Quick Summary:

Today we follow the younger son of our parable as he discovers that the road he has chosen, the road which seemed to him to hold such promise; the well-paved, upwardly mobile path toward a new life, a new identity, a new existence apart from his family, turns out instead to be a long, meandering descent into exile.

Poet and priest John Donne, during a crisis late in life, penned the words: No man is an island... This younger son who acted as if he were an island, convinced he could “make it” on his own without help from anybody, has reached the end of that equation.

The nature of the spiritual journey is that it takes us (as Annie Dillard says) downward and inward, toward the hardest realities of our lives. Why must we go there? “Because," says Parker Palmer, "as we do so, we will meet the darkness that we carry within ourselves—the ultimate source of the shadows that we project onto other people."

There in the pig-pen the lost son “comes to himself.” And in this parable coming to self means going to others. What will he find there? A waiting father who embraces him, a loving community which celebrates with him.