Wandering Sons

This week I read Marilynne Robinson’s Home. Home is a companion novel to her 2004 Pulitzer Prize winning novel Gilead. These novels are about two aging ministers during the 1950s in the small town of Gilead, Iowa. These two best friends are ministers in different churches. Reverend John Ames of Gilead is the minister of the Congregationalists while Reverend Robert Boughton is the Presbyterian minister. These are two men of faith, good men who are also fathers. Reverend Ames lost his wife and child early in life, and after all these years, he has married late in life and has a new, young son. Gilead is about what Ames wants his young son to learn about him in the short time they have together.

Home, on the other hand, is about the end of the widowed Reverend Boughton’s life whose caregiver is his 38 year-old daughter Glory. Boughton’s alcoholic prodigal son Jack returns home after a twenty-year absence—no word from him for twenty years. This novel is a poignant, tender, powerful novel of a father and son who desperately try to reconcile and find peace. This is a novel of healing, but it does contain so much pain. There were several times while reading that my heart ached and eyes teared for either the father or for the son.

I assume much of my connection with this novel is my own good relationship with my sons. I’ve been very blessed to be aware of my sons’ own individual struggles and their often feelings of inadequacies and self-assumed not measuring up to some self-imposed standards. They often feel they fall short. I’m also blessed as a teacher to know other fathers’ sons who feel they don’t measure up and are sometimes disappointments to themselves.

The Parable of the Prodigal Son has always been meaningful to me. I’m always so touched by the warm, welcoming, tight hug the father gives his son as he sees the return. I imagine the father running to his uncertain son to hold him, to heal him, to love him.

This week I’ve also read Milton’s Paradise Lost, and saw again the prodigal son in the Father’s relationship with Adam who is good, who does want to be obedient, yet he fails to measure up and falls. And of course, there is the extreme prodigal son of Lucifer who willfully, angrily, demonically leaves his Father’s home. Lucifer will never return to his Father. But some of the most powerful passages of Paradise Lost is when the Father, His Son Jesus Christ, or angels explain to Adam how he can return to Father through the Atonement of Christ. Father pleads for Adam’s return.

Even the great Nephi in his lament cries, “O wretched man that I am! Yea, my heart sorroweth because of my flesh; my soul grieveth because of mine iniquities” (2 Nephi 4:17). However, Nephi soon turns to Heaven for help: “Nevertheless, I know in whom I have trusted. My God hath been my support; he hath led me through mine afflictions in the wilderness” (2 Nephi 4:17, 20).

Soif there is ever a time when we feel we don’t measure up or that we feel we’re a wandering son, know that there are those who know we do measure up, who are grateful for our goodness and our strength, and who are confident we’re heading in the right direction to return Home.