This Sunday is also known as Laetare Sunday and also Mother's Day in the UK.
Scripture readings for today's Mass are here.
Chagall - Return of The Prodigal Son
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Scripture readings for today's Mass are here.
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Pierre Puvis de Chavannes - The Prodigal Son, 1872 |
Sin and grace,
absence and presence,
tragedy and comedy,
they divide
the world between them
and where they meet head on, the Gospel happens.
Frederick Buechner
Frederick Buechner
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This coming Sunday is the Gospel parable of the prodigal son and God’s forgiveness. It poses the difficult questions of how to believe we are loved by God when we have done wrong, when we can't believe we are worthy of forgiveness for ourselves, when we may feel unlovable.
It also asks us to find it in our heart to forgive others !
It's all there in the Lord's Prayer.
It also asks us to find it in our heart to forgive others !
It's all there in the Lord's Prayer.
Many commentaries on the parable remark that it calls up an echo deep inside to "come to ourselves” as did the prodigal son, when life finds us so often in abject confusion and causes us to see ourselves as being “in a far country”.
It asks us to make the return journey home to God.
It asks us to make the return journey home to God.
The parable of the prodigal son suggests it can often take a good while for the penny to drop that we are loved by God.
"Our hearts are restless Lord until they rest in you."
St Augustine.
The parable shows that beautiful image of reconciliation when we are welcomed by a patient and loving God who has been waiting for us.
- Click here for my earlier post this week on Prodigals and God's Embrace.
- Click here for one on Belonging, Blessing and God's Extravagance.
Some people travel in straight lines:
Sat in metal boxes, eyes ahead,
Always mindful of the target,
Moving in obedience to the coloured lights and white lines,
Mission accomplished at the journey’s end.
Sat in metal boxes, eyes ahead,
Always mindful of the target,
Moving in obedience to the coloured lights and white lines,
Mission accomplished at the journey’s end.
Some people travel round in circles:
Trudging in drudgery, eyes looking down,
Knowing only too well their daily unchanging round,
Moving in response to clock and habit,
Journey never finished yet never begun.
I want to travel in patterns of God’s making:
Walking in wonder, gazing all around,
Knowing my destiny, though not my destination,
Moving to the rhythm of the surging of his spirit,
A journey which when life ends, in Christ has just begun.
Faith is different from
theology
because theology is reasoned, systematic, and orderly,
whereas
faith is disorderly,
intermittent,
and full of surprises….
Faith is homesickness.
Faith is a lump in the throat.
Faith is less a position on than a movement toward,
less a sure thing than a hunch.
Faith is waiting.
Frederick Buechner
This is an excellent reflection from Fr. Ron Rolheiser
entitled Honouring an Abundant and Prodigal God.
You can read the whole article at Fr. Rolheiser's website, here.
Extract below :
entitled Honouring an Abundant and Prodigal God.
You can read the whole article at Fr. Rolheiser's website, here.
Extract below :
"There's a disturbing trend within our churches today. Simply put, we are
seeing the embrace of our churches become less-and-less inclusive.
More-and-more, our churches are demanding a purity and exclusivity not
demanded by Jesus in Gospel..
....................
Who is a true, fully practicing Catholic? Several years ago, I was
asked by a Roman Catholic School Board to write a definition of what it
means to be a "practicing Catholic". I agonized over the task, examined
the classical working definitions for that, and eventually produced a
bit of a formula.
But I prefaced the definition with this preamble: Only
Jesus and Mary were fully practicing Catholics. Everyone else, without a
single exception, falls short. We are all Cafeteria-Catholics.
We all
fall short; all have shortcomings, and all live the Gospel somewhat
selectively. To cite the most salient example: Many of us bear down more
on church-going and private morality, to the neglect of the
non-negotiable Gospel demand apposite justice; others simply reverse
this.
Who's closer to Jesus? Who's more of a Cafeteria-Catholic?
The answer to that question lies inside the secret realm of
conscience. But what we do know is that none of us gets it fully right.
All of us stand in need of God's forgiveness and all of us stand in need
of the patience of our ecclesial communities.
The second caution flag is this: The God that Jesus reveals to us is a God of infinite abundance. Inside God there is no scarcity, no stinginess, no sparing of mercy.
As the parable of the Sower makes clear, this God scatters his seed indiscriminately on every kind of soil - bad soil, mediocre soil, good soil, excellent soil.
God can do this because God's love and mercy are limitlessness. God, it seems, never worries about someone receiving cheap, undeserved grace.
As well, Jesus assures us that God is prodigal: Like the father of the prodigal son and his older brother, God embraces both the missteps of our immaturity as well as the bitterness and resentment within our maturity. Good religion needs to honor that.
Today, on both sides of the ideological divide, conservative or liberal alike, we need to remind ourselves of what it means to live under an abundant, prodigal, universally-embracing, and "Catholic" God.
What it means, among other things of course, is a constant stretching of the heart to an ever-wider inclusivity.
How wide are our hearts?
Exclusivity can mask itself as depth and as passion for truth; but it invariably reveals itself, in its inability to handle ambiguity and otherness, as rigidity and fear, as if God and Jesus needed our protection.
More importantly, it often too reveals itself as lacking genuine empathy for those outside its own circle; and, in that, it fails to honor its own abundant and prodigal God. "
The second caution flag is this: The God that Jesus reveals to us is a God of infinite abundance. Inside God there is no scarcity, no stinginess, no sparing of mercy.
As the parable of the Sower makes clear, this God scatters his seed indiscriminately on every kind of soil - bad soil, mediocre soil, good soil, excellent soil.
God can do this because God's love and mercy are limitlessness. God, it seems, never worries about someone receiving cheap, undeserved grace.
As well, Jesus assures us that God is prodigal: Like the father of the prodigal son and his older brother, God embraces both the missteps of our immaturity as well as the bitterness and resentment within our maturity. Good religion needs to honor that.
Today, on both sides of the ideological divide, conservative or liberal alike, we need to remind ourselves of what it means to live under an abundant, prodigal, universally-embracing, and "Catholic" God.
What it means, among other things of course, is a constant stretching of the heart to an ever-wider inclusivity.
How wide are our hearts?
Exclusivity can mask itself as depth and as passion for truth; but it invariably reveals itself, in its inability to handle ambiguity and otherness, as rigidity and fear, as if God and Jesus needed our protection.
More importantly, it often too reveals itself as lacking genuine empathy for those outside its own circle; and, in that, it fails to honor its own abundant and prodigal God. "
Other Reflections on The Gospel
Mark Oakley, Anglican Canon Chancellor of St Paul's Cathedral, London, also asks similar questions to Ron Rolheiser.
"We are used to the Church trying to be loyal to the past but what would a Church look like that is trying to be loyal to the future?
At a time when the Church undergoes some difficult debates and is often looked on with puzzlement or anger for its compromises and self-preserving caution, it is as if a spiritually hungry society, seriously in search for authenticity and wisdom, finds the Church just too corporate, modelled as a chaplaincy to a disappearing world rather than on the reckless generosity and heretical, outspoken love seen in Jesus Christ.
The Church finds itself in an important, and therefore uncomfortable, place of decision.
How will it be loyal to the future, contribute that energy and perception that is so needed to help bridge our world’s today with a more just tomorrow?
How will it sing that majesty of God who loves us all just as we are but who loves us so much he doesn’t want us to stay like that?"
Mark Oakley, Anglican Canon Chancellor of St Paul's Cathedral, London, also asks similar questions to Ron Rolheiser.
"We are used to the Church trying to be loyal to the past but what would a Church look like that is trying to be loyal to the future?
At a time when the Church undergoes some difficult debates and is often looked on with puzzlement or anger for its compromises and self-preserving caution, it is as if a spiritually hungry society, seriously in search for authenticity and wisdom, finds the Church just too corporate, modelled as a chaplaincy to a disappearing world rather than on the reckless generosity and heretical, outspoken love seen in Jesus Christ.
The Church finds itself in an important, and therefore uncomfortable, place of decision.
How will it be loyal to the future, contribute that energy and perception that is so needed to help bridge our world’s today with a more just tomorrow?
How will it sing that majesty of God who loves us all just as we are but who loves us so much he doesn’t want us to stay like that?"
- Torch, a Dominican website has some challenging questions and reflections on the Gospel from here.
Image source
Click here for a reflection which covers the parable from a wide variety of angles.
-
Edge of Enclosure website has several reflections from here.
Part 1 here
Part 2 here
Part 3 here
Part 4 here
Part 5 here
Prodigal sung by
Casting Crowns
Mumford and Sons
Roll Away Your Stone
A great song for prodigal sons and daughters...
Roll away your stone, I'll roll away mine
Together we can see what we will find
Don't leave me alone at this time
For I am afraid of what I will discover inside
Cause you told me that I would find a hole
Within the fragile substance of my soul
And I have filled this void with things unreal
And all the while my character it steals
Darkness is a harsh term don't you think?
And yet it dominates the things I see
It seems that all my bridges have been burnt
But you say that's exactly how this grace thing works
It's not the long walk home that will change this heart
But the welcome I receive with the restart
Darkness is a harsh term don't you think?
And yet it dominates the things I see
Darkness is a harsh term don't you think?
And yet it dominates the things I've seen
Stars hide your fires
These here are my desires
And I won't give them up to you this time around
And so I'll be found
With my stake stuck in the ground
Marking the territory of this newly impassioned soul
But you, you've gone too far this time
You have neither reason nor rhyme
With which to take this soul that is so rightfully mine
- Torch, a Dominican website has some challenging questions and reflections on the Gospel from here.
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| Image source |
- Edge of Enclosure website has several reflections from here.
Part 2 here
Part 3 here
Part 4 here
Part 5 here
Prodigal sung by
Casting Crowns
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