Dear Amy,
What breaks our Father’s heart? That would be a long list to be sure. I’ll pick one thing.
Recently I got to see Les Misérables at the Regent. What a tremendous story of redemption, the power of love flowing through a redeemed life, and the triumph of love over adversity. But also so very sad⸺I was grateful for the darkness in the theatre, so no-one could see my tears. The saddest song? Some would say I Dreamed a Dream, and that is indeed crushing (“now life has killed the dream I dreamed”), or On My Own, Éponine’s song of unrequited love for Marius (“the trees are bare and everywhere the streets are full of strangers”). But there is another: Javert’s soliloquy, Stars.
Javert is the policeman who pursues the protagonist Jean Valjean through the decades, after he breaks parole from a 19 year sentence of slavery for stealing a loaf of bread to feed his starving family. Valjean receives unexpected grace and repents (“I feel my shame inside me like a knife. He told me that I have a soul. How does he know? What spirit comes to move my life? Is there another way to go?”). Thus he begins a sacrificial life of love, but Javert cannot accept this. Stars is his vow to pursue Valjean and never rest until he is again behind bars. He sings, “mine is the way of the Lord” (he is so wrong), and “those who falter and those who fall must pay the price” (wrong again, Javert — Rom 8:1-4, 31-39).
An isolated sad event cannot be a tragedy, no matter how heart-rending, as explained by Educating Rita’s teacher. Rather, a tragedy is the long and apparently inescapable trajectory of a life, set in motion by a particular course of events or an attitude of the heart, leading inexorably to one’s own destruction. It is the prolonged inevitability which makes it so. Javert eventually takes his own life, the only possible consequence given his Pharisaical heart, hardened over so many years.
Many today live Javert’s life, bereft of grace. Each one is a tragedy, and each one breaks our Father’s heart.
Love with the Father’s love, Amy! 🙏