The Return of the Prodigal Son: A Story of Homecoming

by Henri J.M. Nouwen

It is the place where I so much want to be, but am so fearful of being. It is the place where I will receive all I desire, all that I ever hoped for, all that I will ever need, but it is also the place where I have to let go of all I most want to hold on to. It is the place that confronts me with the fact that truly accepting love, forgiveness, and healing is often much harder than giving it. It is the place beyond earning, deserving, and rewarding. It is the place of surrender and complete trust.

I knew that I would never be able to live the great commandment to love without allowing myself to be loved without conditions or prerequisites.

I am still not free enough to let myself be held completely in the safe embrace of the Father. In many ways I am still moving toward the center. I am still like the prodigal: traveling, preparing speeches, anticipating how it will be when I finally reach my Father’s house. But I am, indeed, on my way home.

I am called to enter into the inner sanctuary of my own being where God has chosen to dwell. The only way to that place is prayer, unceasing prayer. Many struggles and much pain can clear the way, but I am certain that only unceasing prayer can let me enter it.

“Whether you are the younger son or the elder son, you have to realize that you are called to become the father.”

Only when I have the courage to explore in depth what it means to leave home, can I come to a true understanding of the return.

Home is the center of my being where I can hear the voice that says: “You are my Beloved, on you my favor rests”—

As the Beloved of my heavenly Father, “I can walk in the valley of darkness: no evil would I fear.”

I can “give without charge.” As the Beloved,

As the Beloved, I can be tortured and killed without ever having to doubt that the love that is given to me is stronger than death.

As the Beloved, I am free to live and give life, free also to die while giving life.

Finally there came something very tender, called by some a soft breeze and by others a small voice. When Elijah sensed this, he covered his face because he knew that God was present. In the tenderness of God, voice was touch and touch was voice. But there are many other voices, voices that are loud, full of promises and very seductive. These voices say, “Go out and prove that you are worth something.”

It is not very hard for me to know when this is happening. Anger, resentment, jealousy, desire for revenge, lust, greed, antagonisms, and rivalries are the obvious signs that I have left home.

I am so afraid of being disliked, blamed, put aside, passed over, ignored, persecuted, and killed, that I am constantly developing strategies to defend myself and thereby assure myself of the love I think I need and deserve. And in so doing I move far away from my father’s home and choose to dwell in a “distant country.”

As long as I keep looking for my true self in the world of conditional love, I will remain “hooked” to the world—trying, failing, and trying again. It is a world that fosters addictions because what it offers cannot satisfy the deepest craving of my heart.

I am the prodigal son every time I search for unconditional love where it cannot be found.

It was love itself that prevented him from keeping his son home at all cost. It was love itself that allowed him to let his son find his own life, even with the risk of losing it.

The farther I run away from the place where God dwells, the less I am able to hear the voice that calls me the Beloved, and the less I hear that voice, the more entangled I become in the manipulations and power games of the world.

Indeed, it is a question of life or death. Do we accept the rejection of the world that imprisons us, or do we claim the freedom of the children of God? We must choose.

when God created man and woman in his own image, he saw that “it was very good,” and, despite the dark voices, no man or woman can ever change that.

One of the greatest challenges of the spiritual life is to receive God’s forgiveness.

There is something in us humans that keeps us clinging to our sins and prevents us from letting God erase our past and offer us a completely new beginning.

While God wants to restore me to the full dignity of sonship, I keep insisting that I will settle for being a hired servant.

Jesus himself became the prodigal son for our sake. He left the house of his heavenly Father, came to a foreign country, gave away all that he had, and returned through his cross to his Father’s home.

Jesus is the prodigal son of the prodigal Father who gave away everything the Father had entrusted to him so that I could become like him and return with him to his Father’s home.

words of John: “… we are already God’s children, but what we shall be in the future has not yet been revealed. We are well aware that when he appears we shall be like him, because we shall see him as he really is.”

Both needed healing and forgiveness. Both needed to come home. Both needed the embrace of a forgiving father.

it is clear that the hardest conversion to go through is the conversion of the one who stayed home.

my own “lostness.” I had stayed home and didn’t wander off, but I had not yet lived a free life in my father’s house.

This experience of not being able to enter into joy is the experience of a resentful heart.

The Father’s love does not force itself on the beloved.

he wants to heal us of all our inner darkness, we are still free to make our own choice to stay in the darkness or to step into the light of God’s love.

we can allow ourselves to be found by God and healed by his love through the concrete and daily practice of trust and gratitude.

The discipline of gratitude is the explicit effort to acknowledge that all I am and have is given to me as a gift of love, a gift to be celebrated with joy.

There is always the choice between resentment and gratitude because God has appeared in my darkness, urged me to come home,

declared in a voice filled with affection: “You are with me always, and all I have is yours.”

The leap of faith always means loving without expecting to be loved in return, giving without wanting to receive, inviting without hoping to be invited, holding without asking to be held.

The question is not “How am I to find God?” but “How am I to let myself be found by him?” The question is not “How am I to know God?” but “How am I to let myself be known by God?” And, finally, the question is not “How am I to love God?” but “How am I to let myself be loved by God?”

Questions like these raise a real issue: that of my own self-concept. Can I accept that I am worth looking for? Do I believe that there is a real desire in God to simply be with me?

Joy never denies the sadness, but transforms it to a fertile soil for more joy.

People who have come to know the joy of God do not deny the darkness, but they choose not to live in it.

Every moment of each day I have the chance to choose between cynicism and joy. Every thought I have can be cynical or joyful. Every word I speak can be cynical or joyful. Every action can be cynical or joyful.

To become like the Father whose only authority is compassion, I have to shed countless tears and so prepare my heart to receive anyone, whatever their journey has been, and forgive them from that heart.

Forgiveness is the way to step over the wall and welcome others into my heart without expecting anything in return.

to become like the Father, I must be as generous as the Father is generous. Just as the Father gives his very self to his children, so must I give my very self to my brothers and sisters.

Every time I take a step in the direction of generosity, I know that I am moving from fear to love.

The word “generosity” includes the term “gen” which we also find in the words “gender,” “generation,” and “generativity.” This term, from the Latin genus and the Greek genos, refers to our being of one kind.

Generosity creates the family it believes in.

As the Father, I am no longer called to come home as the younger or elder son, but to be there as the one to whom the wayward children can return and be welcomed with joy.

when I experienced the warm, unpretentious reception of those who have nothing to boast about, and experienced a loving embrace from people who didn’t ask any questions, I began to discover that a true spiritual homecoming means a return to the poor in spirit to whom the Kingdom of Heaven belongs. The embrace of the Father became very real to me in the embraces of the mentally poor.