The parable of the Prodigal Son taught by Jesus in the Bible is a beloved parable of many Christians. Often the focus is on the lost son, the lost sibling. However, when you read the whole parable (Luke 15: 11-32; Click link to see scripture), you soon realized that there are two lost siblings in this story, the prodigal sibling who left home and the non-prodigal sibling who stayed home. Both were not finding at home what their souls were looking for and instead went looking for it in different ways. They went down two different paths of searching that caused them to be lost, spiritually. In this blog, I want to explore these two different paths of lostness but also the pathways that help people find their spiritual home again. The Experience of Discontent at Home The parable begins with the youngest sibling wanting to leave home. He/she asks for their inheritance and then heads out into the world. If we treat this parable like a myth, we need to ask ourselves, what is the significance of the youngest son/daughter leaving home? What was he or she missing at home that they hope to find out in the world? This experience of finding our childhood home lacking spiritual elements we needed as children is the common human condition. As the Diamond Approach teaches, it is not possible for our parents and caregivers to hold perfectly the emotional responses and needs when we were children. If our parents didn’t have the compassion to hold our tears and sadness well, we learned to shut down our tears and tenderness by numbing ourselves or becoming critical of ourselves if we did show tears. As our result, we developed a hole of compassion in our lives. If our parents didn’t hold our strength and anger well, but instead reacted to our anger with their anger, we, as children, soon learned to shut down our anger, and disconnect from our strength. We developed a hole around strength in our soul and experienced a lot of weakness. If our parents didn’t hold our curious questions well along with our innate truth of our experiences as children, we soon learn to dismiss our truth. We developed a hole around truth in our soul and came to believe that our understandings of our childhood experiences couldn’t be trusted. Similar things could be said about the experiences of joy, value, peacefulness, trust, power, inner support, etc. If our parents and caregivers didn’t help us connect with these experiences within our soul, we soon concluded that they must be missing inside of us. So when this feeling of missing and deficiency happens, what do children and people do? They follow one of two paths. The path of prodigal sibling involves looking outside ourselves in the world for what is missing inside our soul. The path of the non-prodigal sibling involves creating what is missing inside ourselves through our own human efforts, through striving and human management. Both of these paths take us down a path of lostness. Let’s look at each one briefly. The Prodigal Path of Lostness The youngest sibling took his/her inheritance and spent it on things in the outside world hoping that it would fill what was missing inside them. If they struggled in feeling compassion toward self, they worked at getting this compassion in two ways. They looked for people to take care of them, that is, show compassion to them, or they became caregivers of others, hoping that in doing so, their caregiving would cause others to show compassion back to them. If they struggled with feeling weakness, they befriended strong people to give them the strength they were missing. I still remember my brother who was the smallest boy in grade 9 (only one girl was shorter than him) yet his three closest friends were six feet two inches in height or more. Then, interestingly enough, he got into weight training and body building big time in his later teens and young adult years. He eventually got second in the Mr. London Bodybuilding contest. If the prodigal found it hard to experience value naturally inside, they became over-achievers and people-pleasers hoping people would express value to them through praising them. This pattern of looking to the outside world to get what is missing inside us plays out in many areas: happiness/joy, peace/stillness, trust, love, support, etc. In the parable, the youngest sibling spends his/her whole inheritance trying to find in the world what they are missing inside. In the end, he/she finds themselves penniless, alone, and suffering. It is at this point that the prodigal comes to their senses, and they realize that their parents’ hirehands and servants were better off then he/she is now. In the end, the prodigal decides to come home hoping that he/she could become a servant in their parents’ business. You can imagine the prodigal’s surprise when his parent(s), who symbolize God/Divine Reality in this parable, immediately embrace him/her as their lost child who has come home. They quickly put the family ring on his/her finger and planned a coming home party. Their son/daughter who they thought was lost was not found; their youngest child who they thought was dead was now alive. It seems that this prodigal child now begins to experience at home, that is, in their soul, what he/she had not and would never find in the outside world. They began to experience now the experience of grace and the blessings of love, value, compassion, strength, power, joy, etc., all the experiences that they had originally found missing when they were young. The Non-prodigal Path of Lostness Now the parable takes an interest turn. The non-prodigal sibling discovers that his/her parent(s) are throwing a huge welcome home party for their prodigal sibling. Once they learn this, the non-prodigal sibling explodes in anger. He/she responds, “For all these years I have been working like a slave for you, and I have never disobeyed your commands; yet you have never given me even a young goat so that I might celebrate with my friends.” It is at this point in the story that we discover how lost the oldest sibling is but this path of lostness is different. Instead of looking in the outside world for what is missing in their internal life, they have looked to themselves to provide what is missing. When the experience of compassion failed to arise inside them, they strove to be compassionate to others through lots of “shoulds”. In times when they needed compassion from others, they learned to toughen themselves so they no longer needed compassion. When the experience of internal strength was lacking and weakness appeared instead, they learned to cover up their weakness and worked harder to be strong. When feelings of jog were missing, they learned to put on a smiling face and pretend they were happy. In times of when the experience of love was missing, they follow the laws of “should love” and put a lot of human effort into loving others. When the experience of forgiveness was missing, they practiced “should forgive.” When the experience of trust was missing and they found themselves experiencing lots of anxiety and fear, they practiced “should trust” and denied or numbed these negative feelings. This efforting, striving, and “shoulding” played out in all areas in the non-prodigal life where he/she was not able to experience easily the qualities of God’s spirit in their lives. You can now understand why the oldest sibling was so furious at his/her parents for showing abundant grace to his/her sibling. This experience of grace was something that they had rarely if ever experienced in their own life. The non-prodigal sibling had always been a slave to their compulsions to create through human effort what was missing spiritually in their soul and life. The parable ends with the non-prodigal sibling rejecting home and no longer wanting to be a part of it. The grace he/she sees being expressed in their home is something they can’t accept let alone join and celebrate in. This grace breaks all the rules of their muscular religion, all the rules that they have developed and followed to create artificially through human effort what was missing spiritually in their childhood home, and soul. This non-prodigal will only find their way home when they reach the limits of their resources. For the prodigal sibling, he/she came to their senses when their financial resources ran out and they found themselves in a place of intense suffering due to starvation and loneliness. Only then did the prodigal consider coming home. For the non-prodigal, their resources are not financial but personal. It is only when the non-prodigal reaches the end of their strength, knowledge and abilities and find themselves in a place of depression, powerlessness, loneliness and despair will they reconsider home again. When that happens, they will be in a place where they will be hoping and longing for the very same grace that the prodigal found in coming home. They too, like younger prodigal sibling, will wonder if their parent(s) can ever embrace them again, because of the conflict that occurred when they stormed away from home. But when that homecoming comes for the non-prodigal sibling, they too will be as shocked as their younger prodigal sibling was. They will find their parent(s), who symbolizes God/Divine Reality in this parable, waiting for them to come home so they can put the family ring on their older child’s finger and throw a big home coming party. The older sibling will hear their parents exclaim with joy, “we thought our older child was lost, but they are found. We thought he/she was dead, but they are alive. Hallelujah!”
Questions to ponder:
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