I’ve had two magic moments this week. On both occasions I made it home after a long drive to find my 15-month son Harry still awake (and in time to finish his bath and put him to bed). I’d expected to be too late to see him, but thanks to some delaying tactics by his mother and clear motorways, I caught a magical 20 minutes. Both were unalloyed joy, an eruption of sheer delight that proved infectious as Harry and I laughed and jostled. Moments you wish you could bottle.
In charismatic Christian circles, an emphasis on ‘the Father heart of God’ has been trending for some years. I lose track of the ‘Father’s Heart’ conferences that have announced their way into my inbox. This emphasis is deeply experiential: encouraging believers to feel loved by their heavenly Father and to live in the light of this encounter.
I’m not sure what to make of it. I always found such events off-putting and now, struggling to find my footing on a new road, the last thing I think I want is a feelgood emotional experience. (Aside: Last week’s episode of the brilliant Rev, a sitcom centred on a London vicar, involved him accidentally swallowing Ecstasy and stumbling about the nave in such a loved-up trance). As in my last post, I’m hungry for truth and justice, not safe warm self-affirmation.
But I realised this week that my moments of unadulterated bliss with Harry this week are transcendent and (almost) divine. If God as Greatest Good exists, surely this is one of our best metaphors for the kind of uplifting encounter humanity could experience. Fatherhood is frequently routine, tiring and ordinary; it is also sacred and mysterious.
Eventful Journey 
It seems to be that there is nothing more hopeful than a hunger for justice. Right now many human beings are suffering abuse, cruelty, and exploitation from others and as long as we have records of human civilizations this has always been the case. To imagine that changing, I would need to reach for language like divine intervention, or miraculous, or the invading of the kingdom of God or the like. It is possible, of course, that those are false hopes, but they seem to me no less pausible than any other expectation for justice to be established. The entire annihilation of the human race strikes me as reason trade for the end of this seemingly perpetual victimization of some of the vulnerable that has always marked and marred human society. That is what I think to myself when, I do a starring contest with Truth, her glaring back, naked and cold, not caring if I recognize her or not, as Kierkegaard once said.
Thanks Tim. Even though I’m becoming more doubtful about life after death, the strongest thread holding me to a hope for afterlife is that there will be some justice for people who’ve barely experienced kindness or fairness before they die. This seems to be the heart of the Beatitudes – that there will be a setting-right for those in despair, who long for justice and peace but aren’t getting them. Will have to ponder the Kierkegaard quote. The boy could write.