Finding Your Way Back Home to God

Amidst the busy flow of information, societal secularisation and the demand for scientific rationality, the faithful will always find their way home to God the Father writes GRAHAM WILLIAMS.

Home is essential to our very being. It can be a physical and social place and space—of family, friendship and fellowship, communion, worship belonging and sharing. And it can also be a state of intellectual, emotional and spiritual connection and contentment. A “place” of ecstasy and joy, living of life to the full.

This is not the same as being rich, having prestige, power, possessions, position; and doesn’t exclude the experience of pain. Home is not an escape from the world. Nor is it a comfort zone. But it is a safe place. A place where healing, learning and growth happen as relationships are nurtured, and quests and causes are pursued. It is a safe harbour to launch from and return to.

Home is where we are rooted, where “we live in connections, thrive in webs of meaning that make reality coherent, flourish in working together on things that matter, bloom in our experience of giving and receiving blessing across generations, and prosper as we are drawn toward hope”, as Gary Gunderson & James Cochrane put it in their book Religion and the Health of the Public.

The song “Homeless” by Ladysmith Black Mambazo speaks of being destitute, of being robbed of home. Perhaps it speaks of the ground-down people under apartheid who were uprooted by forced removals and deprived of basic rights? Perhaps it speaks to the current situation of migrating refugees from war-torn countries, human trafficking, ever-increasing numbers made homeless — physically and spiritually?

The father of our nation, Nelson Mandela, was physically homeless and separated from family for 27 long years. During that time he who was homeless carried a vision of, and longed for, a home for all, a place of peace and belonging with no racial, cultural, ethnic and other divisiveness.

Maybe there is hope. Wild rock pigeons and domestic homing pigeons have an exceptional, magnetic ability to locate home — maybe we too have a built-in call to find home again, as groups and as individuals.

There are many stories about coming home to where we belong. Think of the pattern of Joseph Campbell’s oft-quoted Heroes Journey, which, put simply, is departure-trials and discovery-return. Stories old and new repeat that pattern, from Homer’s Odyssey to Lassie Come Home.

Published in 1845, Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tale “The Ugly Duckling” is “a psychological and spiritual root story…one that contains a truth so fundamental to human development that without integration of this fact, further progression is shaky,” Clarissa Pinkola Estés wrote in her 2008 book Woman Who Run With the Wolves.

Many of us go through times of feeling alienated, ugly inside, and different. We need to come home to that “place” where we belong, be accepted, esteem ourselves.

In the parable of the Prodigal Son (Lk 15:11-32), the younger of two sons has a “you owe me” attitude and asks for his inheritance prematurely. He leaves home and lives a decadent life in a “distant country” — a place far from his spiritual home.

He ends up penniless, starving and having to feed pigs whose food he wasn’t permitted to eat (how low can you sink?). Disgraced and without expectation he returns home.

I once stood on a hillside in Nazareth in the Holy Land and imagined the father seeing his returning son in the distance, running to welcome him back affectionately, treat him like royalty and grant him authority, celebrate. Lost and found. “This son of mine was dead and has come back to life.”

The dutiful elder son’s nose is out of joint. He compares his situation to that of his sibling and is deeply resentful

Art historian Kenneth Clark has called Rembrandt’s painting “The Return of the Prodigal Son”, created shortly before the Dutch master’s death in 1667, as the best-ever painting. Reflecting on this work throws light on the soul’s journey, leaving but then returning to our spiritual home.

Is this  a process that needs to be continuously repeated until our final transition from life to death?

Changes in our environment, society, communities, technology, and workplace practices all impact us inwardly, often unconsciously. Being constantly connected to worldwide news and information via TV, computers, mobile phones affects our need to connect face to face with others.

Why attend our churches, mosques, temples, synagogues, if we now have a far greater connectivity and much wider exposure to information, knowledge and wisdom of a religious and spiritual nature on the internet?

Former monk, psychotherapist and popular author Thomas Moore believes that it’s okay to follow our own spiritual path these days, drawing on ancient wisdoms, leading thinkers, the classics, to be curious, and to explore — as long as we remain open to the unknown, the mysterious, have the “ability to be connected to the mysteries without having to explain them”. An inner compass, in his view, will direct us home.

Such a shift has been signalled by Britain’s Prince Charles who has said that when he accedes to the throne he will be the Defender of Faith, not the Defender of the Anglican Faith.

But there are three clear dangers with this relatively new found opportunity to find our own path to our internal truth:

• We should be aware of the possibility of being “conned” by the often self-granted credibility of some “experts” and teachers, and the attractive promises that they make to us.
• We may lose connection with a live community that we were once a part of. Our religion and our spirituality have become a very private matter. Is our emotional, social, spiritual being blunted by cyberspace and virtual engagement? Is what it means to be human increasingly shaped by different criteria and definition?
• Is our thinking and understanding of our very being becoming more and more watered down and wishy-washy? Engaging with others and their beliefs, values, religions is wonderful for learning, mutual respect, expansion of horizons—but only if such engagement is from a basis of clarity regarding one’s own faith, which then becomes strengthened during the engagement process.

Another reason why we leave our spiritual home is because we become embarrassed by and fear ridicule of our inability to explain some aspects of our religious beliefs.

Too much emphasis is put on the demand for “intellectual”, “scientific”, “evidence-based” proof to explain our faith. So it is wonderful to come across learned works produced by spiritual scientists. One of these is Ilia Delio’s The Unbearable Wholeness of Being: God, Evolution and the Power of Love (Orbis Books, 2014). Her solidly-reasoned explanations and insights put physics, evolution and Christianity into meaningful perspective.

In Rembrandt’s painting, leaving home for the younger son was not only physical and social but also a spiritual act. Asking for his inheritance prematurely was tantamount to the son wishing his father was dead.

Rembrandt’s Painting

Allow your gaze on Rembrandt’s painting to move to the elder son standing on the right, on the edge of the light. Rembrandt has captured his stiff bearing, disconnectedness, withdrawal, distance, how he is immobilised by resentment. He conveys a feeling that life is not fair. There is anger turned inward, passive aggressiveness and other confusing, negative and self-destructive emotions.

This son has lost his capacity to love. He traded off duty for expected reward and acknowledgement. He is present but excludes himself. He has effectively left, is now himself homeless, and needs to find the desire to come home again. Note how he speaks disparagingly to the father about his brother: “This son of yours.”

What prompts a desire to return? When we leave home and go on our striving journeys—for reward, adventure, freedom, risk—chances are that along the way we will become jealous of other people’s successes, give in to self-gratification, experience existential loneliness, feel anger and agitation, find ourselves “in a distant country”.

We live alongside ourselves not from within ourselves. Others write our scripts and set our agendas. We become disconnected and dislocated—homeless (even though we may not yet realise it).

The 13th-century Persian mystic Rumi said: “Someone who does not run towards the allure of love walks a road where nothing lives.”

We reach a point where we simply have to return. A sudden knowing, or waking up. (“I woke to find myself in a dark wood. The right road was wholly lost and gone”—Dante.)

In Rembrandt’s painting the “bit players” say quite a lot about this spiritual homecoming. The indistinct figure in the background on the left (behind the father) may be the mother. Her presence is both vague and intriguing. She seems to be leaning forward, probably delighted at her son’s return, but holding back.

The man sitting on the elder son’s right (an uncle or friend?) could be lost in thought, contemplating his own journey.

And the person in the centre of the painting is present but doesn’t look engaged.

The Dutch theologian Fr Henri Nouwen experienced, lived with and engaged with the painting over a long period of time. This is what he saw:

The most intense light in the painting shows the father’s hands. His left hand is strong, firm and supportive, reclaiming what was lost and has returned. His right hand is soft, comforting and caressing. A mother’s hand. The son is safe. Reconnected. Belongs. He is “in the light”.

Fr Nouwen concluded: “As I look at my own aging hands, I know that they have been given to me to stretch out towards all who suffer, to rest upon the shoulders of all who come, and to offer the blessing that emerges from the immensity of God’s love.”

Like Fr Nouwen, the old, frail father suffers from failing body and failing eyesight. Yet he possesses a deep “inner seeing”. He recognises, knows, loves both sons. There is no either/or judgment. Instead it is non-dualistic acceptance.

Staying with the light area of Rembrandt’s painting, we contemplate the younger son. He has been through boom-and-bust, and now is thin, dirty.

His head is shaven—like a prisoner, bereft of part of his identity. His clothes are ragged and torn, his shoes—like him—at the end of their tether, nearly completely ruined, worn through.

His sword is the single remaining symbol of his sonship. He rests against his father’s heart. Forgiven. Giving and receiving blessing. Able to again participate fully, with new purpose and hope for the future.

He is in that special Rumi moment: “Remember the deep root of your being, the presence of your lord. Give yourself to the one who already owns your breath and your moments.”

Let’s give Fr Nouwen the final word: “Whether you are the younger son or the older son, you have to realise that you are called to become the father —look at the father in the painting and you will know who you are called to be.”

Graham Williams is an author, executive coach and a certified management consultant active in leadership development.