Prodigal

 

Musings for the Fourth Sunday in Lent (Laetare), the 27^th of March 2022. Pew Notes, St. Peter’s Church, Eastern Hill, Melbourne 

“Being Swallowed up therefore in the Miserable Gulph of idle talk and worthless vanities, thenceforth I lived among Shadows, like a Prodigal Son feeding upon Husks with Swine. A Comfortless Wilderness full of Thorns and Troubles the World was, or worse, a Waste Place covered with Idleness and Play, and Shops and Markets and Taverns.” For the poet Thomas Traherne (1637-1674), people are insatiable. Our wishes and desires can even drive us to sell up our inheritance, go on world trips in search of everything or nothing, living out our version of the poverty of abundance: work, consume, be silent, die. Like the younger brother in this morning’s Gospel story, in the end there can seem no way back and no way out. 

But Traherne does not deny insatiableness. He understands we need to measure our desires and direct our insatiableness towards that which brings life, not emptiness and loss. He continues the memory of his own early adulthood in his ‘Centuries of Meditations III 14’: “As for Churches they were things I did not understand. And Scholes were a Burden: so that there was nothing in the World worth the having, or Enjoying, but my Game and Sport, which also was a Dream and being passed wholly forgotten. So that I had utterly forgotten all Goodness Bounty Comfort and Glory: which things are the very Brightness of the Glory of GOD: for lack of which therefore He was unknown.” 

When the brother returns home, instead of being treated as worthless or simply fit for hire, his father welcomes him ecstatically as found, honouring his existence in ways that confound the mere customs of society. He was dead to them, now he’s alive. The person who told them to go to hell has come back from some place like hell. 

Which leaves the awkward business of the angry elder brother. Like the teller of the parable, Traherne is not either/or, he’s both/and. He is inclusive. His message is the “Goodness Bounty Comfort and Glory” already available to the elder brother, that the father now is getting him to understand, again. And like so many of Jesus’ stories, it’s open-ended. What’s going to happen next? Somehow, it’s implicit in forgiveness. Any time spent learning and living God’s love is time not spent on husks.     

Philip Harvey