On Being the Prodigal Child

Holy Moments

“Of course the sinner must repent.  But why?  Simply because otherwise he would be unable to realize what he’d done…Christ would have said…I feel quite certain about it—that the moment the prodigal son fell on his knees and wept, he made his having wasted his substance with harlots, his swine-herding and hungering for the husks they ate, beautiful and holy moments in his life.”

                                  Oscar Wilde (De Profundis)

         Most of us think of holy moments as those when we are rapturous and inspired—peak experiences in nature come to mind.  I remember once being stopped dead in my tracts by a desert sunset; I stood for I don’t know how long and wept for the beauty of it.  It seems like a holy moment, etched as it is in my mind.  But what if holy moments also happen when we’re at the bottom of the well with no way out except to fall on our knees and beg for deliverance.  What if those moments when we feel most bereft are in fact the beginning of a new life?

         I’m not a great believer in sin.  The “sins of the flesh” are simple human weaknesses to which everyone is subject.  Like the prodigal son, we are prone to spend our gifts in ways that do not honor us or our creator.  We have a tendency to turn our backs on what God-within is calling us to do because we are afraid and doubt that we are up to the job.  Stepping out on faith requires courage that is hard to summon up.  Moses at the burning bush comes to mind.  He threw out every excuse for inaction that he could come up with because he was afraid.  I do the same thing.  I call it spiritual laziness.

         At the time Oscar Wilde wrote De Profundis, he was disgraced and in jail.  He based it on Psalm 130, which begins, “Out of the depths, I cry to you, O Lord.”  Sometimes our lowest point is, paradoxically, our most profound moment, our holy ground.  Louis Lavelle, spiritual philosopher and professor at Sorbonne, wrote, “The spirit is not a thing we display but an activity we exercise, in favor of which we choose and on which we gamble.  It exists only for him who wants it and, in wanting it, brings it into being.”  Sometimes we have to be at the end of our will to truly want what spirit has to offer.  Those are the times when nothing stands between us and divine guidance—when we have ears to hear and eyes to see.  Holy moments, indeed.

                                  In the spirit,

                                  Jane