Abraham, Isaac and My Philippa
I wrote a few weeks ago about the practice of saying goodbye and of how I first learned this as a painful thing. It was when I realised that my baby daughter would one day leave. The bath had a few inches of warm soaped water, interspersed with various brightly coloured toys and I was kneeling devotionally over the bath, hands immersed in the water and playing watery games with her. She picked up a toy, turned from me, and began to entertain herself. This act of turning her back on me to play was her first act of separation. (I’m sure there were previous ones but this one I noticed).
In this act she established herself as an autonomous being and I knew that I would one day have to let her go.
There is ancient wisdom inherent in the story of Abraham and Isaac. On instructions from God the patriarch takes his son, who carries the wood for sacrifice, up the mountain, believing that only he Abraham, would return. What was going through his mind at the prospect of sacrificing his son? What faith was required to believe that ‘God would provide a sacrifice’?
The journey of Abraham up the mountain is the journey every parent must one day make with their child.
It’s a journey of sacrifice, of goodbye. It is one that God willing, I will make in my turn, as I let my child go out in the world, trusting that everything Ade and I have given her will be enough.
I often wonder what the journey home was like for Isaac and Abraham. Of what would the conversation consist? I’ve no idea, but I guess that the relationship was different from then on. Abraham had received his son back, but he was different, and they were different.
As a father I find this story is an almost incomprehensible. Almost I say, because since that incident in the bath, and my reflections on it over the years, I understand a dimension of sacrificing my child, in faith that as I let her go, I will receive her back again, but in a new way. I can’t be sure of that though. Maybe the world will swallow her. Maybe there will be uncontainable pain.Maybe. Maybe. It requires faith that God will provide a sacrifice and that as I let her go, a new relationship will be resurrected. Like the old, but different.
It requires faith because saying goodbye to the old relationship, the only one I know for sure at this moment, is difficult in prospect, but necessary.
Glenn, as on target as a Thomas Rosicky 30 yard blast. You again put into words unspoken feelings and sensibilities about parenthood that lurk in the depths of my own soul. I just got done teaching Gen 22, and the narrator is merciless in noting that Isaac was Abraham’s “son, his only son, whom [he]love[d],” and in the description, twice offered, that the “the two of them walked on together.” The other interesting observation to be made that you mention, is about the return trip: the text only mentions that “Abraham returned to the servants.” Is Isaac there and unmentioned, or does he hit the road as soon as he is unbound? Either way, the next time we see Isaac he is coming from the well where Hagar and Ishmael were rescued. At any rate, it is definitely a story about struggle, suffering, loving, and letting go, a.k.a., parenting. And does this tell us anything about God as parent? The story messes with my feeble mind. Thanks for your thoughts, love the blog.
Hey Mitch, thanks for the comment and the reminder that this ain’t no hay ride.
Rosicky is the man…how we could do with someone…anyone who even vaguely knows the direction of the goal.