Prodigal

The most powerful Olympic moment I've ever seen was by any reasonable standard a fiasco.

During the 1992 Olympics I clicked on the TV and found live coverage of the men's 400m semifinals. Not far into the heat, a runner slowed and then fell. He lay there, in obvious agony, while his cohort churned toward the finish line. Slowly he picked himself up. His face contorted in pain, he hobbled along the track.

You have probably seen some version of this clip repeatedly. His name was Derek Redmond, and he turned into the Agony of Defeat Poster Boy for the Barcelona Olympics. In the moment, though, there was no slo-mo and no swelling music behind him. The announcers, frankly, were puzzled. "There's some sort of disturbance in the stands," they said, "some sort of scuffle with security." The "scuffle" was Redmond's dad, refusing to be deterred from his attempts to get onto the track. He went over to his son, and supported him as he finished the race in his own lane.

"This rather bizarre scene," as one of the announcers called it at the time, hit me hard. I did not choke up briefly; I did not wipe away a discreet tear. I blubbered like a baby, watching that father and that son together. Seven years later, wandering in Barcelona with friends, we wound up in the Olympic stadium and I started crying again, trying to tell them the story. For a long time I could not articulate why I found it so evocative, but I think I understand it better now. I think I was sobbing because Redmond illustrated a hard truth: sometimes you work unrelentingly for something that you just can't have. And then you can pick -- you can lie there and cry, or you can say, "This is brutal, but I'm not quitting." I think I was crying because his dad illustrated a fundamental truth about parenting: sometimes you can't fix it, but you can walk alongside anyway.

I have been working through Grace for the Good Girl slowly, mostly in my Monday Adoration hour. It is hitting me hard, chapter after chapter. When she writes about the prodigal son the author asks, "What do you think about the father in this story?"

Now I've heard that story a million jillion times, just like anybody else who grew up going to church. And I've thought about the younger brother, and I've thought about the older brother, but I'd never given the dad much thought. He's supposed to be God, and I'm not accustomed to critiquing God. I was a little surprised to see I had an answer right there, just waiting for the question to be asked. What do I think about the father? Bad idea, that's what I think. You're going to get taken, old man, that's what I think.

Whoa.

I've been thinking a lot about this one. It's important for me as a daughter, because I am certain that I could live a freer life if I knew I had room to fail. It's important for me as a mother, because I want to be the kind of parent who sees a child facing some kind of brokenness and walks alongside anyway. The kind of parent who pushes past the security guards, the kind of parent who comes tearing down the road in welcome -- not the kind of parent who thinks, 'Did he squander all that money and come crawling back to me? Because he needs to know that is just not okay."

It is a crazy implausible quixotic truth and I want to own it in both directions: love means seeing a child disappointed and in pain, and running -- heedless of transgressions and taboos -- to throw your arms around him.