Friday, June 21, 2013

The Prodigal Son




It was the year of what I will call my divorce. Technically we were never married. But I still called it my divorce. I loved her, and she loved me, and I had come through a period of great doubt, and so now we lived together so we were married in my mind. There are many ways to divorce. A divorce like the one we experienced is not a single event, but a long grinding process, like being pushed slowly over a cliff by a glacial avalanche one has possibly somehow helped unwittingly to start but in any case now cannot stop but nonetheless fights desperately against until at last one must turn and leap into the icy river weeping and hope, but not much, to land alive. At 43, I was past the point at which I had believed I had finally arrived, and as far as I was concerned all my dreams of my life were turning to dust in my hands (as it turns out, not for the last time; what you think is a sorrow too great to bear, can yet be exceeded, and will be. The greatest humiliation, as Emmy Lou Harris so eloquently put it, is that one survives these sorrows and goes on living anyway). So I was searching for meaning, for some way forward in the midst. For, you might say, a meaningful choice in the midst of desolation.
I prayed for guidance; then brushed aside the next day’s phone calls from those who loved me. I thought God would only speak in my inner heart—I had forgotten that God usually speaks to us physically--through one another, through the voices of other people (“he has no hands but ours”). God answered my prayers as concretely as any human teacher ever could. There are a dozen examples, although I will note that most prayers I prayed were too casually uttered to mean anything. The half dozen prayers I can say were answered dramatically by God in my lifetime were essentially the ones I prayed from the heart, in earnest and in true reaching to the living God, when I prayed for the Holy Spirit and for the good.
At that time, I prayed for hope. My aunt and my mother visited us for my birthday. My aunt said, “Have you read Nouwen’s biography?”[1] I said no and returned to my prayer for help. “You should read it.” I shrugged and returned to prayer. “I could buy it for you.” Too busy praying to listen. “Here it is: are you going to read it or not?!” Oh. Right. God answers prayer this way.
            I read it. Nouwen, to my mind was one of the great synthesizers of personal experience, psychology, and pastoral spirituality, whom I had been inspired by decades earlier. In college I read his “Wounded Healer” and was given hope. I read his work on converting loneliness to solitude, and I understood my entire destiny (though little I realized back then how profoundly this theme would color my entire life). Nouwen lectured, taught, and wrote, one of the great pastors of the twentieth century.
            Yet as I learned here, he had led a more worried life than I had ever imagined. By 50 he realized he had lost his way. By 55 he had found his home. This was a story of hope when I was 43 and saw only darkness, and is hopeful now when I am 53 and feel I have not found my home (or maybe I have). The biographer noted one more thing: Nouwen’s most mature work was The Return of the Prodigal Son.  I didn’t need a second clue on this one. I set down the Biography and opened the Return.
            Now I was listening again, for the first time in twenty years, to Nouwen himself. And again, Nouwen had me hooked by page 3. Like many Catholic boys (and girls), I tried my whole life to be good. Not just okay, but good. In every sense of the word: good at what I do, and good in a moral sense, and the kind of person everyone likes and wants around. I managed to create quite a delightful façade of kindness, reasonableness, even charm. Girlfriend’s mothers tended to like me. I was the kind of guy a girl could definitely bring to dinner. Dependable, Honest. Wholesome. So it seemed. So many people believe about me, even those who think they know me.
            In reality of course I was often honest when it didn’t cost too much, but just as easily treasonous under pressure, my impulses violent, and my callow use of others well-hidden. None of this was any clearer to me than it was to anyone else, until I was well into my thirties and became somewhat more deeply self-aware and able to begin to be more authentically true to others and to myself.
            But I digress. Nouwen identified himself with this club. He had always been good, had denied impulses that other men had lived. Yes, I know it is said: “bad men do what good men dream.” That is too simple. Bad men don’t bother to notice what effect their actions have, and simply call those actions good or necessary because they are merely convenient. Good men do bad things, admit they are bad, but pretend their actions are having good effects, or soon will. Indeed good men resist—either due to virtue or to lack of guts—the temptations of violence and vengeance. They choose lesser sins.
This can come at cost for those among us unable to find a workable integration of the hidden dark side of our psyche, the anger, fear, and rage that hides within us, impotent. Or for whom the resistance to violence has more to do, perhaps, with cowardice than virtue (thinking again of Gandhi’s challenge). Pleasing other people becomes a way to lose your soul, as sure as any violent impulse. Some men might have been better off throwing a few more good right hooks and breaking a few chairs, rather than smiling at assholes and eating shit for all those years. But you can’t get those years back—spiritual rebirth is like this: you die, then you get to go back into your life at any point you wish, and now you have to take that mess and do something with it. You have the same mess, but a new consciousness with which to try to play those poorly chosen cards. It can take awhile to play the game back to even, and even longer to get anywhere near ahead.
            Nouwen lived all this. He was a “good Catholic boy” who did what he was supposed to do, and went on to be a priest and a great pastor only to find himself spiritually empty. Where was God?
            In the story of the Prodigal Son (Luke 15, 11-32), Jesus of Nazareth sums it all up, as he so aptly could and so regularly did, in an unforgettable story rather than a technical essay. A man had two sons. The older son worked his entire life to serve the old man without question, never admitting his own desires, telling himself the sacrifice was righteous and would prove worthy in time. He seemed to represent those who lived the life of the good boy and the good man. But wait. The younger son came to his father one day and said, “give me now my inheritance.” This was a great insult to the father; in that culture it amounted to repudiation of the father. But without a word, the father gave him the inheritance. The younger son went off to a life of loose women, gambling, and reckless partying (think Maxim on steroids—a truly shallow life), burning through the entire inheritance and awakening broke. He seems to represent the life of the thoughtless partier, the sinner, the fool with no one to blame but himself. Who could have sympathy for such a character? Certainly not any of us who lived a good life at some cost! (and kept our Maxim moments out of sight). But one day, the younger son was out working in a field, in the midst of a great famine, and longed to eat the slop fed to the hogs. Coming to his senses at last, he resolved to return to his father and say “I am no longer worthy to be called your son. Make me one of your hired men.”
            Nouwen and many preachers have remarked on the phrase “coming to his senses” which can also be phrased as “coming to himself at last.” Have you ever had that experience—coming back to yourself? It is a great feeling. You can face anything at those moments. And the son now faces his life. He now re-enters the mess of his life, with a new awareness. He has died, and been sent back to live anew. He starts quite deep in the hole. He has got some pretty bad cards that he now has to find a way to play, with his new consciousness. He walks, we guess a far distance taking many weeks or even months, like the hero of Cold Mountain, like Odysseus, back to his father’s house. Nouwen spent some time discussing Rembrant’s painting of the moment when he arrives back. The son has the soles off his shoes. He is in rags. His head is bare and shaven, resembling a monk or a newborn infant. He kneels before his father as a free man, ready to accept the consequences of his choices and his actions—even those he made as a different, and an unconscious man. He offers no excuses.  
The older son stands by, watching, understandably skeptical, as I would be. For I thought I was the older son. Nouwen thought he was too. He asked early on in the book, what does a man like me have in common with the younger son? For the father is understood, initially, as the God of Jesus Christ, a God described as unbounded mercy, forgiveness, healing, new life, and hope, and love. He lifts the son to his feet and embraces him, and calls for a big party. (We tend to forget that God likes parties, as Jesus did).
The older son sulks. His fate remains unknown. The father says, “But your brother was dead, and has come back to life.” Indeed, The Lord does not say he was lost, and now is found. He says he was dead, as he surely was, and is now alive. So the celebration is on!
            How does the good boy relate to the wastrel son? Nouwen answered the question in a way I did not expect. He wrote that he is the younger son whenever he defines his value by the opinions of others. For that is leaving the father’s house, God’s immanent love, and wandering off after hog’s food. This may not seem stunning to you, dear reader, but it was to me: I had dedicated my life to impressing people and winning their esteem as a good man—good at what I do, and good in character. Never mind that my sex life would make Bill Clinton look like a boy scout or that I had developed the ability to smile and lie to a man’s face saying what he wanted to hear, that I nursed anger for long periods, and that I gave to the poor only what I could afford. Those were immaterial details in the self image I cultivated and that others bought into. I worked from first waking to last sleeping to prove myself good in all things and in all ways to all people. I drove myself with utmost dedication toward that single goal.
I was like the terminator machine portayed by Arnold Shwarzenegger in Terminator II (damn good chase scenes in that movie too, by the way). The terminator machine had a mission. It walked into fire for that mission, and it continued without complaint no matter how overwhelming the odds, how outrageous the demands, or how disfigured it became in the fight. There was no tomorrow! That terminator character perfectly portrayed my inner life and, I suspect, that of many men in our world today. Giving it all for a mission, all the time and without rest, being disfigured, without what would feel like due credit for what was given up, for a goal one only prays is worthy, buying the hero myth.
Only: in that moment I just found out it’s the wrong mission, it’s not worthy, and my disfiguring is not required here.
This is not a comfortable realization. But it is the kind of thing that I guess happens when the living God is encountered.
            Nouwen had just proven to me, with the words of Christ himself, that my eagerness to prove myself to others was needless and indeed, unholy. My achievements—real, imagined, planned, present, past, in all spheres, were optional. Jesus had called my bluff, seen through my bullshit and invited me to give it up. God had already embraced me, and my salvation and worth were already a done deal. All that work and courage and deception and humiliation and fear and shame was optional. I did not need it anymore. Nothing was required. Freedom was REAL.
            Damn! I’d been told this a hundred times, but now Nouwen had explained it in a way that spoke directly to me and I understood for the first time. Suddenly I had nothing I had to do.
My life had become truly empty. I was dead. My dreams were ash, my children unborn, my sacrifices not needed, and my ambitions optional and perhaps pointless. My decades of work to create an image as a good man were needless and everything fell in this wake. One must mourn, and I do, but it was instantly obvious that all that mattered now was to play the cards the way God wanted them played. Paul writes in Galatians, “I have been crucified with Christ. I no longer live, but Christ lives in me. I still have my human life, but it is a life of faith in the son of God, who…died for me.” What was I to do with my time remaining?
I have tried since then to think about donation of self, about service. Tagore, the great Hindu master, wrote this: I dreamed life was joy; I awoke and saw that life was service; I served and discovered that service is joy.
I am not there. But my aspirations lean in this direction.
But I have also reconstructed the failed dreams, sometimes failed to accept that discovery. We do not give up our dreams easily. Like cut forests, they grow back, stunted, less full, but recognizable. They trip us up again and again, they fail us again and again. Gradually we are burned to nothing by the fire of pain, and left with only the burning fire of infinite light, infinite grace, infinite mercy, infinite compassion for a world of broken dreams and human hope.


[1] Henry Nouwen (1932-1996) was a much loved Catholic spiritual writer in the last half of the 20th century. See his classic The Return of the Prodigal Son: A Meditation on Fathers, Brothers, and Sons. (Doubleday 1992).

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