The Father and His children

Thinking about fathers, sons, The Father, and The Son today...

“Great-hearted child, thy very being The Son!
   Thou know'st the hearts of all us prodigals;
For who is prodigal but him who has gone
   Far from the true to heart it with the false?
   And who but thee, that, from the animals’,
      Know'st all the hearts, up to the Father's own,
      Can tell what it would be to be alone!

Alone! No father!—At the very thought,
   Thou, the eternal light, wast once aghast;
A death in death for thee it almost wrought!
   How thou didst haste, about to breathe thy last,
   To call out Father ere thy spirit passed!
      Exhausted in fulfilling no hard vow,
      But doing his will who greater is than thou.

That we might know him, thou didst come and live;
   That we might find him, thou to him didst die;
The son-heart, brother, thy son-being give—
   We too would love the father perfectly,
   And to his bosom go back with the cry,
      Father, into thy hands I give the heart
      Which left thee but to learn how good thou art.

There are but two in all the universe—
   The father and his children—not a third;
Nor, all the weary time, fell any curse—
   Not once dropped from its nest a fledgling bird,
   Never old sorrow in young bosom stirred,
      But a love-pull it was upon the chain
      That draws the children to the father again.

O Jesus Christ, babe, man, eternal son!
   Take pity: we are poor where thou art rich
Our hearts are small, and yet there is not one
   In all the sad and noisy nursery, which,
   Merry or mourning in its narrow niche,
      Needs not the Father's heart this very now,
      With all his being's being, even as thou.”

~George MacDonald (Christmas, 1880)