By Fr Gabriel-Allan Boyd
An affluent man once wanted to offer his mother a gift so generously thoughtful that she would be continuously stirred by how deeply he loved and respected her. One day, he serendipitously came across a newspaper story about a remarkable parrot that someone had trained to have a vocabulary of over 4000 words. The bird had even been taught a repertoire of the top musical hits from the last 50 years. The colorful parrot was a true marvel. So, he conceived an elaborate plan and immediately arranged to purchase the bird for $500,000. In the weeks that followed, he commenced to teaching the bird a series of messages expressing his heartfelt love for his mother, so that she would always be reminded of how much he adored her. Even if it was a bit eccentric, it was an incredibly thoughtful gift. When he was finally satisfied that the bird’s education was complete, he had it delivered to his mother. He was so excited, anticipating how she would be moved to tears over such an astonishing expression of his love for her. The next day he phoned to see if she had received the bird. “What did you think of the bird?” he inquired. She replied, “Oh thank you…it was delicious!”
In last week’s preparation, we were reminded of Jesus’ parable of the Pharisee and the Tax Collector…prompting us to be more honest with ourselves about the ways we often inflate our relationship to God. When we’re full of ourselves, there’s no room to be filled with His Spirit. So that God can do His work in us, we use Lent to prepare ourselves by emptying ourselves of our own false perceptions of how closely aligned with Him we are…and we instead begin begging for God’s merciful help, making ourselves present for Him to do His work in us.
This week we’ll enter the second of the three weeks (Triodion) of preparation for Great Lent. And this coming Sunday’s theme of preparation takes us into Jesus’ parable of the Prodigal Son (Luke 15:11-32). Our Lord tells His audience the shocking story of a young man’s cruel rejection of his father, as he concocts a plan to run off to a far away and strange country. He says, “Father, give me the share of the property that falls to me.” In essence he was saying, ‘Father, I can’t wait till you’re dead. And, unfortunately, it doesn’t look like you’re departing this life anytime soon…so I want to enjoy the fruits of your life while I’m still young and they’re still fresh. Therefore, since you’re already dead to me…give me right now the things you’ll owe me, so that I can go live the life of my own choosing.’
As we prepare to enter Lent, the Church asks us to consider the times where we might be treating God and His elaborate and thoughtful gifts the same way. As long as we’re present with God—united with Him in His will—we’re in possession of all things…but, like the young man in our story, it’s easy for us to begin feeling like our Father’s household and His continual presence has cramped our lifestyle. He expects us to connect the whole of our lives to Him with integrity and truth…completely aligned with His will. He expects us to put actual, devoted effort into learning from Him what it really means to love Him with all our mind, all our heart, all our strength, all our being…and too many times, we just don’t like that. So, we take all the gifts He’s offered to us, and we turn away from Him…using those gifts for our own pleasures and wishes…for us alone…without any benefit to God, or to anyone else.
Just as the evil one tempted Christ in the wilderness with the deceitful suggestion, ‘If you’re God’s Son, then turn these stones into bread’…the evil one also says to us, ‘Since you’re God’s child, use *for your own benefit* the wisdom and strength and other gifts He’s given you. You deserve it. Why wait until you’re too old to enjoy it?’ If we’re honest with ourselves, doesn’t this often fit our own ill-fated use of God’s gifts of love?
So, the immature child-of-God in us seeks to sometimes step away from His authority. We disconnect from being ever-present with Him, so that we can go off to a place estranged from God…a distorted place of self-absorption. We look for a place that rejects the restricting ways of His household. We find a place that has listened to and been deceived by the Father’s adversary—the devil and his demons—a place where there’s little, if any, room for God. We settle into a place where we can live according to the desires of our own heart…squandering the gifts that He so lavishly offers to us. And there, eventually, we discover that the pleasures that we thought were our friends weren’t such good friends after all…merely fleecing us of every good thing we had. Eventually, we discover that the gifts we left home with (now that we have willfully severed them from God’s will), have dried up and wasted away into decay. There, eventually we discover what real hunger feels like.
“Blessed are the poor in spirit,” Jesus says in His Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5:3), “because theirs is the Kingdom of heaven.” The “poor in spirit” are those who realize that we have no life whatsoever, except the life that God pours into us…His breath—the breath of life. The poor in spirit are the ones who realize that the only riches to be found are where God has revealed Himself to us—who He truly is—where we can love Him…know Him…worship Him…serve Him…and emulate Him, because He has become human and has shown us what it means to be truly human. To be truly human is to be intimately unified with God’s will…to tangibly participate with His self-sacrificial love. As we sit in spiritual hunger for Him, we begin to discern the empty nourishment (the pods) of our own mind and heart that merely starve us. There are moments when we may wish to respond to a need where someone is suffering…and we suddenly discover that our own heart has been turned to stone and our imagination has been deadened. We discover that only God can give life to the fossilized imagination of our heart!
When we finally come to realize that, left to our own self-absorbed devices, we merely impoverish ourselves into malnourishment…when we finally decide to return to the Father’s presence, only then can we begin to discover all of the gifts with which we have been endowed. Only when we realistically recount, out loud, the many ways that we’ve betrayed Him over and over again…the ways where we’ve turned away from Him time and again can we come to our right mind. Only when we realize the ways that, regardless of all our impoverishing self-absorption, He still lavishly pours His love upon us…only then can we truly experience the extravagant wealth of wholeness in His will. And so, Jesus’ continued words from the Sermon on the Mount resonate even more profoundly for us, “Blessed are the hungry…because they will be filled!” It’s only when we discover our hunger for real things (not the distorted ones) that they can begin to come our way. The prodigal young man in Jesus’ parable finally felt hungry for real nourishment. He hungered for his father’s home, and yet he knew that he no longer had any right to call himself a son. Why? Because he had psychologically made himself a murderer of his father! He had essentially told his father, “I wish you were dead, so that I can live according to my own will.” Nevertheless, even though he knows that he can no longer be counted as a son…he also knows he can still call the man whom he rejected, “Father.”
Then what happens? Jesus’ parable says that from a long distance the father saw his son coming up the road…and he ran to meet him and embrace him. We have a God—a Father—who runs to embrace us, when in hunger for Him…when we repent and make our way back to Him. The son began to make his confession…that he was no longer worthy to be called a son…and yet the father stopped him mid-sentence. Even though none of us are worthy to be called His children, our Father still considers us as His children and hopes to heal us of our self-absorption. As we prepare for Great Lent, God has thoughtfully bestowed lavish gifts upon us. He hopes that we will use the experience of hunger to rejoin our efforts…to live as children of Light…to become partakers of the divine nature…to live continually as His sons and daughters in Christ and in the Spirit. Are we hungry enough to realize this Lent that this kind of hunger is indeed blessed? …because only in Him will we be filled.