The Return of the Prodigal Father

The two Jesuit priests in campus ministry at the high school where I teach, asked me to give a talk at the father-son retreat. I watched my kindergartner buckle himself into his car seat the following morning and wondered what I might say to fathers whose sons drive. When I began teaching I was closer in age to the students compared to their parents. But now, as I’m closer to age forty than I am to thirty, I certainly have an appreciation for what it must be like to parent a son who strides in and out of the house with his own set of car keys.

The morning of the retreat, the fathers and sons sat in a circle, taking turns introducing each other. The ceiling fans played with the air from the opened windows of the small chapel. As the first father spoke he shifted in his seat to lift his foot from the burgundy rug to rest it on his leg. Beyond the stained glass windows, cars hummed past us intermittently on that Saturday morning. I listened to them take turns saying something they admired about the other. I looked at the men and young men looking at each other and thought about their resemblance to one another and the quote I had just finished reading in the retreat program from Henri Nouwen’s The Return of the Prodigal Son:

Recently, on looking into a mirror, I was struck by how much I look like my dad. Looking at my own features, I suddenly saw the man whom I had seen when I was twenty-seven years old: the man I had admired as well as criticized, loved as well as feared. Much of my energy had been invested in finding my own self in the face of this person, and many of my questions about who I was and who I was to become had been shaped by being the son of this man. As I suddenly saw this man appearing in the mirror, I was overcome with the awareness that all the differences I had been aware of during my lifetime seemed so small compared with the similarities. And with a shock, I realized that I was indeed heir, successor, the one who is admired, feared, praised, and misunderstood by others, as my dad was by me.¹

One boy’s reaction to his father’s introduction of him remains in my mind. He peered into his lap, sitting on his hands. This is my son, the father said. He’s under a lot of pressure since he’s in his junior year. I’m proud of how hard he works at subjects that don’t come easy to him. He doesn’t ever give up. He stays at it. Of course, when we talk about school we focus on the results, the grades. I don’t say it a lot, but I admire how he never quits. I admire his effort.

The son didn’t raise his head until his father finished. The boy’s fairskinned face glowed like the head of a struck match, the air moving over his head in the sunrays. Well, I mean, my dad works really hard, the boy said. I mean, I like my friends here, and I wouldn’t be able to go here if he didn’t work so hard, the boy said. How rare it is that fathers and sons praise one another in private, let alone in front of others.

A large print of Rembrandt’s painting, The Return of the Prodigal Son, to which Nouwen titles his book after, rested on one of the chairs in the circle. I liked sitting in the fellowship of these other men, the men, who like me are “admired, feared, praised, and misunderstood by” their children.

Months ago, I had spent the entire day sequestered in my bedroom, listening to the voices of my wife and three children, while recovering from a stomach bug. James was age five, and our daughters were two and a half, and fifteen months. The following morning...