TWO WAGERS, TWO PARABLES - Chapter 30

Chapter 30 and the book ends with two stories, both of them true. One for today and one for Friday.

Story number one is about a boy of twelve or thirteen who, in a fit of crazy anger and depression, got hold of a gun somewhere and fired it at his father, who died not right away but soon afterward. When the authorities asked the boy why he had done it, he said it was because he could not stand his father, because his father demanded too much of him, because he was always after him, because he hated his father. Then later after the boy had been placed in a house of detention, a guard was walking down the corridor late one night when he heard sounds from the boy's room, and he stopped to listen. The words he heard the boy sobbing out in the dark were, "I want my father, I want my father."!

Modern society is like that boy in the house of detention. We have killed off our Father. Two many unanswered questions, too often disappointed. It is difficult to live with uncertainty. And yet we can hear the sobs, "I want my father, I want my father."!

"The center of me," said Bertrand Russell, "is always and eternally a terrible pain - a curious wild pain - a searching for something beyond what the world contains." It seems that the alternative to disappointment with God is disappointment without God.

"Have you not heard of the man who lit a lamp on a bright morning and went to the marketplace crying ceaselessly, 'I seek God. I seek God'... They laughed, and... the man sprang into their midst and looked daggers at them. 'Where is God?' he cried. 'I will tell you. We have killed Him, you and I.' We are all His killers, but how can we have done that? How could we swallow up the sea? Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the horizon? What will we do as the earth is set loose from the sun?" Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science

This first story concerns the loss of a father. Many declare that they do not believe in God just as Richard did. But from where then does the wounded sense of betrayal come from if no one is there to do the betraying?

As I cry out to my Father, what am I sobbing? Why me God? When will You answer me God? How are You going to fix this God? or "I want my Father, I want My Father!"