The Prodigal Son. Saint Paul says, in his turn, that all paternity comes down from heaven, from the Father of Lights [3]. God is the supreme archetype of paternity—his total, complete, gratuitous giving of self. It is that paternity we want to understand, and to understand ourselves as sons in relation to that paternity. The more insight we have into ourselves as sons, and how that has been affected by our experience of sonship and fathership in our relationship with our own fathers—our natural fathers, or step-fathers, and so on—the more we can be aware of our need to understand and be healed by an understanding and experience of the sonship that is in Christ Jesus… the sonship which Jesus reveals in the Gospels, and the fatherhood of God that Jesus also reveals in the Gospels.
We search the Gospels to understand more fully what it means to be a son. This is my beloved son, in whom I am well pleased [4]. And what it means to be a son of that Father. I seek always to do the things that please the Father [5]. There is no doubt that as our father Saint Benedict speaks here of sonship, he has in mind our Lord’s story of the Prodigal Son. This story is one of the great insightful stories of the Gospels, where Jesus tries to bring us—who know ourselves as poor, weak, stupid, sinful sons—into the reality of the relationship.
Saint Benedict says: “Listen, O son, to the master’s instructions, and attend to them with the ear of your heart. This is advice from a father who loves you; welcome it, and faithfully put it into practice. The labor of obedience will bring you back to him from whom you had drifted through the sloth of disobedience” [6].
The journey back to God of the Prodigal Son is a return from the “land of unlikeness” as St. Bernard would say in the Cistercian school [7]. We have always had the image of God [8]. We are made in the image of God—of God the Son, Jesus. We were originally made in the image and likeness of God, but we lost that likeness and went into the land of unlikeness. We are coming back to that. It is the return of the Prodigal Son.
Henri Nouwen. I had a wonderful friend in a man whom you all undoubtedly are familiar with in one way or another—Henri Nouwen [9]. Henri was a full professor at Yale for ten years, and he used to come regularly to Spencer Abbey. Later, he was a professor at Harvard. Henri, in the minds of many people, had reached the pinnacle there. What more prestigious position can you have as a full professor at Yale and Harvard? There aren’t many people who manage that. Yet, Henri was always a tortured man. He wrote his classic work about the “wounded healer” because he was doing a tremendous work of healing [10]. He was conscious of himself as a wounded person and struggled with this all his life. It was only in a short time before his death that he finally came to peace. It was precisely through the experience of the Prodigal Son. He knew that Gospel. He had read it many times and preached on it. One day, as he was looking upon the painting of the Prodigal Son by Rembrandt, he knew he was the Prodigal Son and what that meant. It changed his life; it completed his life. He wrote that wonderful book on it [11]. He was actually on his way to St. Petersburg [Russia] to do a video in the presence of that picture when—by God’s mercy, he had returned home and for the first time was with his family in peace and joy—God called him to himself. His life was complete.
A talk given on the Rule of Saint Benedict
by Abbot M. Basil Pennington, OCSO
Our Lady of the Holy Spirit Monastery
Thursday, March 8, 2001
