THE PRODIGAL SON'S RETURN(S)

When I was eighteen, I found myself on a layover in St. Petersburg, Russia, at the famous Hermitage Museum in the late-Romanovs’ Winter Palace. I had been told that the appreciation of the building alone would have required a three-day tour, and I was allotted four hours. So, having despaired of seeing the whole thing, I walked through the rooms with a desire to see what I could and to be grateful for what could be seen. I turned a corner into a simple room overlooking the Victory Plaza outside and there, by the window, was Rembrandt’s iconic “Return of the Prodigal Son,” the inspiration for the Nouwen book with the same name. I had not read Nouwen, I had only seen a tiny poster of the piece in a classroom at my high school, and so it was without pretense or preamble that I found myself utterly stopped in my tracks before this painting.

First, I couldn’t have imagined how large it was. The scale of the canvas and the height at which it was displayed gave me the feeling of being a little child who had stumbled into a place meant for grown-ups. As an athletic teenager clocking in at 6’3” feeling small was not a typical experience for me. I was overwhelmed, and graciously the museum had set a small bench across from the painting, where I quickly retreated. Staring at the figures of the painting, I started to make out the central characters: the father, the son, the brother, the merry-makers. I looked across from my bench at the painting and took it all in--a powerful portrayal of a story that I had heard regularly since VBS as a second-grader. As the son of an accomplished painter, I could appreciate some of the techniques and admire the skill of the artist. But something was drawing me that I could not explain. My group came by at that moment and I was pulled along to other rooms.

At least for a bit. I needed to go back to that room and that painting. Something was left undone, and I didn’t think I would ever get a chance to return. So I got “lost” from my group and went back. I ended up spending over three of my four hours there. In the final minutes of looking from the bench as the light from the window changed in the waning afternoon and made different parts of the painting emerge and vanish, in those last seconds I tried something. I got up, looked around for a curator or guard, and seeing none, I walked right up to the painting and got much closer than was probably allowed. When I got close I found that I was at eye level with the prodigal son on his knees, looking right at the back of his head. I couldn’t see anything but the back of his head and on either side of it was dark paint. So I looked up. And, looking up, I saw the father looking down with compassion on me. At that closeness, the angle of his eye-line came off the canvas. He was not contained there anymore. He was looking at and beyond his son to the one who stood there, still just a bit farther away. There was enough room there for us both.

In the many years that have passed since that encounter, I’ve read Nouwen, been to seminary, become a priest, become a dad...and all of those have extended my perception of what is happening in that story and in that painting. But something remains elusive, something unaccounted for. As rich as those experiences have been, there is something that remains indescribably present only in the nearness to that painting and in the eyes of the father. C.S. Lewis writes in his under-appreciated essay “Meditations in a Toolshed” about the difference between ‘looking at’ and ‘looking along’ to describe two ways we knew something. I’ve found this repeatedly useful in describing the difference between study and formation. But it has also proven helpful in explaining the difference between looking at the painting from the bench and looking at it from almost inside of it. And that difference accounts for something significant in the parable’s teaching about repentance.

As the parable tells us, the son who went and wasted his substance with riotous and wasteful living comes to himself while starving in the pig-pen of a stranger, and there begins to plan his return. I find it very relatable how he takes time to script the encounter. “Father, I have sinned against heaven and before you.” It is a properly contrite admission, formulaic in its comprehension of having transgressed divine, familial, and social bonds. “I am no longer worthy to be called your son. Make me into one of your hired servants.” For as gutting as this loss may seem, for as much as this offer smacks of appropriate humility, I’ve come to the point where I don’t buy it. It’s still haunted by the need to control. There is no room in it for the father to respond, it is a one-man play and so the rehearsal requires no one else. It is an almost-confession, one that evades the necessary shame of humility, a necessary letting go of the outcome. It is beset by an empty sort of rhetoric.

I’ve detected this in my own confessions at times, over the years. The specificity or the abstraction with which I own up to things in my moral life is so often shackled to the need to curate the perception of myself even while on my knees saying words that are meant fully to open the heart. I want to and need to confess but I also want to and need to be seen a certain way, by the confessor but much more by myself. There is a battle of soul to relinquish that false vision of the humble penitent. It is the first return of the prodigal--the return we think we can control, the one that does not require the honesty or willingness to allow the unscripted moment. But for as flawed as this intention can be in the confessional, for as flawed as it is in the prodigal, it is enough to turn us and move us in the right direction. It is a start.

But it is insufficient when we actually come face to face with the father. The prodigal planned to return to his home, to offer his practiced lines. But the father disrupts the plan, going out with compassion to meet his son before he finishes the journey. As Nouwen speculates, to see his son from afar suggests his enduring hope that his son would return. He must have practiced for this through many disappointing trial runs as well. When they do meet again, the son does not wait for his father to speak, but launches straight into his lines. Yet the father interrupts the script. Before the son can conclude with “make me into your servant,” the father calls for the feast to be ready. That final line of resigned but curated self-identification is never allowed to air.

The disruption of this moment is, I think, part of what kept me in front of that painting those last moments I saw it. I expected to see a framed, contained picture of the father and his penitent son. Instead, I found myself pulled into the painting. I was seen in a way that I didn’t expect, that unnerved me and comforted me, that was unpredictable. But I could not and did not want to look away. Everything else just sort of vanished. Maybe I could say it like this: the point of disruption where goodness exceeds our vision and control may be a way of defining ‘grace.’ The real return of the prodigal defies the scripted return, obliging a solemn but safe silence as the father does just what is needed. Our script is not nearly good enough. The grace of the father is swifter and greater than that for which we would think to ask or settle. 

As someone whose life has required so much continual, incisive grace to redeem, I think I’m beginning to understand. But whatever understanding is worthy has come from the experience of standing under real grace in silence in community, in the confessional, and in that room with Rembrandt’s painting. As with us, the first return of the prodigal gets him nearly there. The second return of the prodigal brings him fully home.