Most, if not all of you, are familiar with the story in Luke 15: 11-32 typically called the parable of the prodigal son. Those of you who have read what I have written or heard me speak on this passage know that I feel it has been misnamed. It would be more appropriate to refer to it as the parable of the prodigal father. After all, the story is not so much about the return home of the son, the return of the prodigal, that is, wasteful louse of a son to his father, as it is a story about how the prodigal, extravagant love of the father returns the son to himself.

Yes, the son “came to himself” but not, I maintain, when he was in the pig slop, flat broke and broken down, but rather when, before he can even utter a rehearsed word of remorse, his old man sees him, goes to him, embraces, and smothers him with the lavishness of his ridiculous love. It is then the exiled son falls in a heap, broken open, and returned to himself by his father who knows before his son can return home, before he can fully return to the father, he must first be returned to the deepest, truest part of himself from which he has been exiled. That is the gift of the father to the son.

The Jesuit priest Gregory Boyle who founded Homeboys Industries in Los Angeles and who has pastored and worked with gang members for thirty years, in the lineage of Dorothy Day, Mother Maria Skobtsova, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Mother Teresa often speaks about returning persons to themselves. If I’m not mistaken, he got this from the Polish-Swiss psychologist and psychoanalyst Alice Miller. He knows that on the way to all becoming one — which was the prayer and desire Jesus announced and embodied as the incarnation of the dream of God—we must first become one with ourselves. We must first become one with our flaws and our failings, yes, our contradictions and betrayals, our mishaps and misdeeds, our secret shame and our public disgraces. But deeper than these, there lies a well from which springs a truer truth about ourselves and who we are and toward which we must move and to which we belong. The truest truth about ourselves “hidden with Christ in God” is that we are the beloved of God, beautiful, exquisite, and blessed, the Rose of Sharon, the apple of God’s eye.

On March 18, 1958, Thomas Merton, the renowned Trappist monk, went from his monastery to Louisville to have printed a new postulant’s guide when, while crossing the street at what is now the corner of 4^th and Mohammed Ali Boulevard, he had an epiphany that since that time has become so famous that there is a plaque and description of his experience placed there by the Kentucky Historical Society. In his book Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander Merton explains how the illusion of separateness and the fallacy of spiritual elitism fostered in the monastery, was suddenly and completely shattered by seeing — as if for the first time — the sheer radiance of the otherwise pedestrian pedestrians crossing the street and that they belong to him and he to them. He writes:

In Louisville, at the corner of Fourth and Walnut, in the center of the shopping district, I was suddenly overwhelmed with the realization that I loved all those people, that they were mine and I theirs, that we could not be alien to one another even though we were total strangers. It was like waking from a dream of separateness, of spurious self-isolation in a special world, the world of renunciation and supposed holiness… This sense of liberation from an illusory difference was such a relief and such a joy to me that I almost laughed out loud… I have the immense joy of being man, a member of a race in which God Himself became incarnate. As if the sorrows and stupidities of the human condition could overwhelm me, now I realize what we all are. And if only everybody could realize this! But it cannot be explained. There is no way of telling people that they are all walking around shining like the sun.[ 1]       

In his journal, Merton continues:

Then it was as if I suddenly saw the secret beauty of their hearts, the depths of their hearts where neither sin nor desire nor self-knowledge can reach, the core of their reality, the person that each one is in God’s eyes. If only they could all see themselves as they really are. If only we could see each other that way all the time. There would be no ore war, no more hatred, no more cruelty, no more greed. . . . I suppose the big problem would be that we would fall down and worship each other.[2]

Merton, well-acquainted with his own contradictions and foibles, knows that the risk of idolatry, the temptation to hit our knees in the presence of the other, sadly is infinitesimal so far are we from reverencing one another and so far are we from seeing ourselves “as we really are.”

I have been offering spiritual direction for nearly 30 years. I have come to see that my primary privilege and responsibility as a spiritual director is to do what I can, in cooperation with the sapient Spirit of God, to return persons to themselves or as Martin Buber once said, “to confirm that which is deepest in the other.” Knowing disgrace myself up close and personal, knowing the paralysis and lethality of shame, I see myself as being in the re-gracing business, to mirror back to people the truth of themselves that for a moment or a week or a month or a lifetime they have not been able to see, “the pure glory of God” in themselves.

I am neither trying to bring people to God nor God to people. That would be as presumptuous as it is unnecessary. “God is at home. It is we who have gone out for a walk,” Meister Eckhart is reported to have said. I am hoping to facilitate persons returning home to their true identity, to the beauty and depths of their heart where the Divine waits for them with the finest robe, ring, and sandals.

But, here’s the deal, perhaps the most important lesson or revelation in all of this. This isn’t merely the role of the spiritual guide. This isn’t exclusive to a foolish old man who showers his undeserving son with the lavishness of his love. It’s the work and good fortune of all of us. It’s what unites us one-to-another in the sacred kinship that is born in the heart of God who is the original beloved community.

It is the nature of love, and more so the work of love, and therefore the work of spouses and parents and children and friends and colleagues and classmates and ministers and strangers waiting to become acquaintances waiting to become friends, to do our part to return one another to that truest, most inviolable, ineffable, exquisite core of who we are in God. Just that. That’s it. That’s enough. It’s so simple it will take us the rest of our lives to become so naturally proficient at it that it becomes spontaneously who we are with others.

And as Fr. Greg Boyle and Dorothy Day and all spiritual guides know, when we help others to return to themselves, they do us the favor of returning us to the most noble, and magnanimous truth of who we are in God. What goes around comes around in the re-gracing work of God’s love.

Have I told you lately how you shine like the sun?

Peace Goodpeople,
Dan
ENDNOTES

[1] Thomas Merton, Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander, p. 156, 157.
[2] Merton, Conjectures p. 158.