Forgiving Our Children

Let's put the forgiveness factor in a different setting now, and see what happens when a parent keeps a commitment by forgiving a child

In a literal sense a committed parent cannot stop being a parent. A father cannot unfather himself. A mother unmother herself. Parent and child are forever parent and child.

And yet sometimes parents need to perform the healing act of forgiving in order to keep their commitment to be a blessing to their children.

For a parent trusts a child as much as a wife and husband, and trust can be broken in any family. When a child betrays a parent's trust, it calls for the same remedy as when husband betrays a wife.

If a father cannot forgive a son, he cuts his child off from the blessing of his commitment.

Let's watch a final scene of Sophocles' tragic drama of King Oedipus, and see Oedipus disown his son, Polyneices. Polyneices had turned against his blinded father and driven him into exile from Thebes, where he had once reigned as king. Now the son, himself exile, is on his knees begging his father to forgive and bless him:

Compassion limits even the power of God;

So may there be a limit for you, Father!

For all that has gone wrong may still be healed...

Why are you silent? Speak to me Father!

Don't turn away from me!

For your own soul's sake, we all implore

And beg you to give up your heavy wrath.

But the pain of betrayal is too deep, its unfairness too galling, and Oedipus's hate too violent. He can empty himself of bitterness no more than the ocean can empty itself of salt. Oedipus spits his last words:

Justice still has a place in the laws of God.

Now go! For I abominate and disown you!

Condemned by his Father's curse, Polyneices goes. He dies.

Oedipus dies too, unreconciled to his son.

Another King comes to mind, another son, too, and another betrayal, but another ending to the story.

King David of Israel, like Oedipus, is betrayed by his son. Absalom, like Polyneices, drives his father from his royal city. And David, like Oedipus, is sent running from his own child.

David sends his army against Absalom. But David cannot curse his son. We hear him say, in the Second Book of Samuel: "Deal gently for my sake with the young man Absalom."

The general knows only military requirements, nothing of fatherly pity, and re runs Absalom through. David hears the horrible news:"And the king was deeply moved, and went up to the chamber over the gate, and wept; and as he went, he said, "O my son Absalom, my son, my son Absalom! Would I had died instead of you, O Absalom, my son!"

A blessing in absentia! Posthumous forgiveness. David could not dam the flow of his committed love

The difference between Oedipus and David is, at heart, a difference of faith. Oedipus believe in fate. David believed in God. Fate does not forgive, so Oedipus cursed his son. A heavenly father forgives, so David forgave.

There is still another story of a father's committed love, and it shows how forgiving and waiting can get nicely blended in the dynamics of a father's wounded love.

It is the story of the prodigal son, the empty -headed ingrate who cashed in what he had coming of his father's estate, and then went off to waste it on wild living.

The prodigal son was a fool, but not traitor. He slinked away alone; he did not run his father off his own land. He was not in Absalom's class.

Still, he poured contempt on his father's commitment, and went off to a far country as a son who never had a father.

When prodigal run out of cash, saw what a mess his life had come to, he swallowed the dried pods of his pride, covered his bets, and crawled home. What could he lose?

His father saw him coming in the lengthening shadows of the olive trees, a bent stick slouching homeward. And he went out to meet his son, loping, his robe pulled up over his knees, arms akimbo, and looking like no Hebrew patriarch with a smidgen of dignity should ever have looked.

He swallowed his wasted son in his arms before his son got to the estate gate, kissed his road-smudged mouth, and brought him home. And in the Gospel of Luke we hear him say to the servants of the clan: "Bring quickly the best robe and put it on him; and put a ring on his hand, and shoes on his feet; and bring the fatted calf and kill it, and let us eat and make merry; for this my son was dead, and is alive again; he was lost and is found.

The father blessed his wasted son. But did he forgive him the way a man forgives an enemy? Or did he celebrate the ending of a long time of worried waiting? Something like forgiveness was happening.

In the father's heart it must have felt like the healing of a hurt he hadn't deserved to feel. More like the joy of tender mercy than the relief of a waiting that was over.

I watched a father cope with a similar pain. He loved his seventeen eye are old son, Gerry, more than he loved his own life.

But Gerry wasted himself in the far country of his mind, not on wine, but on drugs, not with loose women, but with harmful friends.

He didn't betray his father the way Absalom betrayed David, and didn't squander his inheritance the way the prodigal son did, but was the pain any less for it?

And what of the lies that every kid on drugs tell his-or her-parents?

And what of the times he sneaked into his parents bedroom and snitched cash from their dresser drawers? Is this the stuff of which betrayal is made? Or is it only the desperation of a young person backed against the wall of an expensive delinquency?

What did these fine points of morality matter to a wounded father?

So he waited. Stuck with terror in his guts, he waited. Against his powerful desire to wring Gerry's neck, against every self-defensive impulse to send him packing, he waited.

He never sure how long he should wait. But he stuck with what he was stuck with. And when Gerry came to his rightful mind, his father blessed him.

In the muddle and rumpus of family life, the nice distinctions between forgiving and waiting sometimes get fudged.

No matter. A parent's commitments are seldom kept for long without a little forgiveness, now and then with massive doses. And sometimes we keep the commitments by just waiting out the bad times.

Let's have a Coffee

Hari

Blessings