There is a story of a man who was driving along the highway. Along the way he hits a big bump and hears a clang, but he ignores it and keeps on driving. When he gets home, he discovers that one of his hubcaps is missing. So, the next day he goes back to the spot where he hit the big bump, and sure enough, there is his hubcap which was deliberately propped up on the side of the road. When the man walks over to get it, he notices a note which some stranger has attached to the hubcap. It reads like this, “Hi there! I've been waiting for you to find me!”
1). How is the coin lost? Through no fault of its own. It could have happened through careless guardianship.
2). How is the sheep lost? To illustrate:
A sheep found a hole in the fence and crept through it.
He wandered far and lost his way back. Then he realized he was being followed by a wolf. He ran and ran, but the wolf kept chasing him, until the shepherd came and rescued him and carried him lovingly back to the fold. in spite of everyone’s urging to the contrary, the shepherd refused to nail up the hole in the fence.
[Words from the Mass] “Therefore, Lord, we pray: graciously accept this oblation of our service, that of Your whole family; order our days in Your peace, and command that we be delivered from eternal damnation and counted among the flock of those You have chosen.”
As the words from Mass indicate: Both the lost coin and lost sheep tell us that we are unable to move on our own. Spiritually compromised, maybe not even aware that we are lost because of poor conscience formation, we need God’s help.
Passive sheep and inanimate coins are appropriate symbols of things lost when one wishes to emphasize the divine initiative in finding what is lost.
[an action item] Life becomes this process of shouldering one another, of walking each other home. And sometimes we’re the carrier, and sometimes we’re being carried. But all the time, it’s a movement towards holiness and wholeness, of being included again with others though the Real Connection with God.
3). Lastly, how did the Prodigal Son get found? Our text says, "He came to his senses."
So did Dorothy Day, who died in 1980, and was an American journalist, social activist, and Catholic convert. She advocated the Catholic economic theory of distributism, which she considered a third way between capitalism and socialism. Pope Benedict XVI used her conversion story as an example of how to "journey towards faith... in a secularized environment." Pope Francis mentioned her in his address before the United States Congress. The Church has opened the cause for Day's possible canonization. She had lost herself in the Greenwich Village of the 1920s, a place full of "Bohemians, serious artists, workers, theorists, parasites," communists, socialists, and assorted rebels. During this time, she also experienced failed relationships, an abortion, and a common law marriage. She had thought herself sterile following her abortion, was elated to find she was pregnant in mid-1925, though a man named Forster Batterham, dreaded fatherhood. He found her increasing devotion, attendance at Mass, and religious reading incomprehensible. Carrying their child she came to faith in Christ. As a result, Day left the man she loved, although they remained just friends—since he could not reconcile himself to her faith in God—and she went on to guide the Catholic Worker movement. In her autobiography, The Long Loneliness, Day tells us: When I wrote the story of my conversion . . . I left out all my sins but told of all the things which had brought me to God, all the beautiful things, the remembrances of God that had haunted me, pursued me over the years so that when my daughter was born, in grateful joy I turned to God and became a Catholic. I could worship, adore, praise and thank (God) in the company of others. I found faith. I became a member of the Mystical Body of Christ." She later called the abortion "the great tragedy of her life."
One prodigal came to his senses in the pig sty, another with the first pangs of morning sickness. In the strangest places, we realize we have been found. (source: Bill J. Leonard).
Lastly, here is the formula of how to be a Prodigal Son or Daughter, so we can avoid it:
The prodigal’s arbitrary squandering of the property shows that the ego has no goals or commitments, and that in turn reveals that energy has moved from consciousness to the unconscious.
The ego in isolation is unreachable, the light simply does not penetrate. We need to make the breakthrough of self-disclosure—What the AA Big Book calls “a manner of living which demands rigorous honesty.”
The enjoyment of personal freedom could only be attained in fleeing from the father’s house with all that it stood for in terms of tradition, authority, objective values, and moral responsibilities to his father and his brother.
The far country, that promised so much in the beginning and beckoned so seductively at the outset of the journey, turns out to be a land of faded dreams and spiritual hunger. Times change and the land of plenty becomes the land of want. Famine strikes, wealth plummets, jobs became scarce. Days of abundant living and socializing turn into nights of loneliness and personal bankruptcy.
The only employment the younger son could find was looking after pigs, unclean animals in Jewish dietary and social law. And he hungered for the food that the pigs were eating. In the context of the parable the hunger of the younger son’s body is a symbol of his inner hunger of spirit for something to sustain his being and to rescue his life from its downward spiral into destruction and eternal damnation.
When he came to his senses, he is quite willing now to incriminate himself with the self-indicting words, ‘I have sinned’.
The prodigal in verse 17 "comes to himself," he confesses his sins before God and humanity (verses 18 and 21). This is true repentance, as the underlying Semitic expression shows.
The changes that took place in his mindset (metanoia)— coming to himself,” engaging in internal dialogues, and persuading himself through his internal rhetoric—are dimensions of cognitive-emotive and enactive processes considered from a top-down perspective by God’s grace above.
However, “just because the monkey’s off your back doesn’t mean the circus has left town,” as a comedian said.
His wanting to be reconciled with his father should be understood as purification or purgation, and not as punishment. One scholar, who describes himself as ‘a Protestant who believes in purgatory’, has argued for a return to the original understanding of purgatory as a process of purification.
