Exploring Our Prodigal-ness Part 3

 

Yesterday, I invited you to ponder prayerfully your relationships with family and friends who are like family.  The person who knows the ‘you’ you hide away.  The person you are estranged or cut off from.  The people who love you and the ones who wounded you.  And in-between the words, “A man had two sons…” and “the younger one said, ‘Father, give me my share of the inheritance’”…there is a history wider than the Grand Canyon.  We don’t know the age difference between the older and younger.  We don’t know what their childhood was like or how many fights they had or their personalities.  We don’t know where their mother is.  We don’t know why the younger one asks for his inheritance.  I have barely scratched the surface of what we don’t know.  We could keep making a list of all the ways our minds fill in the backstory with assumption after assumption after assumption.  Our minds want to create linear logical narratives, we do this in the story we tell ourselves about ourselves, and we do this when we meet someone else.  Krista Tippett once said, “We see others as monolithic and ourselves as complex.”  Wait, go back to that quote.  We love to make others fit in neat and tidy boxes, we compartmentalize and categorize and confine others, while saying about ourselves, “I don’t fit in boxes.”

This is not to judge the ways our minds fill in the blanks the size of the United States that Jesus leaves open in this story.  But rather to be curious about the assumptions we make.  Why do I see the younger son as ungrateful?  Is there something about my story that fills in that blank?  Or why do I cheer him on to go beyond the horizon of the farm to wander the wide world, because maybe you have felt confined to people please and be the rock of your family.  Why do I shake my head at the mothering-father being so indulgent of the younger son, because maybe I wonder if I have been too lax or messed up with my own children.  Why do I see the older son shedding a tear on the outside and smiling on the inside when his brother packs up his belongings and sets out on his own?  The more we pause to name and notice the assumptions we bring to this story, the more we let this parable interrupt and disrupt the stories we tell ourselves about our lives.  Between verse 11 and 12, there is a whole history that we know nothing about, how do you fill in that blank of missing years?  What might that say about each of us?  May those questions invite holy reflection and investigation into the stories that shape us and saturate our lives.  Amen.