The Turning

Our grandchildren frequently request to hear stories about when their grandfather was young, which they call “Little Grandpa stories.” A favorite is the story of the printer’s ink.

Decades ago, the tale begins, one Christmas when Grandpa was about your age, his parents gave him a longed-for gift: a printer’s set complete with gleaming bottles of dark liquid ink. Grandpa’s father sternly warned him that this gift was not to be assembled until later in the day in the basement workshop. The waiting was too hard, and when his parents were not looking, Little Grandpa opened his gift in the living room. A bottle of that dark black ink spilled onto the newly installed beige carpet. His father angrily confronted Little Grandpa: “What did I tell you not to do?” He raised his hand in a gesture that could only mean trouble. But Grandpa’s mother quickly appeared between cowering Little Grandpa and that raised hand. “Dear,” she gently remonstrated, “he’s only a boy.”

Wide-eyed, our grandchildren nod at the mental picture and its obvious moral: Do what you are told; be obedient. But they absorb a complete picture that includes merciful intervention as an essential dynamic of the story.

Here on the cusp of Lent, that most solemn of liturgical seasons, this week’s readings are all about the pendulum-like swing of disobedience and obedience, sin and forgiveness, estrangement and reconciliation. But they are not simple children’s stories. At a deeper, spiritual level they alert us to the process of turning. They call us to look at our life and respond once again not merely to commands but to the very desire of divine love itself, the merciful desire that we turn fully toward the love that has created and sustained us and continues to offer us fullness of life.