Prodigal Son

Question:

My son has been suffering the life of drugs for 20 years. I have tried to practice love through all the ups and downs of the addiction. It has now come to that I am not offering financial help or shelter when he falls again. It feels scary, and not loving, not to give someone a place to stay, especially your son when he is suffering, so I have used this passage and story often and welcomed him back and helped pick him up to try again. The pattern keeps repeating, he loses everything, even jail and overdose—gets sober, and I help him, then he loses it all by returning to drugs.

Comment:

I understand all too well from my own experience the grief and anxiety you must be going through. And I can understand using the Prodigal Son—probably the most powerful of all Jesus' parables—as a justification for welcoming your son back again and again. But Jesus never calls us to ignore our own inner spiritual guidance. The true power of every parable lies in consciousness—not only yours, but your son's as well. The consciousness of the Prodigal Son as he works in the pigsty is one of total surrender. He knows that he, of himself, cannot solve his problems. He returns to the father, not for a handout, but as a way of moving forward. 'I no longer deserve to be your son,' he says (or tries to say). 'Just let me be a field hand on your farm; that will be far better than what I've managed on my own.' It is that state of surrender that releases his father's infinite love. In my favorite version of the story—found in the Indian scripture the Lotus Sutra—the son is quite mad when he returns home; he doesn't even recognize his father, doesn't know the truth of who he is. Out of infinite love, the father does, indeed, make him a field hand and sends him to work the farm. Gradually, over time, as the son begins to heal, the father increases his responsibilities, makes him a house servant, and then finally, when the son is ready and can handle the truth, tells him who he truly is.

The point is, I think, that we can't force people to heal faster than they are willing to do. Sometimes the loving—and difficult—thing to do is to allow them to experience the consequences of their own choices, to heal at whatever pace they can accept, and to know that, however mad their choices may seem to us, they are never less than the Christ in spiritual Truth.

Blessings!

Rev. Ed