Welcome Home

We’re talking about prodigal child stories in class this week, not because it’s an election year, but because many of the stories in our text and our life seem to involve journeys and finding our way with the people we love (and sometimes dislike with great intensity).

Wolff’s “The Rich Brother”; Tan’s “A Pair of Tickets”; Williams’ The Glass Menagerie; Keillor’s Prodigal Son radio play; Ishiguro’s “Family Supper”; Baldwin’s “Sonny’s Blues,” and so many other tales, including our own lives: all have elements of that prodigal child.

What and where is home? I write on the board. What is the journey? How do the characters perceive and define home and their journeys?

We’re all prodigals at some time in our lives, often at many times in our lives. We leave via our bodies, or our emotions, or our minds. Even if we’re not the ones apparently leaving, we experience the prodigal child on multiple levels. There’s family relationships: Who’s Mom’s favorite? Who is not the golden child? There’s group relationships: Who’s the prodigal? How do the rest of us treat him? There’s changing roles: Sometimes I’m the prodigal and sometimes the other child. Sometimes I’m the one who journeys; and sometimes the one who stays home. Sometimes the parent; and sometimes the child.

Which role do we want to play, and what’s the meaning of it for us? Do we feel caught in a role? Being the good and responsible child gets old after a while. Is the prodigal child always the prodigal? Do we want to stop breaking the rules and start making them?

What’s at stake? Control. Limited resources: land, inheritance, love. Fear. Status. Self-identity. How much of who we are comes from inside and how much comes from asking others to give us our role and our worth?

If we’re out there, walking the byways or thumbing a lift, we’ve got the choice of going back. We can go back to be accepted. We can return to confront problems. We can be confronted in pain or anger by those we’ve left behind. We can go back to claim our rightful status, responsibility, and identity. We can claim our destiny.

Or we can refuse to return home: we can keep wandering. Maybe we’re haunted. Maybe we don’t want to accept our family or our identity; and maybe we’re busy creating a new one.

Yet if we identify prodigal with its meaning of luxuriant and abundant, we must include the father in that parable. He gives to both his children, throughout the story. He stays at home, waiting, but we need to remember that he also is wandering.

Every day we have the opportunity to go out, learn something, and come back home. We bring something back with us: sometimes a bottle of wine to share at dinner, sometimes a skill, sometimes love for the people who got dinner going and ran the washing machine. Sometimes not. Sometimes we bring back the same resentment we left with, not even airing it out on the trip.

Whoever has won, however we have voted, and wherever we come back to: welcome home