“We have to show up”: On Lent and our love of God
A few weeks ago, the priest gave me the most memorable advice that I’ve heard in the confessional in a long time. I had finished recounting my sins, and, before absolution, Father made this observation: “There’s a similarity among the sins you’ve confessed. Remember that God’s grace and mercy are like Niagara Falls. He’s always ready to pour them out upon us. But to receive them, we have to show up.”
That idea has echoed in my thoughts and prayers ever since. Eventually, I connected it to a phrase that has often struck me in the parable of the prodigal son. We all know the story. The youngest son demands his inheritance (essentially telling his father to drop dead) and goes off to have a grand time in a foreign country. And then a famine hits, the money runs out, and the only work he can find is taking care of a herd of pigs.
Something we thought would bring us happiness, or at least pleasure, winds up with us sitting alone in the mud. But we wouldn’t know anything about that, would we?
The prodigal decides he’s finally had enough of slopping the pigs, and heads back towards his father’s house. And that’s when we get to a part of the story we need to pay close attention to. In describing the son’s return, Jesus says, “While he was still a long way off, his father caught sight of him, and was filled with compassion. He ran to his son, embraced him and kissed him” (Lk 15:20).
Think for a moment about how Our Lord phrases and describes this scene. Put yourself there in the presence of the two men. How was the father able to see the son “while he was still a long way off”? The son had cut off all ties with his father. His father perhaps knew what direction his son had taken off in, but he had heard nothing from him.
Was it mere coincidence that he happened to be looking in the right direction on the very day his son returned? No. It couldn’t be. Our Lord doesn’t state the fact explicitly, but He doesn’t need to. He expects us to fill in the gap from our own experience of fatherhood.
The only way that Jesus’s words make sense is for us to picture the father standing there at the edge of his property each and every day since the son had left. Looking in the direction he had run off longing for him to return.
How many days had the father looked from that spot and seen nothing? The son could have returned at any time, and the father would have been there to welcome him back with open arms. The joy and celebration we read about in the rest of the story was always waiting for him. But the prodigal son had to actually show up.
I have a suspicion that this concept of showing up might be something that men especially may need to reflect on in our modern world. We live by this philosophy in other aspects of our life. How do you improve your physique? By putting in your time at the gym every day. You show up, or you don’t see the gains. You’ll never bag that buck if you don’t go to woods to hunt. You show up to work every day or you don’t get paid. We don’t expect these aspects of our life to work any other way.
But do we show up for the people in our lives, especially our spouse and family? Do we show up for our relationship with God?
