Tag: repentance

Everyone gets an inheritance; everyone gets a choice

What was the prodigal son’s actual sin?

That question popped into my head as I heard the Gospel reading that I’ve heard countless times. The obvious answers — essentially, sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll — seemed unpersuasive this time. Is this really just a story saying that if you go and do the really common bad things that people tend to do, then God will still forgive you?

Well, yes! It’s definitely that. Jesus, in telling this parable, was showing the Pharisees and scribes that he hung around with sinners because he wants to forgive them and be reconciled with them.

But here’s something odd: The prodigal son says that he has sinned against God and against his father. Obviously, fornicating and getting drunk are sins against the Ten Commandments, and thus sins against God. But what sin has he committed against his father?

The sin of squandering. What an evocative word. His father had something good, and he gave it to his son as a gift so he could use it for some particular purpose. But, instead, he squandered it. That’s worth looking at because it also sheds light on the part of the story that troubles many people: the father’s attitude toward his other, obedient son.

So what’s so terrible about squandering an inheritance?

First, it’s clearly terrible for the son himself. He burns through his money and ends up humiliated and starving. It was a bad plan, and it bit him in the butt.

It was also bad for the father. He very likely wanted to help set his son up with a homestead of his own so his wealth would flourish and grow. A young man with a sizable inheritance could easily marry, likely have children of his own, and bring joy and delight to his father.

His sin was also bad for the community. By squandering his inheritance, he refused to enrich the land or make jobs for the next generation. I know how tediously modern that sounds — “His great sin was that he failed to engage in community development!” — but it’s true! Things haven’t changed that much. When you get something good, you’re not supposed to waste it. You’re supposed to use it to help yourself, show respect to the person who gave it to you, and help other people. That’s what good things are FOR.

But on every count, the prodigal son did the opposite. 

When we are assessing our lives (a very good practice during Lent!), it may or may not be helpful to ask ourselves, “Am I sinning?” It will probably be fruitful, though, to look at what good things God has given us, and to ask ourselves what we are doing with it. Are we using that inheritance well? Or are we squandering it?

An obvious example of an inheritance is money. If we have it, are we spending it on dumb or bad stuff that hurts ourselves and other people? That’s squandering. But using it to help other people would be using it for its intended purpose.

There are less obvious examples. Gifts of time, energy and health are all things we can either squander or use well. Even our personalities can be an inheritance. If we have been given the gift of a quick wit and sharp sense of humor, what do we use that for? For being nasty to other people and humiliating them? That’s squandering it. For making people laugh and helping them take life lightly? That’s putting it to good use.

Or maybe we’re naturally confident and charming, and we find it easy to persuade and influence others. Some people use this gift to get their way, and finagle themselves into situations they haven’t really earned and can’t really manage. That’s squandering. But some people use the gift of charisma well, buoying up everyone around them, bringing out their best and leading them down good paths.

You get the idea. Whatever it is you have in life, whatever strengths you possess, whatever talents you can claim, whatever skills and abilities you have, these are your inheritance. You can accept God’s help to get yourself set up in a thriving life that makes him proud and benefits everyone. Or you can stuff whatever gifts you have in your pocket, run far away from your father’s land and squander it all. And you see where that second choice lands you. Sooner or later, you’ll be wishing you had it as good as a pig.

So what about the elder son? In the story, he didn’t run through his inheritance. He obeyed his father and did his work, and when his loser brother comes crawling back, he’s indignant at how thrilled their father is. The elder son comes across, at first, as innocent and justified.

But listen to how Jesus tells it…. Read the rest of my latest for Our Sunday Visitor. 

Image: The Return of the Prodigal Son by Maestro dell’Annuncio ai Pastori, National Museum of Capodimonte (Naples) via Wikimedia (Creative Commons) 

The princess and the fig tree

Halfway through Lent, we heard the Gospel reading where Jesus tells his disciples twice, in fairly stark and violent terms: If you do not repent, you will perish.

Then he tells them a story: “There once was a person who had a fig tree planted in his orchard, and when he came in search of fruit on it but found none, he said to the gardener, ‘For three years now, I have come in search of fruit on this fig tree but have found none. So cut it down. Why should it exhaust the soil?’

He said to him in reply, ‘Sir, leave it for this year also, and I shall cultivate the ground around it and fertilize it; it may bear fruit in the future. If not, you can cut it down.’”

If the fig tree (you and me) isn’t just failing to bear fruit; it’s exhausting the soil around it. It’s hurting the other trees and crops nearby by taking without giving back. It should be destroyed, says the owner of the garden.

The gardener (Jesus) agrees that the fig tree shouldn’t be allowed to go on this way. It must bear fruit—repent—or it should perish. But note something extremely important: he doesn’t just insist that it should repent. He doesn’t even just give it extra time to repent. He comes and helps it. He gives it what it needs so it can, if it will, turn things around before it’s too late.

This reading dovetails so nicely with a short book I recently re-read: The Lost Princess by George MacDonald. It’s not as well-known as his excellent longer “princess” books, the two Curdie books or The Light Princess, but I think it deserves more attention than it gets.

To summarize without spoilers: Two young girls are raised by disastrously indulgent parents. One girl, Rosamond, is a princess, who has become monstrously selfish and capricious, terrorising the whole household. The king and queen are at their wits’ end with their daughter’s violent temper, so they summon a wise woman to help them. She abducts Rosamond and takes her on a brutal journey of self-knowledge and self-control, with many trials and many failures.

Then we are introduced to the second girl, the daughter of a shepherd and his wife, who isn’t openly monstrous, but she is so profoundly self-satisfied, she doesn’t really believe anyone else is real. She, too, is taken in by the wise woman for cultivation, and at some point, the shepherd girl and the princess switch roles, with varying consequences. At the end, both girls are returned to their homes to live the lives they have chosen.

The story, being Victorian, is pretty openly preachy. The narrator frequently delivers little lessons about life directly to the reader, which was the style at the time. But if you think of it as a sermon with a compelling and entertaining story, rather than a story that preaches at you, it’s wonderful, and harrowing in the best way—and don’t get me wrong; the fiction stands up on its own and isn’t solely a vehicle for a message. It has some scenes and some imagery that have stayed with me for 40 years or longer, and that have not lost any of their power when I read again it last week.

One such scene … Read the rest of my latest for The Catholic Weekly. 

Image: Detail of painting by Julie Le Brun (1780–1819) Looking in a Mirror (1787) via Rawpixel (Creative Commons) 

From “rinse and repeat” to the living water

A priest I knew used to counsel against making New Year’s resolutions. He said that the first of January was an artificial deadline for starting new habits, and that, as Catholics, we shouldn’t feel the need to wait for that day. Do you want to repent and change your life? Why tie your plans to a date on the calendar? Now is the acceptable time.

I get the point, but I think he missed the boat with this advice. It’s very natural to want a nice, bright line for a starting point, and it’s very common to do better when we have plenty of people starting fresh on January first. If misery loves company, so does hope.

But there is something to be said for looking closely at both the secular view of “changing one’s life” with a New Year’s resolution and the sacred view. There is a lot of overlap, but also some gaps in each—at least on the surface.

I have been seeing a therapist for just over a year. She is thoroughly secular but extremely interested in and respectful of my Catholic worldview, and she wants to help me be a healthy and whole person. Our conversations help me clarify what it is I believe: Which ideas are helpful and healing and from the Lord (even if they look secular from the outside)? Which are terrible (even though they have always been mislabeled “Catholic” in my head)?

We talk about the phenomenon of people repeating undesirable behaviors over and over again. This is what she calls “rinse and repeat.” We talk about what it looks like when people start to make those small, uncomfortable changes toward their stated goals. This is what she calls “moving the needle.” We talk a lot about how to tell the difference between these two phenomena because when you’re in the middle of either, they can look and feel similar.

It is common to make the same resolutions over and over again. This is the year, we may say to ourselves. This is the year I am finally going to stop eating compulsively or smoking or using porn or lying around all the time while my body falls apart.

Secular and spiritual advisors would agree that is a good idea! These things you say you want to give up are bad for you, and they are probably bad for people you care about.

The basic Catholic advice for making a change is: Go to confession and confess anything you’ve done that’s sinful and make a firm intention to stop doing those things. Listen to absolution and your penance. Boom, done. A brand new person walks out of the confessional.

But if you took these issues to a therapist, they would probably say: O.K., awesome. What’s the plan? What are you going to do differently from what you have done before? Let’s figure out why you do the thing that you’ve been doing over and over, that you say you want to stop doing. What are you getting from it? And if it’s something you need, where else can you get that thing?

The basic Catholic advice is not meant to be everything you need. In some ways, it is just a starting point. A good confessor, who has the time and the expertise, will tell you almost exactly the same things as a good therapist. A good confessor will say, I absolve you, but what’s your plan? What are you going to do differently than what you have done before? Let’s take a hard look at why you’re committing the sin you’re committing. What are you getting from it, where else can you get that thing?

Most priests are not trained therapists and aren’t qualified to lead you through detailed analysis. But it wouldn’t be a bad thing for them to at least suggest that these questions are relevant and worth pondering. A good confessor will also answer that last question. The answer is: Everything you need, you can get from Jesus. But you’re a lot more likely to get it if you understand what you’re asking for. And this is where all those other questions come in.

Read the rest of my latest for America Magazine. 

Image via Wikimedia Commons  (Creative Commons)

Sincerely, Horace J. Schmiddlapp

The other day, my therapist said, “How are you? The last time we talked, your father had just died.”

And I answered, “Well . . . he’s still dead.”

This is totally a dad joke, and he would have laughed. Every time a celebrity died, he would rail against the 24-hour coverage on the news, as if there could be some update. Still dead! And I’m finding myself doing more and more things in tribute to him. If you care to play along, here are some things you could do in tribute to my father:

1.Sign something ‘Horace J. Schmiddlapp’. I forget how this first got started. I think he got tired of having to sign endless, useless permission slips for his eight children, so he started signing them ‘Horace J. Schmiddlapp’, and no one ever questioned it. Now that we’re going over legal documents and working through thorny issues of his estate, we’re glad he only took it that far.

2. Bring fancy cookies to the people who work at the post office and bank. This was a recent development, but apparently he used to do this every Christmas. I was amazed to hear it. When I was growing up, he cultivated a reputation as a curmudgeon. I guess it goes to show: Just because you used to be one way, doesn’t mean you can’t start bringing people cookies.

Read the rest of my latest for The Catholic Weekly. 

Is Christmas alive in your heart today?

If you think of the liturgical year as a lifetime, the Christmas season is a very brief babyhood, just a bright little sliver on the pie chart, and the dark wedge of Lent hits right around the teen or early adult years.

Doesn’t that explain a thing or two?

Read the rest of my latest for The Catholic Weekly.

The X-Plan for salvation

Beep beep. I am here to tell you that, sometime after that seventh time (or maybe after the seventy-times-seventh time) a light bulb will click on in that dopey son’s head. After being rescued without comment one more time after time after time after time, that son is very likely to decide on his own that this is no way to live, and he’d rather face the jeers and yucks of his stupid friends than the quiet patience of his father one more time.

Not because he’s scared of his father, but because he’s not. Not because his father is mad at him, but because his father loves him, and it finally feels like it’s time to live up to that love.

Read the rest of my latest at The Catholic Weekly.