For many of us, as children, the freedom and promise of the adult world cannot possibly come soon enough. We will, at last, be able to surround ourselves with good things, the best things, and do whatever we would like. Perhaps it’s ice cream for dinner or spending all of your money on toys. Maybe throwing parties day after day for anyone who will come. The fantasy, whatever its shapes, has a familiar emotional contour, and at some point in our lives we discover its limits.
The prodigal son has cashed in his inheritance to go out into the world and to feast sumptuously upon all of its delights and pleasures, to give in to every temptation, to be freed at last from inhibition, and to be able to satisfy every whim. Living like that, you don’t have to worry about when it all might come crashing down. What might happen tomorrow is of very little consequence so long as it feels good now.
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In the parable, the prodigal son ends up destitute and broken through-and-through, but the money doesn’t have to run out to end up in the same place. If you want to feel really empty, try surrounding yourself with everything and everyone you could ever want, and still feeling empty and lost and broken. In those moments, we are invited to wake up to what is real.
The child’s mind, at its earliest stages, exists in a world of objects that are either pleasing or displeasing, good or bad; it either brings up a good feeling or it fails to do so, and our development depends on our ability to seek to thrive rather than to die, to be fed rather than to starve, to experience connection rather than isolation. If you feel bad, you simply find the thing that provides you with a better feeling, whether it is food, companionship, or anything else that might give comfort, warmth, and pleasure.
As we develop, we have the terrible realization that the good things don’t always feel good, and that we cannot trust the world to reliably modify our feelings for us. This is really, truly awful.
Instead, we have to actually understand what our needs are and meet them if we want to feel better — ice cream for dinner has its limits, and toys are no substitute for companionship. Worse still, some needs cannot be met, and there we encounter suffering. We may long for someone who is far away, or for one more conversation with someone who has died. We may have lost some degree of function, and need to understand ourselves and our life differently, rather than simply wishing that things were different.
We wake up to find ourselves in a world that is not just about being in the presence of the right things, but requires of us understanding, choice, action, and even a tolerance for all the indignities of the human life, from pain to despair, humiliation, and even emptiness.
The prodigal son at last becomes very well acquainted with suffering. In truth, he has probably been in pain for a very long time. He threw away everything he had ever known to try to meet some need, only it was the wrong tool time and again. He was trying to eat his way out of a cancer of the soul, and to use mere pleasure to try to address his disconnection from other people. He thinks nothing of leaving his family, and that surely comes from a place of pain.
Having at last awoken to the nature of his circumstances, he realizes that extravagance and indulgence are not, in fact, what he needs. Instead, he turns towards a modest existence in an environment that he knows he can trust. He is not cravenly discerning how to extract a little more from the father he had abandoned, nor manipulating those to whom he had long been dead. Instead, he experiences a change of heart and a change of mind, in which he is freed from endlessly dying in a world of illusion, and can at last take up his place among the living.
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The parable concludes with two pairs of major tensions. The first is that the prodigal son intends to return humiliated and right-sized, prepared to experience the real suffering and hardship that are inevitable in life, but knowing that he will, at least, live. As he returns, however, his father sees him far off, and prepares a banquet and to clothe his son in the finest glory he can muster. There is a tension here between expectations and reality.
The prodigal son goes out seeking pleasure, but cannot rest until he learns to suffer. He returns prepared to accept subservience and alienation, and finds acceptance and celebration. Jesus tells a lot of parables like this: that those who expect great things will find disappointment, while those who expect very little will find glory. This is not about playing meek in order to win favour, this is a true statement about the nature of spiritual development. We cannot really know joy, nor anything of the light of the world, so long as we deny suffering and darkness.
The second major tension is that between the father and the faithful son, in their response to the return of the prodigal son. The father is overjoyed, while the faithful son is bitter. He has worked hard and denied himself many things, and he never gets celebrated. If that is what he truly needs, perhaps he should find a way to seek it, rather than living a life which is in denial of himself. Perhaps he is as lost as the prodigal son ever was, only ensconced in a world of duty rather than indulgence, expecting that some reward lies just around the corner. Perhaps it is simply the inversion that troubles him, the perversion of right and wrong.
“That’s not how it’s supposed to be” is not very far away from the emptiness that sends the prodigal son out to discover his despair. The faithful son also imagines that if he just does the right things he will feel the right ways. The world owes it to him.
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We carry all these tensions and more besides within us across the whole of our lives. We are ever waking up to discover that the world is not actually the way we think it’s supposed to be, and that our lives will be what we make of them. Our time is short, and it is a great gift to discover soon that we must love one another fully, and live in a world of connection rather than in a world of abstract ideas and dead objects that never seem to satisfy. It is painful, too, to discover just how much suffering is involved in the world of the living, even if it might also just be good enough.
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God does not promise us endless joy and pleasure if only we will do the right thing; instead, we are told again and again that if we can enter into life with one another as we really are, and as life really is, we will find that it, too, might just be good enough. Like the servants of the father, we will have good enough bread upon which to subsist, and maybe even a little more than we need. There among the other lowly creatures, the tax collectors and sinners and all the other broken people of the world just like us, we will find there is companionship and joy, and there are other hearts with which to share our sorrow. In that modest Kingdom, we may not possess everything, but what holds us together will never fail.
When we can long for that, we will find that glory is plenteous and the feast does not cease. The modest joy of being truly at-home in our being will overflow, and all things will be made new.
May we let ourselves long for so little and so much as fills the whole Kingdom of God forever. May we set our hearts upon the banquet that never fails, and share abundantly of every good thing. May we love so flagrantly recklessly that our hearts will be broken open and again and again to the presence of the Belovèd always in our midst. May we return home to the One who will evermore delight in our companionship, in life and in death, in joy and in suffering, until the end of all things, and beyond.