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June 5 - June 6, 2025
It is the place where I am held safe in the embrace of an all-loving Father who calls me by name and says, “You are my beloved son, on you my favor rests.” It is the place where I can taste the joy and the peace that are not of this world.
Leaving home is, then, much more than an historical event bound to time and place. It is a denial of the spiritual reality that I belong to God with every part of my being, that God holds me safe in an eternal embrace, that I am indeed carved in the palms of God’s hands and hidden in their shadows. Leaving home means ignoring the truth that God has “fashioned me in secret, moulded me in the depths of the earth and knitted me together in my mother’s womb.” Leaving home is living as though I do not yet have a home and must look far and wide to find one.
As the Beloved, I can suffer persecution without desire for revenge and receive praise without using it as a proof of my goodness.
Praying to his Father for his disciples, he says: “They do not belong to the world, any more than I belong to the world. Consecrate them [set them aside] in the truth. As you sent me into the world, I have sent them into the world, and for their sake I consecrate myself so that they too may be consecrated in truth.”
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.”
I am the prodigal son every time I search for unconditional love where it cannot be found. Why do I keep ignoring the place of true love and persist in looking for it elsewhere? Why do I keep leaving home where I am called a child of God, the Beloved of my Father?
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.
but also the return to the womb of God who is Mother as well as Father?
“Quick! Bring out the best robe and put it on him; put a ring on his finger and sandals on his feet; let us eat and celebrate! Because my children who, as you know, were dead have returned to life; they were lost and have been found again! My prodigal Son has brought them all back.” They all began to have a feast dressed in their long robes, washed white in the blood of the Lamb.
But with all of that there came a seriousness, a moralistic intensity—and even a touch of fanaticism—that made it increasingly difficult to feel at home in my Father’s house. I became less free, less spontaneous, less playful, and others came to see me more and more as a somewhat “heavy” person.
Complaining is self-perpetuating and counterproductive.
Joy and resentment cannot coexist.
How can I return when I am lost in resentment, when I am caught in jealousy, when I am imprisoned in obedience and duty lived out as slavery? It is clear that alone, by myself, I cannot find myself.
The father does not compare the two sons. He loves them both with a complete love and expresses that love according to their individual journeys. He knows them both intimately. He understands their highly unique gifts and shortcomings.
Each child of God has there his or her unique place, all of them places of God.
Although we are incapable of liberating ourselves from our frozen anger, we can allow ourselves to be found by God and healed by his love through the concrete and daily practice of trust and gratitude. Trust and gratitude are the disciplines for the conversion of the elder son. And I have come to know them through my own experience.
Without trust, I cannot let myself be found. Trust is that deep inner conviction that the Father wants me home.
Gratitude, however, goes beyond the “mine” and “thine” and claims the truth that all of life is a pure gift.
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.
Acts of gratitude make one grateful because, step by step, they reveal that all is grace.
God, creator of heaven and earth, has chosen to be, first and foremost, a Father.
The Father wants to say, more with his hands than with his mouth: “You are my Beloved, on you my favor rests.” He is the shepherd, “feeding his flock, gathering lambs in his arms, holding them against his breast.”
The Father is not simply a great patriarch. He is mother as well as father. He touches the son with a masculine hand and a feminine hand. He holds, and she caresses. He confirms and she consoles. He is, indeed, God, in whom both manhood and womanhood, fatherhood and motherhood, are fully present.
What I see here is God as mother, receiving back into her womb the one whom she made in her own image.
But her joy will not be complete until all who have received life from her have returned home and gather together around the table prepared for them.
God is not the patriarch who stays home, doesn’t move, and expects his children to come to him, apologize for their aberrant behavior, beg for forgiveness, and promise to do better. To the contrary, he leaves the house, ignoring his dignity by running toward them, pays no heed to apologies and promises of change, and brings them to the table richly prepared for them.
Wouldn’t it be wonderful to make God smile by giving God the chance to find me and love me lavishly?
It is the love that always welcomes home and always wants to celebrate.
He pre-empts his son’s begging by spontaneous forgiveness and puts aside his pleas as completely irrelevant in the light of the joy at his return. But there is more.
But when I think about the ways in which Jesus describes God’s Kingdom, a joyful banquet is often at its center.
The reward of choosing joy is joy itself.
People who have come to know the joy of God do not deny the darkness, but they choose not to live in it. They claim that the light that shines in the darkness can be trusted more than the darkness itself and that a little bit of light can dispel a lot of darkness.
The return to the Father is ultimately the challenge to become the Father.
Being in the Father’s house requires that I make the Father’s life my own and become transformed in his image.
But grief is the discipline of the heart that sees the sin of the world, and knows itself to be the sorrowful price of freedom without which love cannot bloom. I am beginning to see that much of praying is grieving.
Giving all thus becomes gaining all. Jesus expresses this clearly as he says: “Anyone who loses his life for my sake … will save it.”
Every time I take a step in the direction of generosity, I know that I am moving from fear to love.
Generosity creates the family it believes in.
Because what greater joy can there be for me than to stretch out my tired arms and let my hands rest in a blessing on the shoulders of my home-coming children?
His loneliness has become endless solitude, his anger boundless gratitude. This is who I have to become.
