From a Long Way Off

What happens to our shadows in the embrace of our Father?

“But while he was still far off, his father saw him and was filled with compassion; he ran and put his arms around him and kissed him.” – Luke 15:20

This week marks one year since my mom died alone in a hospital room, with tubes down her throat and machines attached to her body. I found a picture of her recently, one I don’t remember taking. In it, she’s smiling in that gentle way she would on rare occasions. When she smiled like that, I felt I could see something young, innocent, and real in her.

For reasons I don’t completely understand, I put the photo in my bathroom beside my makeup mirror. I’ve found myself staring at the picture and then back at my own face. It’s strange to know that my body came from her body, that I grew inside of her, and share her genetic material. This woman, the most intimate stranger I’ve ever known. Her body, ravaged by disease, stopped breathing one year ago. And my body is still here, persisting.

Grief is complicated under any circumstance; but there is something particularly difficult about grieving for a person who many people believed to be evil. Many times, in my life, I believed my mom to be evil too. She lived in shadows of addiction, mental illness, and trauma. And her pain often overshadowed us all.

Yet, she wasn’t all shadow. None of us are all shadow.

Her smile lit up a room.

She loved to laugh.

Her quick wit was legendary.

She relished hearing about the doings of my children, even if her shadows kept her from being an active part of their lives. She called me just to hear the details of their successes and challenges. She appreciated a good story. I still reach for the phone to share story-time with my mom.

She carried violence and mercy, despair and joy, lies and truth, dark and light, within her.

She once carried me within her too.

God Sees the Shadow and the Light

This week I’ve been crafting a sermon centered on the Parable of the Lost Son. Jesus shared this story with a motley crew of a crowd – self-righteous, religious Pharisees and wild-living, opportunistic outcasts. The purpose of the story is obviously to highlight the heart of this extravagant father who defies love-limitations. And this line has been reverberating in my soul:

“But while he was still far off, his father saw him and was filled with compassion; he ran and put his arms around him and kissed him.” – Luke 15:20

Why is it so difficult for us to comprehend a love like this? Why do we reach for qualifications, formulas, and exceptions to this kind of love? Is it because of self-loathing? Or are our imaginations simply too dim to envision a God who sees the shadow and the light within all of us, and still runs out to meet us?

We speak, with all the power that comes with our speech, phrases like:

You can come as you are to God. But God loves you too much to allow you to stay that way.

How can we say this with a straight face and with such authority? Listen, I’ve loved Christ with my entire being for a long time, and I’ve devoted my life to learning about spiritual transformation, and I’ve come to accept the reality that God does, indeed, often allow us to “stay this way.”

Yes, God can change us. Our Creator’s ability is not in question. And, yes, God wants to change us. God’s desire for our best is never in question. And, yes, sometimes and in some ways, God does change us. Interaction with God will inevitably lead to change.

Yet, we must face uncomfortable reality. There are substantial aspects of ourselves that we may die having never seen changed. Yes, this includes sinful, disintegrated patterns of thinking and living — the shadows of ourselves that haunt us. Our refusal to acknowledge this reality, and our insistence on pointing out others’ disintegrated patterns while ignoring our own, is what gives Christian faith a distinctly hypocritical, inauthentic, and impotent flavor in our society today.

When Jesus warned us to stop focusing on the speck in our neighbor’s eye because the painfully obvious plank in our own renders us incompetent judges, he wasn’t kidding. Our life’s work is to address our own planks, to assess our own souls, and to begin our own journey down the long road toward our Father’s home.

The remarkable news is that He sees us – all of us – from a long way off. It’s this assurance that gives us confidence and hope.

I’ve loved too many people on the fringes of social-acceptability to believe that, if you haven’t achieved some arbitrary, human-conceived level of “change,” you aren’t really loved and accepted by God. In fact, I know this isn’t true. I’ve witnessed the Spirit of God move in people’s lives who wouldn’t pass even the loosest litmus test of Christian respectability. I know firsthand that the fruits of the Spirit begin, initially, as imperceptible seeds and that the human eye can miss them; but God’s work is being done, nonetheless.

I think about my shadowed mom, dying alone in a hospital room, the body that carried me now being carried by tubes and machines. And I realize so many people would condemn my mom to hell, based upon their knowledge of her life. I wonder if she was scared for her own soul, having heard tale of a vengeful God who does not forgive seventy-times seven, despite what Jesus taught us to do.

I also think about the God I’ve come to know and trust, the One who sees us from a long way off and is running out to meet us. I think about my mom in His arms and know that the power of her shadows – of anyone’s shadows – cannot hold sway in the power of His embrace and under the meaning of His kiss. I remember the thief on the cross next to Christ and our Savior whispering: Today you will be with me in paradise. The thief never had the opportunity to change.

I consider my own plank, which is still much too large for my liking, and which still gets in the way often. I imagine the slow co-laboring between God and me, as we whittle this plank down an inch at a time, might look a lot like no change from the outside. But I know better. And so does God.

I don’t have all the answers as to why some of us are so slow to change, or why the changes seem to ebb and flow, or why the old shadows circle back to us again and again. But I read these words by the great C.S. Lewis and I’m comforted that God knows what we don’t. We, of the plank-filled eyes, and the loose lips filled with trite sayings, and the unaddressed self-loathing that leads us to condemn, and of the dim imaginations that can’t fathom a Love so freely given – we don’t know half of what we think we do. But God sees us all from a long way off, and His eyes are ones of love.

“But if you are a poor creature — poisoned by a wretched up-bringing in some house full of vulgar jealousies and senseless quarrels — saddled, by no choice of your own, with some loathsome sexual perversion — nagged day in and day out by an inferiority complex that makes you snap at your best friends — do not despair. He knows all about it. You are one of the poor whom He blessed. He knows what a wretched machine you are trying to drive. Keep on. Do what you can. One day He will fling it on the scrap-heap and give you a new one. And then you may astonish us all - not least yourself: for you have learned your driving in a hard school.”

― C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity