The Sin of the Elder Prodigal
On the Very Good Work of Losing Bad Religion
“Where, except in the present, can the Eternal be met?” — C.S. Lewis
It’s the simple things, you know, the everyday, close in, ordinary things, that end up giving all the meaning to our lives. We have these everyday moments in such wealthy abundance, we think very little of them. But every one of them is a portal to the Eternal; each one, a gateway to the face of God.
We humans ache for God like a lonely man aches for a lover, or a child aches for a mother they never knew. We experience God first as an absence, a divine embrace of love and belonging that ought to be there but is not. We crave we know not what. But we crave it mightily.
So we build religions—complicated, soul-crushing religions—to explain God’s absence to ourselves.1 We blame ourselves for God’s obscurity. Or we blame some other group of humans upon whom we can outsource our shame. We craft elaborate rules and rituals and perform them with exacting care in the hope that we may coax God near. We contort and compress our bodies, our minds, and our hearts in thousands of desperate, tragic ways to convince this great and marvelous One who allegedly loves us to come near at last and hold us close.
We are the Elder Prodigal in the old story, the one who never repented, and so never realized what he already had.
So they began to celebrate. Meanwhile, the older son was in the field. When he came near the house, he heard music and dancing. So he called one of the servants and asked him what was going on. “Your brother has come,” he replied, “and your father has killed the fattened calf because he has him back safe and sound.” The older brother became angry and refused to go in. So his father went out and pleaded with him. But he answered his father, “Look! All these years I’ve been slaving for you and never disobeyed your orders. Yet you never gave me even a young goat so I could celebrate with my friends. But when this son of yours who has squandered your property with prostitutes comes home, you kill the fattened calf for him!” “My son,” the father said, “you are always with me, and everything I have is yours.” — Luke 15:24-31
I was raised religious. I know it like I know the back of my hand. The collar it placed on my neck was warm and comfortable. I thought by submitting to its pull, it would lead me to the face of God.
But now I see that’s not where it leads. I have seen what such religion turns people into. They are terrified of getting life wrong. But, ironically, they are getting life wrong in the worst possible way. They are not loving, especially to themselves. And they are not free. They obey their religious laws with everything they have. But religious observance was never the sort of surrender God was after. The celebration is happening all around them. But they remain apart, refusing to enter, secretly angry that God won’t let them earn their way in.
The problem is not and never was with Jesus. The problem is with all the religious structures that got built around him, to keep the right ones in and the wrong ones out.
But that was never my job, was it?
When Jesus revealed his glory on the Mount of Transfiguration, the very first thing Peter wanted to do was erect three temples there on that spot; which, if he had, would have no doubt led to all sorts of religious ritualizations, regulations, and monetizations today. The impulse to build walls around the ineffable is strong in us, and immediate. But Jesus commanded him to tell no one about what happened.
And so it has continued. Time and again throughout the centuries, despite even the most earnest attempts of our most religious elder prodigals, the ineffable has stubbornly refused to be caged.
I heard an owl hooting its querious call just outside my wall this morning as I watched a single sliver of dawn stretch beneath my curtain, having just arrived to greet me after its eight-and-a-half-minute flight from the sun ninety-three million miles away.
And just last night, when I stepped outside, I looked to Orion, and God met me there, on the mad fiery fringes of the great red giant Betelgeuse.
I wonder … how would it be if I let it all go? Doctrine and dogma, the endless petty bickering over what I can do or say or think or even dream lest God be displeased? But it isn’t really God, is it, who cares? Only the gods who crave social power make such laws. The real God has no need for such games. So what if I simply stopped playing along?
Then my church would be this moment; my incense, the fragrant scent of coffee rising from the warm mug in my hand. My tears, of joy or sorrow, would be my anointing oil, made holy not by some priest’s blessing, but by the honest trembling of my fierce and fragile human heart. My worship would be every movement of my body through the wild green earth, and every cry of ecstasy I shout from my lungs for the sheer audacity of being alive, and every cry of heartbreak for the terrible injustices of the world, and every sigh of satisfaction at the end of a good day’s work, and every wail of grief at the horrendous loss of those I love, and every bout of laughter over the joy of good company and the beauty of common things, and every smile of quiet delight when I look to the heavens and see that Someone wonderful and strange and mighty and mysterious and bursting with a particular love that is just for me is looking back.
The earth would be my cathedral; its seasons and its creatures my liturgy and guides along the path. The trees would be my confessors, and the wind in their limbs and leaves the song of my absolution whenever I lose my way. I would understand at last without any pretense or pride that I visit heaven every night in my sleep, and I can always find the face of God in the eyes of that one soul I love most dearly, or in the eyes of the stranger I have never met.
I would be free—a wild, easy freedom, unfettered by silly concerns like titles, labels, and status. I would not care what religion, or the religious, think of me. I would have no need for it anymore.
“Why stay in the cage when the door is so wide open?” Rumi asks.
Indeed, Rumi, my brother. Why, indeed?
Perhaps it is time to take my leave, and my freedom, and go.
Not all religion is built on this fear-based foundation (i.e. creating performance-based structures to explain, mitigate, or manipulate God’s distance, absence, or obscurity), but those that are always lead down a dark path. They peddle in fear, and will inevitably contract the heart and shrink the soul until there’s nearly nothing left of it. By contrast, religion that springs spontaneously from wonder, awe, and gratitude, rejects fear as a primary driver for life. Rather, it promotes love as the foundational truth of the universe, and encourages the expansion of the human heart through the risk and vulnerability inherent in any life devoted to the service of love and beauty.