I confess that I am failing with my Lenten disciplines. It is one thing to not keep my New Year’s resolutions; this seems weightier, a scarlet letter of shame etched on the heart. Oh how easily I stumble in life and find myself in the muck–something like the pigsty in today’s gospel story, often referred to as “The Parable of the Prodigal Son.”*
If you aren’t familiar with this parable of Jesus, I encourage you to read it. If you do know it, I encourage you to spend more time with it. In particular imagine yourself as each of the characters. We can learn from them all, maybe get to know ourselves and God more fully, and perhaps come to see with more compassionate eyes.
As I sat with the story this past week, I harkened back to God’s invitation in a hymn sung at the beginning of our 40-day Lenten journey: Come back to me with all your heart / don’t let fear keep us apart.** This is a good word for me; I tend to get mired in disillusion, whether wallowing in my sinfulness or full of myself in my goodness. I remember a wise pastor saying how grateful we should be for dis-illusionment—to be freed of false illusions about ourselves so to be free for God to love and lead us.
Perhaps one of the hardest illusions for us as a collective people to break is that any one of us or group of us is less deserving or more worthy of generosity of spirit and goods. God’s love, as conveyed in today’s Scripture story, is so indiscriminate and lavish that some are profoundly comforted and transformed by it while others are confounded and angered.
I am grateful for such an amazing love. As I begin again this new day, I am carried by the hymn’s refrain: Long have I waited for your coming / home to me and living deeply our new life.
*Luke 15:1-3, 11b-32
** “Hosea” by Gregory Norbet
-Trish Stefanik, Overlook Retreat House at Dayspring
For reflection:
- When have you experienced mercy?
- What holds you back from accepting God’s embrace of you, and others?
- How might you be an agent of reconciling love in the world?
