What if the Prodigal Son Had No Father to Return to?

What if the Prodigal Son Had No Father to Return to? s

The United Nations Report on the Holy See turned a blind eye to a peril that threatens our young. It's the elephant in the house, or rather, the absence of one.
For as long as I've been able to read, I have been fascinated with the evolution of language and the origins of words. This field of study in linguistics is called "etymology." It sounds like, and is sometimes confused with, "entomology," which is the branch of zoology that studies insects. Come to think of it, I've been wondering about the etymology of entomology. It's been bugging me for years!Too Nerdy? Sorry about that. I sometimes think I must drive other prisoners mad when they ask me the meaning of a word, and I provide its entire history from its Latin root to its current use in the English lexicon. Our friend, Pornchai-Maximilian Moontri recently asked me about the difference between the words, "prodigy" and "prodigal." The question arose when I wrote about the well-known Parable of the Prodigal Son from the Gospel of Saint Luke (15:11-32) in "Pope Francis Has a Challenge for the Prodigal Son's Older Brother."Prodigy and prodigal are often confused. They both come from Latin, but both the original Latin and the contemporary English have vastly different meanings. The word, "Prodigy," from the Latin, "prodigium," means "portent" in the sense that it refers to a marvelous example of something. The Latin root of the word, "prodigious" is related to it. In English, a prodigy refers to someone gifted with exceptional qualities."Prodigal," on the other hand, has almost the opposite connotation. It comes from the Latin "prodigus," rendered in later medieval Latin as "prodigalis," and it means "lavish." Its use in English refers to someone reckless and wasteful. However, "prodigal" has long been associated with the younger, errant son in the famous Parable of the Prodigal Son. We therefore often interpret it to mean someone who has returned from the error of his ways. It's a development in the etymology of the word that has been influenced entirely by how we apply that parable.The story lends itself to that meaning because the younger son's return, and the older son's disdain for his father's embrace of him, are central events of the parable. The key to the parable, however, is the father's reaction at the return of his prodigal son, and his challenge to his older son - who never left, who was always faithful - to share, or at least to see, the father's joy in the restoration of his son who was lost.The parable is one of the most memorable in all of Scripture because our tradition has always recognized the crucial importance of fatherhood. If you remove the father from the parable, it becomes a tale of two brothers, one utterly rejecting the other. Removal of the father is to remove all hope for restoration and justice. It is the father's joy at the return of his errant son that is the parable's central image.THE STORY OF ELEPHANTS AND MENAlmost two years ago on These Stone Walls, I wrote a post that seemed to touch the raw nerve of what is fast becoming an endangered species in Western Culture: committed and involved fathers. That post, which took off like a rocket in the on-line world, was "In the Absence of Fathers: A Story of Elephants and Men."It was our most shared, re-posted, tweeted, and linked TSW post. I was surprised one day recently when a friend looked it up and saw that it has been shared thus far almost 1,200 times on Facebook, and has been linked-to and republished hundreds of times. I'm not sure whether its attraction was elephants or fathers, but I think the latter.For me, the most moving among hundreds of comments in various places on that post was also the most recent. A link to it appeared in February 2014, almost two years after I wrote it, in a post entitled "Operation No More Tears, Part 2" at the website of Saint Patrick Presbyterian Church in Collierville, TN. Senior Minister, The Reverend Jim Holland, wrote:

"[I was] recently sent...a great blog post. It was remarkable, actually. The post, written by Catholic priest Gordon MacRae, is called "In the Absence of Fathers: A Story of Elephants and Men.” While the essay is profound, the man who wrote the blog is what interests me; he is even more profound."

I don't see or understand that last part at all. I don't feel very profound. Reverend Jim Holland went on to describe for his readers the circumstances of my imprisonment, and concluded:

"So he writes, he blesses, and witnesses to the grace of God in a prison. How? How do you bless people when your life is a testimony of a profound wrong? How do you witness to grace when your life is based on an injustice? . . . All I can say is this: the message of hope in the Bible is so profound and real that it actually works into our lives in the here and now. You ask, 'How could that be?' Good question. This Sunday, we'll talk about it."

I've asked a friend to send me a printed copy of Reverend Jim Holland's sermon from that following Sunday. I was very touched by his words, and cannot help but wonder why I haven't seen anything like them on the websites of Catholic priests and parishes. I hear personally in prison from a growing number of other priests, and I am both moved and grateful for that, but more and more I fear that we as a Church have taken on the demeanor of the Prodigal Son's older brother, and many among our bishops and priests have cast off some of the central tenets of fatherhood: mercy and restorative justice.Within the priesthood, and especially within the leadership of our shepherds, joy at the errant son's return seems to have become tempered by a fear of being somehow tarnished by him. It's a point I tried to make with clarity in "Our Catholic Tabloid Frenzy About Fallen Priests." As fatherhood is sacrificed on the altar of political correctness in Western Culture, it has never before been more urgently needed in the relationships between bishops and their priests, and between priests and their people. And without a doubt, it has never before been more urgently needed in the relationships between fathers and their sons.IN THE ABSENCE OF FATHERSWhen I wrote "In the Absence of Fathers: A Story of Elephants and Men," I was irked by some folks in the Catholic reform movement, Voice of the Faithful (VOTF) which since then seems to have virtually disappeared from the landscape of the Church. VOTF spent a decade using a painful scandal in the Catholic Church to clamor for a dissenting theological and social agenda under the guise of "survivor support." I know many sexual abuse survivors. You heard from one here on TSW two weeks ago in "I Come to the Catholic Church for Healing and Hope." As a survivor, a real one, Pornchai-Maximilian has not found support in VOTF's relentless dissent. To use the fall of some of their very sons and brothers in the priesthood to further their own cause is for me the most vivid example of what it means to mimic the Prodigal Son's older brother.VOTF is not at all alone in this. In the following excerpt from "In the Absence of Fathers," you may simply substitute "Voice of the Faithful" with the United Nations, or any number of groups using a crisis in the Catholic Church as leverage to stifle the Church's moral voice in the public square:

"But for me, the most mindless politics of all are those of groups like Voice of the Faithful, obsessed with the 'survivors' of priestly misconduct - both real and feigned - from 30, 40, or 50 years ago. But they have absolutely nothing to say about the thousands of young men dumped annually into prison systems from which they emerge with little hope of ever recovering from what they encounter there. How can anyone claim to protect young people while ignoring that?"

Drawing

Some of the Catholic websites that republished "In the Absence of Fathers” edited out that paragraph, and I found that to be sad for it overlooked an inconvenient truth. America's great social experiment in radical feminist redesign of the family unit has led Western Culture into the demise of fatherhood, marriage, family, and the role of committed men in the raising of the young. The people most paying the price for this are the very young in the here and now that the U.N. Committee on the Rights of the Child has turned a blind eye to while scoring headlines at Catholic Church expense for claims from a half century ago.The evidence is staggering that those who have most visibly succumbed to the effect of the absence of fathers have been simply cast into prisons by the thousands, and as such, they have no voice. They have become invisible. How can anyone claim to want to protect the young while ignoring this? Has even one of the clueless social reconstructionists pointing at the Catholic Church from the safe confines of U.N. bureaucracy ever spent a single day inside an American prison? Here is what they would find there: thousands of young men spending their twenties in prison because they spent their teens in homes without fathers.AT THE ROOT OF JESSEMy friend, Jesse Pickard, is one of them. For months, Jesse stood at the window in his prison cell watching me, Pornchai-Maximilian, Mike Ciresi, Michael Martinez walking together across the walled prison yard toward early Sunday morning Mass. One day last month, Jesse approached me in the prison yard and asked where we go every Sunday. I explained, and he said, "I've never been in the prison chapel." I said it's a lot like going into any other church, and Jesse said, "I've never been in a church." I asked him if he would like to go with us, and he said he would think about it.A week later, Jesse passed me a note as he was walking by me. Such things are forbidden here because prison officials usually see any communication between prisoners as something plotting and nefarious. What Jesse was plotting, however, was to get up the courage to go to Mass. In his note he wrote: "Father G, I really want to go but I feel so awkward. I don't know what to do." We can't stop to talk much here so I wrote back my own illegal note plotting some subversive prison activity. I wrote: "You can sit between me and Pornchai and just do what we do." Jesse has been there every week since.From age 10 to 12, Jesse and his father were homeless. They spent two years living in Florida in his father's van when State officials stepped in and removed Jesse to a series of group homes and foster homes which Jesse finally outgrew when he turned 18. He headed north alone in search of some family. On his way north, Jesse followed some of his fatherless and aimless peers into prison.Jesse calls me "Father" in every note, conversation, and brief exchange and I can't get him to stop saying it. "There are no titles in prison," I tried to explain, but it was Pornchai-Maximilian who set me straight. "You're missing the point," Pornchai said. "Jesse hasn't used that word in a long time, and you shouldn't stop him!"Well, as is said in New England since times of old, "Light finally dawns on Marblehead!" The Parable of the Prodigal Son is stripped barren, meaningless and empty, if prodigal sons everywhere have no fathers to return to. That's why our families are floundering and our prisons are flourishing, and it's a crime against humanity.Editor’s Note: Below is a sketch of Father Gordon MacRae created by Jesse Pickard after Mass in the prison a few weeks ago.