The Prodigal Returns

I got back from England last week, but have not been feeling well since then. As a consequence I haven't really done much with the blog apart from letting the pre-prepared posts self-publish.

The funeral for Mom was strange - a bit formal - and with an obsequious High Anglican Priest named Father Williams, who reminded me a bit of his namesake, zany commedian Kenneth Williams, playing a version of Dickens' Uriah Heep.

But the important thing is not how I felt about it all, but that my Father was satisfied with everything, and that it was one stage completed in the necessary process of his grieving for a great loss. Here is a picture of the immediate family taken just before the procession to the chapel.


That's Dad on the left looking younger than me, even though he's 88 years old. I'd like to say that it's because I have higher mileage, but that wouldn't be true. Dad worked in factory under dreadful conditions until he was about 32, then as a mailman for 30 years when mailmen didn't have cars but bicycles. All this was after spending 6 years in the army, two of them in action where he was wounded and returned to the front lines after three months.

Who are the others? My older (yes older) brother, Peter, is the one in the back wearing glasses and standing immediately behind his wife. To his left is his son-in-law. All the others are Peter's children. Peter was, and still technically is, a member of the HSAUWC organization (Moonies, to the uninitiated). It's both shameful and troubling that he is a far better person than me, despite all my professions of faith. He is patient and kind and tolerant and meek - all qualities that elude me. But that's for another time.

In case you don't believe how incredibly youthful and vital my Dad is for a man of 88, here's a picture of him in the pub, the Poacher's Pocket, where we went for lunch and a great pint of English Bitter a few days before I came back.


Not everything was love and roses during my visit. I have tried countless times to share the gospel with my Father and I tried again while I was there. I try always to let him be the one that touches on God or spirituality before I have at it and this was no exception. But he is an incredibly stubborn man, styling himself as an intellectual (reads Zola and Hugo and George Eliot) and is massively influenced by the worst elements of modernism, rationalism and the enlightenment. The fruits of the German School of Higher Biblical Criticism have permeated into his thinking like ground water - not because he has read them, but because their influences percolated down into the society he grew up in, and bore their poison in the 70 years or so following their propagation among the clerisy.

To cut a long story short, I went with the idea of tenderly comforting my Dad with thoughts of Christ and wound up berating him for his intransigence. Great witness, eh? But at least I left him with the unmistakable reassurance that I love him, as I hope this picture shows.


Nevertheless, my being able to express at all any true feeling of affection in outward ways is the fruit of the Christ that I so poorly represent. I dread to think how much worse I would have been if the Lord had not saved me and gone to work on my character. Amazingly, He shines even in my darkness, and I thank Him for the grace shown to my Father in so many ways during this difficult time.

I'll try to get back in the swing of things here at the blog. The Romans 1-3 study is coming up and I'm not completely ready, so I'll have to buckle down.