A Story For The Books

Do I ever enjoy a good story!  One of my all time favorite ongoing story sagas is Garrison Keillor’s weekly tall tale of his home town, Lake Wobegon.  There, all the women are strong, all the men are good-looking, and all the children are above average.  I have found myself over the years a bit envious of my brother-in-law, Ed who has attempted and done a fine job, professionally, story telling.  

So awhile back I gave a little thought of learning for myself to tell a good story.  In researching the subject I ran across a Christopher Booker.  A British journalist who says that all literature can be classified into seven basic narratives. Booker made my head swim with his exhaustive identities in his book: The Seven Basic Plots: Why We Tell Stories.  Now I don’t give up easily at a challenge and I am glad I didn’t because I found one category he describes as the “Voyage and Return” plot. Here, Booker catalogs, among other works, Alice and Wonderland, Peter Rabbit, and Gone with the Wind. Each of of those stories chronicles a hero who travels away from the familiar and into the unfamiliar, only to return again with new perspective.  I like that!  How many times I have been asked through my life; “Where in the world did you get that idea?”

Among his list of “Voyage and Return” plots, Booker also identifies Jesus’s parable of the Prodigal Son. He describes the parable as I have always understood it.  The younger son demands his inheritance, travels to another country, squanders his money until he has nothing left, and finally decides to come home again pleading for mercy. When told or heard like this, it is a story that indeed fits neatly into Booker’s category, and perhaps neatly into visions of the spiritual journey.  My experience has been that my journey of faith and the Father, has been a story of coming and going and returning again.  Sometimes the process taken longer than I care to admit.   

But is this an accurate understanding of the parable of Jesus? Is the story of the prodigal son really about the son? Is the spiritual journey about my coming and going or God’s?

My story of faith and belief cannot be told without some admittance of wandering to and from that faith, in and out of God’s presence, walking with and without Father, Son, or Spirit. When I think of my place among the spiritually vibrant, I am immediately aware of my drifting soul and less than perfect role in the story. Prone to wander, Lord I feel it; prone to leave the God I love, sings the hymnist. I imagine my place in the assembly of the faithful as I might image entering a grand ballroom of crowned guests and beautiful robes only to realize I am wearing my old garden jeans and straw hat. The world of beautiful souls—with its ardent disciples from early centuries and saints from today—does not seem a place in which I sometimes belong. Sometimes I feel more like humorist Groucho Marx, who once declined the offer of membership into an organization with the reply: “I don’t care to belong to any club that would have someone like me as a member.” If I myself am the main character in my story of faith, this is the story I must tell.

But thankfully, I am not. In the Christian religion, the spiritual “journeying” is God’s. Jesus’s parable of the prodigal son is one more compelling reminder of this. The parable of the prodigal son is only a “voyage and return” narrative in the way Booker describes it if the son is the subject of the story. But when studying the father in this story makes that an altogether unlikely theory. Even the titling of the story as that of “the prodigal son” is misleading. Jesus tells that it was while the son was still “a long way off” that the father saw him and “was filled with compassion for him” in Luke 15:20. Literally, this father was moved by his compassion. I notice the Greek word conveys an inward movement of concern and mercy, but this man was also clearly moved outwardly. The father runs to the son, embraces him (literally, “falls upon his neck”), and kisses him.

 Jesus describes a scene that is far more abrupt and shocking than the story I have often read as a son who wanders away and returns home again. It is not the wayward son who runs to the father but the father who runs to his wayward son, and at that, without any assurance of his son’s repentance whatsoever. In fact, the father runs without any promise that the son is even home to stay. What sort of a spiritual voyage and return journey would omit such a vital detail? Moreover, it is not the son who I read as kneeling in the story Jesus tells, but the father. It is as if Christ is reminding once again that all have indeed fallen short of the hope and promise and beauty of God, but that God has fallen to pick me up again and again, and to bring me home. Jesus tells a story whose merciful ending has far more to do with the actions of the father than any action of the child.

Father, God, so it is with my own journey all these seventy two years. I confess that my voyage and return stories, my place in the story You tell, will never be valid because of my steps, but because of Christ’s. If I must use Booker’s headings to describe the journey of faith, the voyage was Christ’s, so that I might forever return to You.  Amen.