On the walls and columns of a grey stoned sanctuary hung twelve to fifteen prints of Rembrandt's Return of the Prodigal . The audience was mix of parents and grandparents and nuns and pastors and students. We were all gathered in a Beverly Hills' Anglican church to hear writer/speaker Henri Nouwen speak on his book The Return of the Prodigal: A Story of Homecoming (Image Books, 1994). That afternoon ten years ago, he beautifully wove together his own narrative with the characters of Jesus' parable (younger son, older son, father), a brief portrait of Rembrandt's life, and the story of the painting. Everyone there was invited into an understanding of the younger son, an understanding of the older son, and an encounter with the father of Luke 15.

During the Q & A time with Father Nouwen it became clear the audience identified deeply with the characters' experiences. Several questions were asked by persons who knew first-hand the pain of leaving home on bad terms. Other questions revealed the loneliness of sons and daughters who knew only duty in their life of faith. However, moms and dads, looking for advice concerning their children, asked the bulk of the questions. One had a daughter who was much like the younger son in the story. Several had a son who “did all the right things.” Others had to kick out a rebellious child. They each wanted to ensure that their daughter felt loved or their son did not grow resentful like the older son of the story.

What was the right thing for them to do? They wanted direction and assurance and advice. Nouwen replied patiently to each. He spoke directly to all of these questions, except one.

There is little I recall today of what Nouwen said specifically throughout the afternoon. I cannot remember what this mother of a junior high boy asked, but ten years later his response to her still sticks with me. Instead of explicitly answering the mom's question, he paused and said this:

There is much that can be said of parenting a child, but the greatest gift any parent can give her child is the gift of being a growing person herself.

He went on to explain that in a community like a family, love is communicated more by who you are than by any single situational choice or strategy. Moral education is often limited to discussions of skills or techniques. Nouwen resisted such an approach. He did not ignore this woman's particular concern for her son, but rather placed it in a fuller perspective. He did not minimize any of those particular questions (for after all, he answered those questions for more than half-an-hour), but in his response he pointed out the critical importance of recognizing the larger context in which life is lived and love is communicated. In so doing, he seemed to ask all of us, “In the whole of your life, are you a growing person?” For it is the whole of one's life that is offered to those closest, not just the parts one chooses to give.

Those words offered far more than parenting advice. Every time I become absorbed in a spiritual or relational “how to” question (e.g. how to pray, how to forgive such-and-such a person, how to build trust with so-and-so, how to receive grace from a friend, how to grow in Christ-likeness), those words in Beverly Hills offer some perspective, some breathing space. Love and life cannot be reduced to a ‘how to' skill. Loving a person is not a strategy one simply applies. Nor is living truthfully a technique we can reduce to three or four principles.

Living honestly and faithfully, becoming a growing person, is more often caught than calculated. It is not so much a mastery of principles we must learn, but rather it is an open-ness to a certain sort of life – the mystery of God's life expressed in ours. The life of God as communicated in Jesus and the Spirit has a contagious character. To use C.S. Lewis' analogy, such a life is “a good infection.” (See note below). It is spread person to person to person. Grace infects un-grace just as one wonderfully generous father ran out to meet his wayward and dying son (Luke 15). Do we ever realize the way one person's simple concern for another often “injects” love into un-
loving circumstances? The local church is the central expression of this contagion, God's reconciling grace in this world. Are we resistant to this infection? Or are we open to such a gracious life in our communities?

Ten years ago, one teenager's mom was looking for a ‘how to' in her relationship with a son. She was entrusted with something much larger -- an insight into the way we grow and change, an insight into the way we offer compassion and hospitality and truth to one another. Henri Nouwen challenged her person to person. The greatest gift any parent can give her child is the gift of being a growing person herself. That challenge has infected me as well. To be a growing person is to be open to the mystery of God's transforming love uniquely shared in our lives and communities. By God's grace may we all be “infected.”
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On C.S. Lewis' “good infection” and becoming like Christ ( Mere Christianity , pp. 147-149):

For you are no longer thinking simply about right and wrong; you are trying to catch the good infection from a Person. It is more like painting a portrait than obeying a set of rules…

The real Son of God is at your side. He is beginning to turn you into the same kind of thing as Himself. He is beginning, so to speak, to “inject” His kind of life and thought…into you…

Some of you may feel that this is very unlike your own experience. You may say “I've never had the sense of being helped by an invisible Christ, but I often have been helped by other human beings.” That is rather like the woman in the first war who said that if there were a bread shortage it would not bother her house because they always ate toast. If there is no bread there will be no toast. If there were no help from Christ, there would be no help from other human beings. He works on us in all sorts of ways: not only through what we think our “religious life.” He works through Nature, through our own bodies, through books, sometimes through experiences which seem (at the time) anti -Christian. When a young man who has been going to church in a routine way honestly realizes that he does not believe in Christianity and stops going—provided he does it for honesty's sake and not just to annoy his parents—the spirit of Christ is probably nearer to him then than it ever was before. But above all, He works on us through each other.

Men are mirrors, or “carriers” of Christ to other men. Sometimes unconscious carriers. This “good infection” can be carried by those who have not got it themselves. People who were not Christians themselves helped me to Christianity. But usually it is those who know Him that bring Him to others. That is why the Church, the whole body of Christians showing Him to one another, is so important. You might say that when two Christians are following Christ together there is not twice as much Christianity as when they are apart, but sixteen times as much. But do not forget this. At first it is natural for a baby to take its mother's milk without knowing its mother. It is equally natural for us to see the man who helps us without seeing Christ behind him. But we must not remain babies. We must go on to recognize the real Giver.

Discuss!

( C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity , Macmillan Publishing Co. 1952)