Mark 16:1-8 (Matins)
1 Corinthians 6:12-20
Luke 15:11-32
Whether you attempt to live up to the Sermon on the Mount, or you go to the opposite extreme and live the profligate life, you will be torn apart. (Of course, in the former case you die a holy martyr and in the latter case, a son of satan.) For in this world we must navigate a narrow path: "as gentle as doves and as wise as serpents" (Mt 10:16), in the words of the Master.
Most of us begin as children in a garden where Kingdom-of-Heaven life seems possible: approaching each stranger as a friend, glad to share what we have, and feeling all things deeply. As we grow older, our awareness expands. We hear of cruelty and danger and corruption, yet clinging always to the belief that life, after all, is fair and that the garden will triumph in the end. And this brings us to a worldly commonplace: the rage of the angry young man.
The older brother comments, "This just in, little brother! Life isn't fair." This rankles because the young man's rage arises from his ideals and his undying loyalty to garden-life. Still, over time, the hard and gritty "facts of life" overwhelm him. The world isn't unfair. Innocent people needlessly suffer. Children ache with hunger amidst plenty. And decent families are pushed out of their homes on to the streets. Fairness, much less compassion, is nowhere to be found. And the young man throws himself into the sordid world, giving in to every temptation, and thinking "What's the use! What's the use!"
Yet, try as he might, he cannot swim to the bottom of this dark sea. There is a golden thread within him which will not break, for it is Divine. The garden underlies all. Nor was it ever a fairy tale but an undying reality .... the only remaining reality when all has been stripped off. And he stands back on his feet and dusts himself off and begins his long trek back to the garden. For his child's heart (Mt 18:3), deathless and incorruptible, was been the garden all along. And the lessons of sweet boyhood have remained locked up in his deepest heart.
Our Father in Heaven watches. He watches every foot-fall from an eternal roadside. He is not sovereign of this world, for worldly sovereignty He has given into the hands of men (Ps 113:12/115:16). His pledge all along is to be with us and to receive us in His Love and Forgiveness and to await us, at long last, with a garden that cannot fade.
The rest is ours to do. But this is the work we were born to. For within our breasts beats the heart of a child. And that heart can never be killed nor ever finally be corrupted. And always, even from the farthest distance, is the good and pristine garden ever blooming and ever pure.
I have imagined the Parable of the Prodigal Son through the prism of our times. For ours is an era of unremitting rage fueled by angry mobs of young men and women. They are furious as the famously rebellious flower children of the 60s were not. For that movement began with aspirations to a "Brotherhood of Man."
Today is different. And it runs deep involving the most basic things: the language we speak is execrated; the radiance of the body is covered by tattoos; the gift and beautiful vocation of gender is mutilated; God's sacred building block, the family, is mocked and deformed; and sexuality, the holy rite of marriage, is desecrated. So much of this rage proceeds from the perceived unfairness in the world. And the indignant cry for justice is often and everywhere heard: social justice, economic justice, every kind of justice.
And this gives away the primary difference between the flower children of the 60s and the woke mobs of today. The flower children, at least the faithful ones, departed from the world and sought to bring about a new and simpler world on little farms eschewing private property and sharing all in common.
By contrast, the woke movement is a materialist movement. These young people see everything is terms of matter. And the spiritual world is ignored, or worse, execrated as part of the general overthrow of religion. For them, all solutions are to be sought through government or other worldly institutions.
The spiritual person's focus is a more radical focus. The spiritual person sees injustice as an interior problem ..... as part of a general collapse of compassion. Unfairness is the outcome of the me-first ego. And the solutions from without will not work any more than legislated conversion of heart would work. Burning cars and buildings are the height of this folly, for only the burning down of our own worldly possessions and egoisms will avail.
It is no use to assign blame to the world, for the world in an illusion, which we project. We must place the blame upon ourselves and our failure to love. The God of love created a world that is fundamentally good. What we have done to His marvelous gift is ours to own.
An alternate ending of the Prodigal Son Parable would be for the young man to blame his uncontrolled passions on everyone else and then to begin a career of public protest and social influencing. But he does not. He looks in his own heart and sees the truth: that he is the world. And his degradation is not an external thing but an inner viciousness which began with his own choice for vice. For any good can be turned to perversion. And it is no coincidence that our era of mobs and burnings should coincide with an explosion of street drugs and a pandemic of venereal diseases.
Here at the approach of Great Lent, let us all take a hard look at ourselves. Let us practice a daily examination of conscience. For the journey of theosis cannot get very far when we are carrying the colossal of uncontrolled passions and profound delusion.
When the Master bids us to take up our crosses and follow Him, He is not asking us to bear yet another unbearable weight, but rather to crucify the past, to crucify past viciousness, to crucify the deluded and overly-complicated mind .... and to strip the thick crust worldly life off of ourselves. For the cross is the surgical instrument which extracts the child of God from the mess of past. And it must be reverenced as our turning point, you see, as our crossroads deliverance.
Let us live simply that others may simply live.
And let us follow the Man Who had nowhere to lay His Head.
In the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost.