THOUGHTS OF A NUN

The Prodigal Son

February 2005

Several years ago, on a visit to San Francisco, I had the experience of serving in a large soup kitchen for one day.  Beginning early in the morning, my group chopped onions, potatoes, carrots, and celery for hours, filling a huge vat in which they were boiled into a soup. Others made salads, set tables, opened loaves of bread.  Then I had the honor of ladling out the soup into paper bowls, and handing them to one person after another, as they came through the line  in a steady stream for an hour or more.  Many were people I would have given a wide berth to if I had seen them walking toward me on a dark street.  Some looked just like you or me. Three faces stand out in particular in my memory.

One, a young man, early 20’s at the oldest, could have been and in fact, may have been, a student at one of the colleges in the area.  I wanted to ask him,  “Does your mother know you are here?”  But he said nothing to me, so I said nothing to him.  Another, a man of indeterminate age, looked at me with wild eyes set into a filthy face crowned with a tangled mop of filthy hair.  Schizophrenic?  Heroine addict?  Both?  I looked at his hand reaching for the offered bowl.  It was as black with grime as if it had been groping for something in a pit of greasy mud.  Perhaps it had.  “Thank you,” he said, as he took the bowl from me.  “You’re welcome,” I replied, watching carefully to be sure the hand didn’t touch me, my ladle, or the pot in front of me.  Then came a woman who looked at me with surprise as she took the soup, saying, “You look just like my mother”.  This might not have been remarkable, except this was a black woman.  Furthermore, she looked as if she was about my own age.  Of course, she might have been much younger.  Life on the streets can age people beyond their years.  Since she had offered this opening, I asked her when she’d last seen her mother.  “Oh”, she said, “She died thirty years ago”.  “So did mine”, I replied, and our eyes met.   With hungry people anxiously waiting behind her, there was no chance to go further, but I realized in that moment how close we were despite the chasm that separated our circumstances. 

We call the people who come to soup kitchens like this “homeless”.  Perhaps a more politically correct term would be “street people”, Just what does that mean?  What is “home”?  I’ve heard it defined this way:  When you get there, they have to take you in.  There are many interesting implications to that definition.  One of the biggest is that; no one ever lives at home.  Home is somewhere you may someday have to go.  Not anywhere you are.  Another interesting idea is that it is defined in terms of need or compulsion.  When you have to go there, they – whoever “they” are – have to take you in.  It is this sense of need and compulsion that is operative in the story of the Prodigal Son.  To need to go home is to hit absolute rock bottom.  I love my natural brothers, but I cannot imagine living with either of them.  Things would have to get very, very bad indeed in my life for me to show up on either of their doorsteps asking to be taken in.  But this is what things have come to for the younger son in the parable.  And what about having to take someone in who appears on the doorstep?  Surely the father in the parable is not legally required to take his son back.  He already gave the son his portion of the family wealth.  But he does have to take him in.  It is of the nature of “fatherhood” that he cannot do otherwise.  The son has returned home. 

We read this parable at this time in the liturgical year because it is a good metaphor for the journey we will each ultimately have to make in “going home to God”. Lent, which we will be entering in a few weeks, is in many ways an annual “practice run” for that journey.   We generally do not think of God as “having to” do anything – after all, God is God –and  God sets the “rules”.  But the good news is that God, like the father in the parable, will take us in, not because of a legalistic requirement, but simply because that is God’s very nature. That is the revelation of truth we look for at the end of the Lenten journey. 

But we’re not there yet.  We are all prodigal sons and daughters, sojourning in a distant land.  This year we will again come together as a parish each Wednesday after the Lenten pre-sanctified service to share a simple meal.  In doing this, we will be playing out both “sides” of a soup line.  We will prepare soups for each other; we will also receive and eat a simple meal, entering into the space of those “homeless” ones, as much as we are able given our own privileged circumstances.  I, for one, will remember each of those three faces from San Francisco at those meals.  Did the young man figure out – like the son in the parable – that he really did not belong there, and go home to his mother?  Has the spidery, grimy schizo-addict passed on to his heavenly home, having truly found none here on earth?  And what about that black woman who saw her mother when she saw me, and in whom I saw myself reflected? Is she, like me, still on the journey?   And which part of the journey am I on?  I like to think I have turned toward God, and am traveling in the right direction to take me “home”.  But what I hope my Lenten meals and meditations will help me see more clearly is that I surely have many more turnings to go.  That before I can rightfully show up on the doorstep of my “home”, I need to acknowledge that I have no choice in the matter.  That I “have to” go there.  That am not homeless, but neither am I “home.”