Paco’s Papa

Paco’s Papa

Ernie felt like God had played a cruel joke on him. Born a free spirit, he was raised in a staid Victorian house on Main Street in a Midwestern town. His mother crammed her religion down his throat, and a perfectionistic father demanded that Ernie excel in everything he did. Ernie felt smothered. He later wrote that he grew up in a town of wide lawns and narrow minds.

His folks wanted him to become a doctor, but he loved to write. After high school he escaped to Kansas City to work for a newspaper. His parents were scandalized, but his editors said that he was a boy genius. His wanderlust led him to join the Red Cross ambulance corps on the Italian front in World War I. It was exhilarating until he was severely wounded. In the hospital he fell in love with a volunteer nurse named Agnes. Ernie returned home to Illinois confident that she would soon join him as his wife.

A few months later, he received a devastating letter. Agnes had fallen in love with someone else. Ernie never got over that rejection. He began to drink heavily. Though a rising star in the literary world, he was gaining a reputation as a barroom brawler. Rage and alcoholism would torment Ernie to the end.

One day Agnes showed up at his father’s lake. When he opened the door, she pleaded, “Ernie, please forgive me and take me back!” Without a word, he slammed the door in her face. A few years later, when his father took his own life, Ernie snarled, “Everyone who commits suicide rots in hell.” When his mother died, he refused to attend her funeral. Over the years, booze and bitterness dismantled Ernie. He plowed through four marriages. Even though his friends called him Papa, his children lived in fear of his rage. At age sixty-one, he put a shotgun to his head and pulled the trigger.

His family called him Ernie, but the world remembers him as Ernest Hemingway. He wrote novels like For Whom the Bell Tolls and A Farewell to Arms. He was awarded both the Pulitzer and Nobel Prizes. As a writer, Hemingway was a giant. As a celebrity adventurer, he was bigger than life. But the real Ernie never ceased being the bitter little boy who couldn’t do enough to please his parents.

None of Hemingway’s stories capture his deep wounds more than the one about Paco. After he wrongs his father, the boy runs away to Madrid. Paco’s father follows him to the city. Unable to find Paco, his father takes out a newspaper ad: “Paco, meet me at the Hotel Montana, twelve noon, Tuesday. All is forgiven. Papa.” When the father arrives at the hotel, he finds a lobby filled with eight hundred young men, all named Paco.

Ernie captures his and our hearts’ longing. Whether we are the Prodigal Son in the far country or the older brother keeping all the rules at home, we want to know that our father loves us unconditionally. What a difference it would have made for Ernest Hemingway—and would make for all of us—to grasp this:

God loves each of us as if there were only one of us.

When God our Savior revealed his kindness and love, he saved us, not because of the righteous things we had done, but because of his mercy.

Titus 3:4-5