Our Lent introduction ended with questions about what helps when experiencing thresholds in faith and life…
What metaphor or question may we inhabit? What way or request may we follow?
And when he came to himself, he said, How many hired servants of my father's have bread enough and to spare, and I perish with hunger! Luke 15:17
Seeing what is
In this parable it is said of the prodigal son “he came to himself” (15:17).
Franciscan Richard Rohr writes of rituals which typically are meant to startle us, wake us up even. I know that sense of sleep walking and the need to somehow wake up and return to myself or recover some sense of being present to what is: to some limitation, physical or otherwise, for example and the necessary and full engagement with it.
The prodigal’s poorly planned and executed journey, reminded me of a recent impromptu trip. I reflected on my defensiveness about my decision making yet nonetheless received some recompenses. One of them was a bearded outdoorsman looming large, fiery beard foremost, from an outsize Costwolds poster. He was attributed with these words:
“The outdoors provides me with the mental bandwidth I need to transition from all of the work and daily life, into a space where I am more myself”
He needed the outdoors. But what do I need, what do you need, to transition, through day and life, into a space where your true self can be enabled, where we can come to our senses.
Some times all it takes
is a walk around the lake- Ari J Picker