 

              On a regular basis Mama Watts tries to run off, take off, get home, to the now deserted gulf of Mexico town of Bountiful where she was born and raised, wed to a man she didn’t love, had three children and lost two.  She wants to get back, smell the salt air, put her hands in the soil, tend to her babies’ graves. She wants to just listen to the deep silence of a farm field full of memories.  She wants to get home something awful.  Again and again she tries to catch a train, a bus, anything to go home, if only for a day, an hour, a minute.  But again and again she is caught in the act and returned to the stifling, bickering disdain filling every inch of the cramped apartment.

              The story is how she finally makes it.  Dodges Ludie and Jessie Mae and takes a couple of busses to get as far as the nearest town where a sheriff drives her the rest of the way and sits in the car while she rambles through the house and fields and the memories.  She gets down on the ground and grasps the earth like a mother clinging to a child.

              The climax of the story is when Ludie shows up with Jessie Mae to bring her home.  Ludie is not angry, but he is weary of all of this.  He is ever in the middle of these two.  At this point, the adventure of Mama Watts is nothing more than a nostalgia, a moment to come home once more— in her words, one last time before I die.  Into this moment though Ludie breaks down and confesses. He led his mother to believe Bountiful was not something he remembered, not something he ever thought about as he was only a child.  But this was not true.

              “I remember everything Mama,” he says.  I remember the night we walked together in the moonlight, I remember sitting with granddad and listening to his friends speak of him when he died.  I remember everything all the time, but what good is it? What good is it?

              In his tears and his pleading with his mother to just let the past go, in his need to not carry the sorrows of the past, I wonder if this is the contradiction, the belief we carry protecting our heart, guarding our love, keeping it in control and measured.  The contradiction being: we love only enough, forgive only enough, remember only enough so to be safe, so we can elude sorrow; in seeking to be safe though we may just ruin our only hope of love making us better. Maybe just enough is not enough.

We do this.  How often do we give just a bit of love, not too much, not too little?  How often is our mercy conditioned and qualified by future actions and promised amendments and the perceived sincerity of the ashamed?  This is what the older brother wanted. 

How often are the memories we share made to fit into an orderly world, a purposeful plan of God?  How often are we safe in our grace and thus stifling the power of love with civility and decorum? I think this is what Rembrandt was wrestling with.   

              How few are the days lived with a prodigious love, an extravagant unbounded uncalculated love?  Emily Dickinson said, it was the plenty that hurt me.

              The final scene of a Trip to Bountiful always haunts me.  Mama Watts must agree to a series of conditions Jessie Mae has written out and reads so to be clear: no running, no hymn singing when she’s around, no pouting.  As she agrees Mama Watts takes Jessie Mae in her arms and gives her a long kiss, caresses her face.  Jessie Mae is stunned.  She was caught completely unaware by extravagant love.

              I am haunted by the question: what if Mama Watts had simply agreed and got in the car?  What if? I think of all the compromises, the winced eyes of enduring a weak but polite kindness.  Confusing civility with grace.  The times where silence was a way to keep the peace.  But for what, ugliness, bitterness?  How often do we confuse repentance with an agreed to indignity?

              But she didn’t just get in the car.  She offered an extravagant, unbounded, uncalculated love to someone lost in bitterness.  She agreed to Jesse Mae's terms, but it is not less hymn singing making life better.  Love makes life better.

              I wonder if the contradiction of the parable, what will turn our life upside down is the extravagant love of the father.  Beautiful, inspiring, but how we live?  I am not sure if I were Mama Watts if I would have been so bold and just got in the car.  Amen.