“And God cut him off and said “Baloney,” A Prodigal Mishap

We have been quite the liturgical gypsies with all our wandering this past summer and fall and have had the opportunity to visit a lot of churches. One bright summer morning the Gospel reading was the Prodigal Son, Luke 15, my favorite. The preacher starts to unpack the reading and my gut is tightening, he gets to the part about the Father meeting the son and how the Father cut short the son’s speech of repentance, by saying “baloney.” How the Father was thinking “baloney,” that just like any father receiving a son’s apology, he knows the son doesn’t mean it, and that it is just baloney. I nearly came out of my seat. I looked at Doug and said “bullshit.” I was livid, don’t bastardize that parable and pull the image of Father God down to a human embodiment of fatherhood as you have perceived it in your life. I was beside myself, with my very rudimentary study, I knew that the original Greek spoke nothing of baloney, but of God the Father’s love, mercy, and humility. How the Father actually “fell upon his son’s neck,” the Father ran to his son, the Father had been scanning the horizon for his lost son for a long time. This is not a pompous arrogant father just waiting to pounce on his repentant child, to basically call him a bullshitter and demean his conversion with a snarky comment, this is Christ trying to reveal the face of God the Father, the suffering Father longing for His child, the humble Father releasing his child to find his own way in life, even if it means the child leaving His house, the joyful Father running to embrace his returning son.

I fidgeted and fumed, and I thought back to those times of reconciliation in our own family. How that when the boys came to us to offer an apology, it was an incredibly humbling experience for us as parents. Their remorse and humility touched the dry, desert parts of us and brought fresh water, it brought peace, and healing. Their humility stirred in us a great remorse and sorrow for our own sinfulness and failure in our very human attempts at parenting. There was never any thought of sandwich meat.

Trusting God is hard, and in dark and shadow, even harder. Hard to discard the illusions of what you thought life would be, impossible if your vision is of a Father who after you have humbled yourself and bared your soul, will throw it all back in your face and say “baloney.” What a horrible, terrible image to share with people starving for mercy. And the Father said baloney, written in no Gospel ever.

We were then instructed that we were to remain standing after the Lamb of God and to remain standing until everyone has received, probably between 500 and 600 people easily. Now you are going to mess with my body posture? Do not take away my solace in the act of kneeling, it is at times the only thing I can offer God with whom I so warily dance. I can rarely speak the responses, I cannot sing, but I can kneel. My body can do what my heart and soul cannot most days, kneel to the Father’s will. Sometimes it is the body that will lead the head and heart. My body telegraphs to the my will to kneel, and then it reaches my head to bow to God’s will, not my own will. We are body persons, sensual beings. Catholicism is sensual, it should feed our senses. Ours knees hitting something solid, something hard, reminds us of the hardness of our hearts, the hardness of life. We kneel before the Father of mercies and bow our head in silence to ponder a paradox and mystery we cannot fathom, kneeling in humility, in smallness, it does a soul good.

It was not a conscious thought, but my knees hit the ground after the Lamb of God, Doug too. Funny in a way, you could feel the desire from those around us to kneel, and when we returned from receiving, we knelt. And in front of us, behind us, and to our sides, people knelt in silence, it was a moment of peace in what had been a disturbing morning. I was grateful for the final blessing and nearly knocked Doug over in my haste to get out of that building, away from so much baloney. I felt that God had been betrayed again, His true nature and humility covered in cheap beef and pork.  And I left with fear, what if in those moments of quiet dialogue when I silently open my heart to God and share my sorrow, what if He mocks me and is saying to Himself “baloney.”

I have a favorite small book that I discovered several years ago, it is called “Why Go To Confession? Reconciliation and the Beauty of God” by Archbishop Bruno Forte, his Lectio divina on the Prodigal Son should not be missed. I have never read anything like it and was grateful to have Archbishop Forte in my desk drawer to visit with when I was home. I was grateful for my highlighted sections and notes written in the margins from years before. In my dark place, I read sections of this little book over and over again, how can I tire of hearing the story of a Father’s love so great that He waits at the window to catch a mere glimpse of me.