About Isaac

Our first grandson was born a week ago, in the hospital in Leeds where they film the TV docu-series One Born Every Minute. (My daughter wisely declined to take part, wondering why any woman would want to be immortalised in labour.)

Jo and Will have called him Isaac.  I love that name. Its root meaning is ‘to laugh’.  In Genesis, God promises that Sarah will have a child by Abraham.  She laughs because she can’t imagine conceiving at her great age.  But when the promised son is born, Sarah makes a beautiful little speech: ‘God has brought laughter for me; everyone who hears will laugh with me…. Who would ever have said to Abraham that Sarah would nurse children? Yet I have borne him a son in his old age’.  To begin with her laughter was scornful. How different it is now; for even if it’s a joke on God’s part, it’s a happy generous joke that against all odds a life has been promised and now it’s arrived. 

Every birth represents hope, and every birth brings laughter into a family – at least, we want to believe so.  And like Isaac of old, our Isaac has brought happiness and laughter to our family.  He has already been loved and cherished for many months, laughingly called Pancake in the womb because he was due on Shrove Tuesday.  Now he has been welcomed into our family.  St Benedict says in his Rule that we should welcome every guest as if he or she were Christ himself.  As I held Isaac barely 24 hours old, I thought how hard it is not to see the infant Jesus in the face of a tiny child.

There is a lot more that Genesis says about Isaac.  As a boy perhaps no older than a chorister, he and his father take a long walk to a far-off mountain in the biggest ordeal either of them will ever have to face.  I wrote about Abraham and Isaac in my book Lost Sons, though I doubt that I did it justice: the Aqeda or ‘Binding’, as Judaism calls it, is a profoundly mysterious story.  And if I tried to write about it now, I would not be able to keep my grandson Isaac out of my mental image of the narrative. 

But standing back from that particular text, I am safe in saying that for little Isaac, life will mean journeys he or we cannot possibly foresee.  Most of these, we pray, will be filled with happiness and hope and Isaac-like laughter, for who does not wish for every new-born child these God-given blessings?   But inevitably, some paths will take him into hard and difficult places where there is more shadow than light; and at those times, we pray all the more that he will know that he is cherished by God as a beloved child, and be kept safe from harm. 

And who knows whether even in infancy, he does not already intuit this for himself? Who can say whether his little heart isn’t already responding to the everlasting heart of Love which framed and fashioned him in his mother’s womb and brought him into this world?  Cor ad cor loquitur: heart speaks to heart in ways that don’t need words. Childbirth is one of the joyful mysteries of life, a sacrament where laughter and human love evoke the Love that, as Dante put it, moves the sun and the other stars. I like to think that this is something all children know deep within themselves. Sadly, for many, growing up is an act of forgetting.

So we are now officially old.  But we are going to enjoy being grandparents.

Lost Sons

SPCK have just published my new book, Lost Sons: God’s Long Search for Humanity. I don’t want to indulge in self-promotion (moi?).  But now that it’s out I hope you’ll allow me to say a little about it.

Earlier this year the title felt as though it had a rueful irony to it.  A book is like a baby: a unique individual whom you have begotten. Its life becomes separate from yours; it has a character, temperament and will of its own. This offspring just didn’t seem to want to be born. It felt like a lost child.  The labour pains were considerable.

I’ve pondered why this might have been.  Maybe the content touched me too personally.  I am after all a (late) father’s son and a son’s father.  So the theme of sons who are lost and found was bound to bring up material from my own past and present.  It would take a psychotherapist (e.g. my wife) years to get to the heart of what all this might mean. 

The book looks at stories in the early part of the Bible that tell of sons who are ‘lost’ in various ways. Abel is murdered, Canaan cursed, Ishmael abandoned, Isaac destined for sacrifice, Esau supplanted, Joseph betrayed, Moses hidden. Adam is the archetype of them all, and us: the child who hides himself from God. In each case I try to show how Jesus in his passion and death is God’s ‘Lost Son’. It is not that these Old Testament stories are all ‘types’ who prefigure Jesus. But the first Jewish readers of the gospels would have known these stories intimately and would, I guess, have brought their own associations to the passion story, seeing ‘pre-echoes’ if you like in these lost sons.

But the wonderful thing about God’s Lost Son is that he is ‘found’ again in the resurrection.  And this turns out to be true of many of the ancient lost sons. Ishmael is rescued from the desert.  Isaac is not killed on the altar because an angel stays his father’s hand.  Esau is reconciled to the brother who supplanted him as Joseph is with the brothers who sold him into slavery.  Moses is discovered in the bulrushes and brought up in the royal palace. So the book is about resurrection as well as death, even if sometimes we have to go looking for it in dark and baffling places.

This may remind you of the parable of the Prodigal Son or, as I think it’s better called, the Lost Son and the Loving Father. It was constantly in my mind as I was writing.  In the introduction, I tell how that marvellous parable seems to have a counterpart in the Hebrew Bible in the moving story of Abraham and Isaac (depicted by Chagall in the painting on the book’s cover – see to the right, and don’t miss the little crucifixion scene in the top right-hand corner). In both stories it isn’t just the son who makes a journey to a ‘far country’ (an idea that appears in both stories) but the father as well: physically for Abraham, imaginatively for the father of the Prodigal. Perhaps the book is an invitation to make that journey as both father and son, ago into a far country and in doing so, enter more deeply into the mystery of the passion.

I dedicated the book to my wonderful not-lost son Aidan.  My three equally wonderful girls are asking when I intend to write a book called Lost Daughters and dedicate it to them.  I am thinking about that.