2025.03.30 A Famous Story—Now and Forever. Lyn G. Brakeman, Spiritual Lemons, blog post

Last night I dreamed about the parable called The Prodigal Son. When I woke up I had this sentence at the front of my mind:  Let go of your prideful ego and discover your famished soul. 

My first feeling was annoyance, and then I began to wonder if the sentence itself was prodigal, that is wasteful or extravagant especially with pride?  My mother was amazingly prodigal with my father’s hard-earned salary. Once I saw Dad cry about money, and once he cried prodigal tears over the dog he loved who obviously failed to look both ways before he raced across the road and was killed by a prodigal car that never even stopped! My little sister could easily have done the same thing, and it would have mysteriously been my fault for not watching her, because I was engrossed in my favorite book—prodigally!

You see what I mean about the many and varied complications this very prodigal parable invites. This is why so many preachers glibly blame Divinity itself, because of course Jesus had just told them about it all. Puffed up with pride, the disciples went forth, forgetting Jesus’s own favorite words: FEAR NOT.

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As I age I feel proud of myself even though I cannot mobilize like I once did. After all, I have survived. I remember my name. I still can lobby for all kinds of good things. My husband and I still love each other……. prodigally. I can laugh even at myself tottering along at 86. I pray that my adult children forgive me some of my own prodigality as they enjoy their own. 

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I’m not really starving, and yet when I die, God, please fill my famished soul. I suppose there’s one of those paradoxes often found in biblical story: the less you strive for pride the more you discover you have.  In fact I can read the entire Holy Communion/Eucharist as a paradox: we pray hard for the salvation we also acknowledge that we already have!   

I’m not really starving, yet when I die, God, please feed my famished soul anyway.  Thanks! 

2019.03.31 Prodigality?

Prodigality? It’s actually a word. I looked it up. It’s the noun form of the adjective prodigal, which means spending money recklessly. OR there’s the noun which gets personal: a Prodigal is someone who is extravagant with money—lavish. So you see it is a complex word, loaded and layered. Christians use this word with prodigal abandon, attaching it, errantly and recklessly, to one son in a parable told by Jesus in Luke’s gospel.

American consumerism, I conclude, encourages prodigality, and simultaneously spawns lost souls, which is really what the biblical parable we prodigally call “The Prodigal Son” is about. This boy is lost. So is the sheep in the Lost Sheep parable, and so is the coin in the Lost Coin parable. The grouping of three parable about being lost and found is purposeful.

The lost son has asked, probably nagged, his father for his share in the family inheritance—more than double his allowance I wager. Worse, the father gives it to him, while also giving his older brother the other half. Mom has no voice in this story, but if I were here I’d have advised against this transaction. The younger son wastes his money on “dissolute living.” He gets demonized by interpreters for his inability to resist temptations that few young immature boys could. Who is prodigal here?

I’m tired of Christian interpretations that identify the effulgent father with the image of God—oh so generous and merciful. This parabolic father is the one who behaves prodigally, dishing out his wealth prematurely. What self-respecting father would do such a foolish thing? In so doing he creates a near-impossible family trauma. The younger son is thrilled and races off into the world to squander his wealth. He ends up in a pig sty starving. He—  cagily and wisely—remembers that Papa has money and fatted calves so he heads back home to a father who welcomes him with a prodigal banquet, thus earning the ire of the elder son who has stayed home, worked hard and invested his money in the local bank.

Okay, I know it’s only a story, but nothing is “only” a story. Every story has value and meaning, especially a parable in the Holy Bible, through which we are supposed to discern the presence of divine grace. Traditionally, this prodigal father is imagined to be God, but I think this pop needs a little deflation.

First of all, this story is in Luke’s cluster of three lost-and-found stories in which all those who have lost something search diligently and ceaselessly for the lost. These qualities—diligent caring for the lost and the least— are divine.

The father in the prodigal, however, is not identified as hiring posses et. al to search for his lost son. He makes no such efforts. Then he sets the boy up for a disaster in which the home-coming banquet is lavish and earns this father a reputation as the all-merciful Lord-lookalike. Daddy is also gracious to the elder brother as well, but it’s too late to prevent the looming sibling rivalry that surely will torture this family for some time, not to mention garnering a reputation for his firstborn as a bitter whiner with no grace in his heart. Divine grace, I conclude, isn’t foolhardy or cheap, is it?

One definition of grace is the experience of being known, exactly as you are, and loved, exactly as you are, at the same exact time. The one who sees you this way with no conditions attached is, yes, divine.

Do you think that is what the father in this story provided to his sons? He knew them both and gave them each equal portions of his money, whether they deserved it or not. He also knew, I suspect, their weakness and vulnerabilities. But he gave extravagantly anyway, and—foolish old coot. Dumb enough to be divine I’d say—and prodigally so.