Unreciprocated Love

NOTE: These weekly blogs are prepared as Sunday sermons for North Baptist Church in Port Chester.

From my perspective, there has never been any question about the true star of the popular 1987 film Dirty Dancing. 

Not Patrick Swayze in the role of Johnny Castle, the strong but sensitive dance instructor at the 1960’s era Catskill summer resort where the action takes place. And not Jennifer Grey, the naïve coming-of-age Frances “Baby” Houseman who falls in love with Johnny.

Granted, the characters captured the hearts of a generation of X’ers. I still remember two of my daughters re-creating a dance number by Johnny and Baby, imitating their lithe movements so meticulously that I was afraid one might swoop the other over her head and jump off a stage.

But to me, the central character has always been Baby’s father, Dr. Jake Houseman, played by Jerry Orbach.

Orbach, a seasoned song-and-dance man remembered for his role as Detective Lennie Briscoe in Law and Order, was probably the best-known actor in the low-budget film. Jake Houseman suffers all the classic stresses of fatherhood, including the open rebellion of Baby, his youngest, who becomes actively and secretly involved with the older and more experienced Johnny.

Jake also has a troublesome older daughter Lisa, played by Jane Brucker, who decides to become sexually active with a boy at the resort. Lisa, who strives to feign intelligent worldliness she lacks, provides one of the more imponderable lines in the show: “If Vietnam falls, is China next?”

With both daughters lying to him and sneaking around behind his back, Jake finds himself in an awkward position: he is a faithful provider who envelops his daughters with material possessions, security, and love. But to his daughters, once those possessions are securely in place, Jake’s presence in their lives is scarcely noticed except for its occasional inconvenience.

I may be overstating the case a bit, but this is how the fathers of adored daughters sometimes feel about that inevitable time when Daddy is no longer the central figure in a girl’s life. Of course, Jake’s daughters still love him, but they’re quickly maturing to the point where they no longer need him. To Jake and millions of fathers like him, his love for them is beginning to feel unreciprocated.

Dirty Dancing is supposed to be a charming love story involving Baby and Johnny, and of course it is.

But the film is also a parable of fatherhood, and it’s not a lot different from the soap opera related by Jesus that we call the Prodigal Son.

Both are stories about loving fathers, and we are invited to put ourselves in God’s place: what does a parent do with love when love is no longer returned?

The parable of the prodigal son, which is also called the parable of the good father, seems to be making this point: greater love has no one than the love that is not returned.

My spouse and I have spent many hours immersed in the story and music of Les Misérables, on stage and most recently in the cinema.

As disciples of Victor Hugo’s novel know, Les Misérables is a parable of love: parental love, romantic love, and divine love. The show’s climatic declaration is from Hugo himself: “To love another person is to see the face of God.”

For me, the most loving person in the story is Éponine because she never stops loving the dashing Marius, even though the young man will never love her.

My spouse, who has memorized the entire score of Les Misérables and is more expert than I am in its nuances, believes the most loving character is Fantine, who chooses a life of degradation so her daughter Cossette could live, and ultimately she gives her life for Cossette.

But Fantine had a loving benefactor in Jean Valjean, who knelt beside her death bed and raised Cossette as his own child.

Éponine, on the other hand, was the daughter of the thieving Thénardiers who cynically used her to advance their own felonious schemes. When Éponine fell in love with Marius, he treated her like one of the boys and turned his attentions to Cossette. Éponine knew this was unlikely to change, that she would forever be on her own.

I love him
But everyday I'm learning
All my life
I've only been pretending
Without me
His world will go on turning
The world is full of happiness
That I have never known
I love him
I love him
I love him
But only on my own

The youthfully obtuse Marius, who thinks of Éponine as a pal, gives her a love note addressed to Cossette and asks the heartsick girl to deliver it for him. Éponine does so, but she returns to Marius at the barricades where students prepare to do battle with the repressive Parisian regime. As she struggles to get over the barrier, Éponine is fatally wounded.

Marius rushes to hold her in his arms, and I can never listen to her dying song without a small catharsis:

The rain can't hurt me now
This rain will wash away what's past
And you will keep me safe
And you will keep me close
I'll sleep in your embrace at last
The rain that brings you here
Is Heaven-blessed!
The skies begin to clear
And I'm at rest
A breath away from where you are.

Éponine, whose love will never be reciprocated, loves anyway. And not only that: she gives her life for the love that will never be returned.

It is that kind of love that emanates from the parable of the Prodigal Son.

The misnamed story (Jesus never used the title) places too much attention on the loving father’s sons, both the callous ingrate and the smoldering aggrieved.

Jesus is on his journey to Jerusalem as he has been throughout much of Luke’s gospel. His loyal followers are divided into two main groups: tax collectors and sinners, and Pharisees and scribes.

The tax collectors and sinners are not the Pharisees’ type of people; in fact, they are not our type of people.

The tax collectors are government lackeys skimming large amounts of money off the taxes they collect from decent folks. “Sinners” are so designated because they have committed moral offenses so grievous that they are no longer allowed in the Synagogue. And Jesus loves to hang with both tax collectors and sinners, engaging them in friendly conversation and even joining them for supper.

The Pharisees and scribes – proud exemplars of moral comportment – complain audibly about the riff-raff Jesus associates with.

Which reminds Jesus of a story, which he shares with the riff-raff loudly enough for the exemplars of comportment to hear him.

The father in the story is identified simply as a “man,” but the two sons are more vividly cast.

The younger son is self-absorbed and impatient, lacking in gratitude to the father who enables him to live comfortably and eager to strike out on his own in search of a hedonist existence.

The older son is a self-righteous conformist, orthodox, boring, and unadventurous.  He reminds you of the Pharisees.

Neither son is a prize, but the father loves them both – unconditionally and without any hope they will return his love.

The younger son shows his disdain for his father by making it clear he regards the old man as a meal ticket. As far as this son is concerned, the old man can’t die soon enough.

In fact, the son tells the father, let’s dispense with all that. You give me everything I would have inherited anyway and I’ll get out of your hair.

The father, disappointed but committed to supporting the free will of his children, complies.

What happens next is pure novella, and Jesus lays it on thick. It’s not hard to figure out what Jesus meant by the “dissolute living” that caused the son to squander his father’s money. And when the son ends up feeding pigs – those unclean creatures Jews weren’t even allowed to touch – it’s obvious the boy could fall no lower.

When he had spent everything, a severe famine took place throughout that country, and he began to be in need. So he went and hired himself out to one of the citizens of that country, who sent him to his fields to feed the pigs. He would gladly have filled himself with the pods that the pigs were eating; and no one gave him anything. But when he came to himself he said, 'How many of my father’s hired hands have bread enough and to spare, but here I am dying of hunger! Luke 15:14-17

Chagrined, penitent, and now history’s archetype of the perfect screw-up, the young man returns home to the father he once spurned and begs for food and a job.

The father – still unconditional in his love for the little creep – leaps to his feet in joy and welcomes the boy home.

The celebration feast must have looked like the repasts Jesus is having with the salvaged tax collectors and sinners.

Too, the upright scribes and Pharisees couldn’t have missed that Jesus was comparing them with the offended older brother.

Now his elder son was in the field; and when he came and approached the house, he heard music and dancing. He called one of the slaves and asked what was going on. He replied, “Your brother has come, and your father has killed the fatted calf, because he has got him back safe and sound.” Then he became angry and refused to go in. His father came out and began to plead with him. But he answered his father, “Listen! For all these years I have been working like a slave for you, and I have never disobeyed your command; yet you have never given me even a young goat so that I might celebrate with my friends. But when this son of yours came back, who has devoured your property with prostitutes, you killed the fatted calf for him!” Then the father said to him, “Son, you are always with me, and all that is mine is yours. But we had to celebrate and rejoice, because this brother of yours was dead and has come to life; he was lost and has been found.’” Luke 15:26-32

If the scribes and Pharisees were listening, they would have got the point.

Jesus is telling them: Shut up.

Sinners and tax collectors may not be your kind of people, but God has always loved them and God could not be happier that they are now following Jesus on his way to Jerusalem.

The good fortune of God's love extends to the scribes and Pharisees as well as to the sinners and tax collectors. It extends to the resentful older brother as well as to the ungrateful and profligate brother.

We are all, in fact, fortunate that God loves each of us, even at times when his love for us has not been reciprocated.

And, granted, it’s not always easy to love God. God is a vast concept, an invisible spirit, an incomprehensible essence of creativity and order. How, exactly, do we love a God too big for us to even imagine?

The parable of the Good Father who loves his sons no matter who they are or what they do is a comforting message for us as we continue our Lenten journey to Jerusalem.

The unreciprocated love God has for each of us is the greatest kind of love we will ever experience.

And God will never stop waiting for us to return to the fold, no matter how far we stray or how creepy we get.