Jacob Jordaens, “The Prodigal Son”
Spiritual Sunday
I remember being stimulated by an André Gide version of the Prodigal Son parable when I was a French minor at Carleton College. As the story is today’s lectionary reading, I tracked down a Kindle version ($3 for the new Walter Ballenberger translation) to rediscover what drew me to it. I suspect I was excited by the way that Gide’s prodigal is searching for spiritual insight outside of conventional religion.
In Gide’s version, the son leaves his father’s home because he feels stifled by narrow versions of what God calls for us to do. In Gide’s version, the father at first seems to reprimand the prodigal on the day following the welcome home party. He then shows himself to be sympathetic with his son’s decision to leave. He accounts for his change with the excuse that he has been merely parroting the elder son, who has set himself up as the official interpreter of the father’s will.
Here’s the prodigal son explaining to his father why he left home. Note that it might not pass muster with those who are narrowly religious. God, as the prodigal sees him, does not call for austerity and self-denial:
I changed your gold into pleasures, your precepts into fantasies, my chastity into poetry, and my austerity into desires.
When the father further questions the prodigal, he is told that the son never stopped loving him. Indeed, the son’s love was all the more intense when he was hungry and suffering:
[Father:] “Think about the pure flame that Moses saw on the sacred bush. It was burning but did not consume.”
“I knew a love that consumed.”
“The love that I want to teach you refreshes. After a little time, what is left of it, my prodigal son?”
“The memory of these pleasures.”
“And the destitution that follows them.”
“In this destitution I felt closer to you, Father.”
“Was it necessary to experience misery to motivate you to return to me?”
“I do not know. I do not know. It was in the aridity of that desert that I loved my thirst the most.”
“Your misery made you better appreciate the price of riches.”
“No, not that! Do you not understand me, my father? My heart, emptied of everything, is filled with love. At the price of my possessions, I bought fervor.”
“Were you thus happy far away from me?”
“I never felt I was far from you.”
And further on:
Father, I told you, I never loved you so much as when I was in the desert.
While he ventured out to discover his full self, however, the prodigal returns feeling defeated. Privation and the pressure of rebelling against conventionality has eaten away at his searching, and now he now is prepared to surrender to life as most people live it. He wants his mother to comfort him and he is prepared to do whatever his parents think best. His elder brother tells him that, from now on, he must conform to the rules of the house—which is to say, the rules as he interprets them:
“Our father did not speak so harshly to me.”
“I know what the Father said to you. It was vague. He does not explain himself very clearly, and one can take away anything at all from what he says. But I know his thoughts well. Among the servants I am the unique interpreter, and anybody who wants to understand him must listen to me.”
In the course of talking to his mother, the prodigal learns that he has a younger brother who wants to set out on the same journey. This brother reminds the prodigal of his earlier desiring and, to articulate it, shows him a wild pomegranate:
[Brother:] “It has a horrible sourness. I feel, however, that if I had a strong enough thirst, I would bite into it.”
“Ah! I can tell you right now that it was that thirst I was searching for in the desert.”
“A thirst that only non-sweetened fruit can quench…”
“No, but one must love that thirst.”
The prodigal may no longer have the strength to rediscover that thirst, but he encourages his brother to search for it:
Leave me! Leave me! I will stay and console our mother. Without me you will be more courageous. Now is the time. The sky is getting pale. Leave without making any noise. Let’s go! Embrace me, my young brother. You carry all my hopes. Be strong. Forget us, forget me. May you not return. Go out softly, I will hold the lamp…
Among other things, Gide’s short story points to the difficulty of pursuing a genuine spiritual journey in the face of external pressures and conventional thinking. And speaking of such, this past Friday I led a discussion at Hope Lutheran Church (in College Park, MD) about the film Gods and Men (2011). In it, an order of Trappist monks in 1990s Algeria decides to remain in place, even though they are threatened by Islamic fundamentalists.
Gods and Men is a powerful Lenten film. The monks must undergo their own suffering as they wrestle with their fears. While everyone wants them to return to France, they find the Father in the desert.
We can’t all be Trappist monks but we can strive to honor our inner spiritual yearnings.
