My song today is the hymn, ‘Come Back to Me (Hosea)”. I came across this hymn recently when Sheila introduced it to me. I have been unable to find out very little about the hymn. The text is by Gregory Norbert and I believe it was by the ‘Benedictine Foundation of The State of Vermont’.
Gregory Norbert is a respected spiritual leader, composer, singer and retreat director. He spent 21 years as a Benedictine monk at Weston Priory in Vermont. His specialty is group spiritual development and renewal, using song, Scripture and the spoken word. Gregory travels extensively, providing missions, concerts, retreats and workshops for those in hospital, prison and teaching ministries. In addition to the twelve music collections published during his twenty-one years as a Benedictine monk at Weston Priory, he has released several prayer books and octavos through OCP. Gregory is a graduate of the Institute for Spiritual Leadership in Chicago and received his master’s degree from the Institute of Pastoral Studies at Loyola University, Chicago. Gregory is director of the ‘Hosea Foundation’, a not-for-profit ministry dedicated to the renewal of the church and spiritual development in individuals. Gregory and his wife, artist Kathryn Carrington, live in Hanover, New Hampshire. Her gold-leaf icon paintings hang in many churches.
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The message that is central to this song is the reunification of mankind with their God.
There are times in the life of every Christian when some experience leads them to question not only their faith but the very existence of God. Such times are personalised to each of us. They can include horrific accidents that involve drastic changes to one’s lifestyle or the death of a loved one in tragic or terrible circumstances such as murder, miscarriage, stillbirth or the death of a healthy child through a ‘hit and run’ incident by a drunken motorist or the diagnosis of a terminal illnesses like child cancer to someone with all their life yet before them.
Other tragic circumstances such as sexual abuse by a parent, a parish priest or another trusted adult can rock one’s faith in ever believing in anything pure or positive again, along with rape or some other evil act perpetrated against an innocent person. Even the suicide of a loved one can emotionally destabilise a person and lead them to withdraw from the world of love and trust. Many years as a Probation Officer often revealed to me, how a broken relationship or divorce seemed to foster an individual’s belief that never again, would anything good or anyone loving ever come back into their lives.
For whatever reason, human beings seem to have this overbearing need to apportion fault and blame somebody for something bad that has happened to them or other loved ones. The person with whom the blame is most often placed is God himself. The most usual and natural human response is something like, “If there is a loving God looking after us, then why, oh why did He allow such a tragic thing to happen to…?”
I cannot provide you with an answer to heart-breaking questions like this except to supply the reader with a plausible explanation that they will hopefully accept.
So often, one hears the statement ‘To be human is to err!” Let us examine this proposition for a moment and consider it to be the case. For the purpose of this exercise, let us first assume that there is a God; a supreme spiritual being who has power and dominion over the world and all who inhabit it.
Second, let us consider the healthy relationship between a parent and their child; both of whom share a loving relationship. The only way that a good parent brings up their child to be a healthy individual who can grow into a responsible adult is to allow the child to learn by making their own mistakes. Only through giving their child the ultimate power to decide for themselves, can the individual decide between what is ‘right and wrong’ or ‘good and bad’ for them.
A loving parent will gradually allow their growing child to make more decisions for themselves the older they get. By the time they are around 18 years old, it will be up to them to decide upon all the important decisions in their lives, whether to go on to University, what job to get, who to marry, where to live; even how to live! The loving parent may not like the decisions their child makes, may disagree strongly with them and may strongly believe such decisions to be wrong ones, harmful and hurtful ones to make; but nevertheless accepts their grown child’s right as an adult to make them and to take the consequences of them. Adult children who take all manner of drugs or have addictive illnesses like anorexia that may/will lead to their eventual early death represent such a tragic circumstance where a parent sometimes has to watch on without being able to persuade their child to the contrary.
Without moralising, most responsible and intelligent parents will endure the anguish if they cannot persuade or prevent their child acting thus. When their help and advice isn’t accepted, all the parent can do is ‘to be there’ for their child if/when needed. In their most painful of moments, an adult may have to give way to the expressed wishes of a dying parent in hospital, watching them end their pain by shortening their life. The parent (who is of sound mind) may decide to have a ‘do not resuscitate’ placed on themselves instead of receiving any further medical intervention. In such situations, grown and adult children are obliged to honour the wishes of their dying parent to make the most crucial decision of their life.
This is what an individual’s ‘Freedom to decide’ is all about. This basic freedom is the seed for all freedom granted to individuals by parents, state, and dare I say it, God!
Back to the human propensity of ‘blaming God’. It is wrong to blame God just as it is to blame a parent respecting the free will of an adult child to exercise that free will and to make their own decisions throughout their life. I believe that the Lord God created us and gave us dominion over animals on the earth. God gave us life, but he gave us something as important as life itself; the free will as humans to decide whether to do right or wrong, good or bad, to be hateful or loving, hurtful or comforting with the life we have been given.
It is in these opposite choices that all individual decisions made throughout every person’s life determines the very nature and wholesomeness of the character they become. Please note, as a ‘Behaviourist’ by practice, I avoid calling anyone a ‘good’ or a ‘bad’ person. I prefer to judge the act and not the person; to focus primarily on the ‘good’ and ‘bad’ things done instead of the person doing them. I do believe that most things that humans do spring from the decisions they make as a result of the ‘free will’ they exercise, but not always so. Occasionally, people who do bad things are unable to control the behaviour they are displaying because of prior conditioning in both their nature and their nurture (self and environment).
Ask yourself, what is the purpose of life if you accept that there is a God, without also accepting the concept of having ‘free will’? What is the purpose of being a Christian if it isn’t to act in a Christian way in all things? Christians believe that the purpose of being on earth in this life is to prepare for being in heaven in the afterlife. How is ‘good and bad’, and all the things in between determined on the ‘Day of Judgement’, if we did not decide to them through our own choice? Is someone else responsible for the action they compel you to do or does the responsibility and culpability reside solely with you? Even a jury of eleven good men and women will only produce a verdict of ‘guilty’ based upon the ‘culpability’ of the defendant before them and never upon the action itself.
People who had no choice in their action or control over it (people who are considered insane) are never held responsible for what they ultimately do in the eyes of the law. I believe that on ‘The Day of Judgement’, when God weighs all our life’s intentions and actions in the balance, He also will use a similar ruler of justice to measure what we did and failed to do in our lives(based upon the quality of ‘free will’ we exercised in the doing).
I know this point of view will not be acceptable to many people who still believe that it is essential to have somebody to blame for everything that happens in the world. I do believe that because our Maker made the Heavens and earth and then created mankind, that the buck stops with God. However, I stop short of placing God in the ‘blame-game-firing-line’ because He chose to give every man, woman and child He created ‘free will’. Were God to be held solely responsible for mankind’s outcome, then I believe such a proposition would remove the very reason for mankind’s existence on earth and make the purpose of our lives devoid.
I believe that mankind was given life on earth in order to prove himself/herself worthy of life in heaven. I’d much prefer to see God be put in the dock and plead ‘Guilty’ to being responsible for having given every person on earth ‘life’, but not for ‘the living of it!’
Love and peace Bill xxx