Dear Father,
It has been ages since we last spoke. Depressed by the continued absence of Fatherly epiphanies, and hitting wall after wall in my search for meaning in your grand design, I resorted to silence.
It wasn’t initially a conscious choice. The time between my letters had already been growing due to my increasing responsibilities, and it seemed at the start that the pause was simply more of the same, albeit longer. The more the time grew, however, the easier it became to just remain quiet, as mere thoughts of addressing you served only to remind me of past failures and of the apparent impossibility of any real future within your House. There was no point I thought, for as long as the reasons behind my departure remained unchanged, reconciliation would forever be impossible.
I understand Father that this fear is very similar to what wayward children, guilty of much greater crimes than a crisis of faith, feel after having left the fold for too long. Many an elder in your House, through sermon and scripture, has spoken at length of how misplaced these fears are. Our Father, they say, is most gracious; there is no sin is too great for his boundless forgiveness. It was after all to buy this very forgiveness that the Brother-Saviour gave his life.
But how does one forgive a lack of faith? How does one forgive a sin whose very core is the question of whether forgiveness is possible, whether it is even necessary? As the space between my letters grew wider, and as the hopelessness of satisfactorily concluding my quest grew greater, this question became of increasing importance to me. Would you, dearest Father, accept a wayward son back into your home? One who, while filled with a burning desire to return, was yet to reconcile the many questions that had drove him away to begin with? Would such a return to the House even mean anything? Could I truly call myself a child of the Cross if at every service, in every prayer, my once little friend was still able to ask his pernicious questions? If whenever called to exalt your name, or give solace to my brethren, or stand resolute in the face of temptation, I found myself thinking instead of whether or not the very foundations of our household were real? What good would such a return do?
Unfortunately, roaming aimlessly with these thoughts in my head had a very unintended consequence Father. It brought me to the realisation that fulfilment in spite of all this, despite the lack of your approval and forgiveness, is a real and attainable goal.
In this letterless stretch I met a lot of people, many of whom were like me: prodigal children long separated from their Houses. There were differences of course; some had left not because they feared they had no parents, but because they felt they had wrong homes. Some had left because they had discovered in their Houses corners so dark and vile they shattered the illusions of perfection they had come to believe were real. Some simply believed there was no true House, no one Father, that these structures were but the flawed efforts of children desperate to satisfy an inexplicable yearning they all found within themselves.
Regardless of their stripe Father, their presence and the manner in which they carried themselves revealed that a life without a House is not the thing I once feared it was. From within your gates we hear all kinds of things about the wayward children beyond the wall. They live lives of sin, empty and unfulfilled. They are cruel and selfish, blind and hateful, and the few with good hearts are ultimately misguided, doomed and damned by virtue of their pride and ignorance. Only you, through the Brother-Saviour, can save all men. Only you can bring us joy.
Seeing these wayward souls, living among them, banished all of those thoughts dearest Father. Here were people that were just as content as those I had seen back home, and in many ways even more so. Here were people that had found, in your earth, its people, its institutions, and even in their own existence, a fulfilment and calm that had eluded me for years.
To be fair these people weren’t new. I have been bumping into different kinds of your children from the day I set foot outside the House. There was however something about interacting with them, free from the impetus to judge their acts against your standard, that impressed on me the ease of their existence. Even Doubt, ever ready to throw a wrench in the works and derail my progress, seemed quieter when I was with them, less rash and more indulgent. Once I stopped trying to judge ideas against some sort of fixed, Crossian dogma, his questions lost their bite. In their presence he transformed from bane to boon, his probes helping all of us reach new levels of discovery instead of holding me back with the weight of his uncertainty.
And perhaps nothing could have sealed my fate more than that final realisation, dearest Father. My once little friend has been with me from the start of my quest, and rare were the occasions on which I managed to quiet him. To see his vindictive ruthlessness cooled by the acceptance of the children Outside, to glimpse a future in which I didn’t have to worry that every thought, every action had to be weighed against his incessant questions, a future where the truth was something to be sought and not something to be fought… I believe even you Father can understand why a weak child like myself would be seduced by that.
Of course none of this would have mattered had I made steady progress in my quest to find you. But being the all-knowing Father that you are, I suppose you always knew how this journey was going to end. The letter that launched my silence was not one of hope, and in the absence of any new discoveries to counter the despondent conclusions I reached prior to sending it, was there ever really much chance that my questions would find resolution?
And so here I am Father, ending my journey much like I started it: outside your gates and longing for your voice, my immense sadness at the futility of my quest tempered only by the renewed promise of finding peace amongst my prodigal brethren. Alas I will not be privy to that greatest of feasts thrown when one of your children return to the fold. I cannot in good faith take that final step through the gilded gates, for I still cannot accept that your House is my home. My doubts are too deep, your silence too deafening.
I can only hope that if you really are there, if you did receive any of the letters I sent on this saddest of quests, that somewhere in your heart lies the capacity to forgive even those of us that turn our backs to you. We want to love you Father, to know you, but in a world such as this an invisible, intangible, and inconstant parent makes that leap just a little too large.
So fare thee well dearest Father. May your grief at the loss of yet another child not dull the joy from those that choose to remain, resolute and steadfast, in your presence.
Forever with love,
Your Prodigal Son.
Letters To My Distant Father 