Praying our Prodigal-ness

 

As we pray our way through the Prodigal Family this week ~ I want to remind you of the framework Richard Rohr lays out as a way to see our story.  He talks about life being a spiral of orientation to disorientation to reorientation.  One of the challenges of any parable, particularly this one of Prodigal-ness, is that it rushes us through these stages at a dizzying pace.  Rohr says we start with an orientation, this is a framework of how the world is supposed to work.  This is what we are taught and caught in school, from family, friends, media, television shops and 80s sitcoms about families, and all the forces of the world that whip and whirl around us.  Moreover, you have these competing stories within you.  You have an economic story of our country that says, “I spent, therefore I am” ~ we love to swipe our credit card to affirm and express our identity.  You have a family story your parents told you ~ maybe about hard work leading to success or that people are out to get you so be afraid or that you used to have so much and someone took it away.  We have a family origin story.  We have a geographical story.  I was taught and told as a Midwesterner not to get a big ego – too big for my britches, to keep my head down.  You have a religious story ~ for good or not that great or probably both.  You have a friendship story.  All of these try to weave together in your mind, heart, and soul into some kind of cohesive patchwork quilt.  This is our orientation narrative.  Pause today to think about the forces of formation and orientation that help you tell your story.

 

But…and there is always a but…then something happens.  Your dad loses that good paying job.  You move.  Someone you love dies.  Someone new enters the narrative and upsets the entire cart of all the perfectly polished apples you stacked so carefully!  We all have dizzying disorienting moments in our life.  My kids right now are living through one ~ it’s called college.  Trying to make decisions for themselves, deciding what to eat (I am sure there are very few brussels sprouts being consumed by my kids right now), and navigating relationships.  Or it can be a new job.  Or someone leaves a job.  Our church is amid this as we prepare to say, “Thank you” with our heartfelt love to our music minister.  These moments are not easy.  And sometimes we want to race back to what was or end up idealizing the past.  Sometimes we charge forward, embracing an idealized future.  To live during the whirlwind of change is not easy.

 

Day-by-day, we do, and we begin (often slowly and with lots of mistakes and missteps) to find new ways.  This is a reorientation ~ a new direction or path or way of being. 

 

This framework is at play in the Prodigal family.  They have an orientation ~ a status quo ~ a family system of being together.  We don’t have a full description or definition of this in the passage ~ this is that Grand Canyon of mystery that we fill in with our assumptions between verse 11 (A man had two sons) and verse 12 (the younger asking for his inheritance).  We don’t know the dynamics or dysfunction or disagreements that fill that small spaces on the page between those two verses ~ but our minds are all too glad to fill it in with our beliefs.  Then, there is a disorientation ~ the younger son leaves.  Now, there is an empty chair at the table.  Now, there is heart break and soul ache of the Mothering-Father.  Now there is all this frustration fuming in the older son.  Now there is a way of life that causes the younger son to lose everything and end up in the pigsty of his own decisions in life. 

 

And there is that great verse ~ the younger son came to his senses (verse 17).  The younger son has a reorientation or awakening to a new awareness.  As he returns, the older son is still stuck and stymied, maybe in the original orientation or a disorientation or just in his own story that his life is not what it might have been.  The clash between the older and younger son with the Mothering-Father between can be seen as through this lens ~ each character is living in a different realm and from a different story.  I dare say so many of our human problems ~ crisis ~ have this truth as one of the roots.  Some in our country want to return to an orientation that has passed.  Some in our country/church/family ~ benefit from staying in disorientation ~ because there is fame and fortune to be made in fanning to flame fears.  And some want to move on to a new reorientation and reordering.  Where is this true for your own story?  Where are you today in an organized and orderly place of orientation?  Where are you in disorientation?  And where is a new orientation appearing on the horizon like the younger son coming home that you want to run to?  May these questions percolate and provoke new awarenesses on this day.