Liturgies

Cate Blanchett’s Oscar winning performance portraying Jasmine, a former New York socialite whose life has imploded in the wake of her wheeler-dealer husband’s imprisonment, has links to today’s gospel story of the Prodigal Son.

With a luxurious apartment in New York City and a house by the beach, Jasmine was part of the social whirl, unaware that her husband Hal was a crook and serial womanizer. When everything comes crashing down, Jasmine has to start life all over again. She comes to stay with her sister Ginger (Sally Hawkins) in San Francisco. Though siblings, they had been adopted and with different birth parents, have little in common.
In an attempt to get her life back together, she is out of her depth. She makes attempts at ill-fitting employment, ill-judged social climbing and abysmal interpersonal relations. The movie darts back and forth between past and present, interlacing scenes of extravagant privilege with the dawning realities of a mid-life meltdown.
Throughout the film, Jasmine’s increasingly desperate presence (vocal, physical and emotional) barely lets up, constantly reaching for a drink, her mouth set in a cracked smile, eyes darting with cornered panic, Jasmine is an exhausting character to be with and to watch.
She, not unlike the character of the younger son in today’s Gospel, having become estranged from their former life of privilege, it is now clear to them that they are living on the scraps left by the pigs. And certainly in their life of privilege, although they were unaware of it, they were living on scraps. For when someone believes that their ‘material’ life is all there is and life is about making lots of money and living a life of privilege and prestige with little or no regard for anyone or anything else, where the next new purchase of property or higher place on the plastic platform of life’s privilege is where it is at, then they are really living on the mere scraps which life has to offer- desperately trying to find fulfilment and pleasure in life from the next new trinket. How hard it is for a rich person, says Jesus, to enter the Kingdom of God or true connectedness with Being. The many Prodigal Son stories in the various religious traditions all point to the need to return to the Source after having been lost in the world of form. And on returning discovering it anew; when you lose something and you have spent hours, days, weeks looking for it and you find it, the joy of having it back, retrieving it and embracing it with a new appreciation. The story of the Prodigal Son in Luke’s Gospel is the last of these parables about loss and recovery. The parable of the Lost Sheep and the Lost Coin precede it. There is great rejoicing in all these stories on recovering what was lost.
As it is within us, as we move away from the Source, God, Present Oneness with Being, we lose ourselves. We forgot who we are, as the story of the Prodigal Son relates. This is especially true in the Buddhist Prodigal Son where the Father’s attendants have to go out and seize the Son and bring him back to the Father against his will. He does not even recognize the Father at first on returning. It is some time before he realizes who his father is and who he is.
As it does for most of us. For we do not believe who we are – consciousness itself.
Sons and daughters of God if you like. And when we do, it is like the person from T.S.Elliott
“With the drawing of this love and the voice of this calling,
We shall not cease from exploration.
And the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.” (Little Gidding by TS Elliott)
What we have been searching for has been with us all the time and we thought it was over there somewhere.

Captured in these sentiments from the 13th Century Persian Poet, Rumi:
“I have lived on the lip of insanity wanting to know reasons,
Knocking on a door,
It opens
I’ve been knocking from the inside.”
(Rumi)
This forgetting who we are also related to Peter’s homily the week before last, where we as humans have forgotten we are nature. We are not something apart from nature, we are nature itself. The whole environmental movement is based on this recognition. People are rediscovering nature and our oneness with it and what we do to it, we do to ourselves.
It is a whole awakening experience. We came out of the sea 370 million years ago, we came down from the trees 6 million years ago and we walked upright on the plains 2 million years ago. But somewhere we forgot who we were.
Could this be what the writer of Genesis, in our first reading, meant when we picked the fruit from the TREE of KNOWLEDGE ?
We entered the world of thinking, the world of duality, where we gradually split from our connectedness to nature, and the Source of our Being. Could this be the fall – our loss of knowing who we truly are?
The time of Lent has traditionally been a time set aside to re-examine our connectedness to Source. For Jasmine and the Prodigal Son are all of us to varying degrees. We so easily can get lost in the world of form mistaking it for reality.
Vanity of vanities, says the preacher. All is Vanity writes the author of Ecclesiastes. Lent begins with Ash Wednesday with the signing of Ash. “Remember you are Ash and unto Ash you shall return.”
All in this life is Vanity – passing, changing and moving on.
The invitation comes in the first reading on ASH WEDNESDAY from the Prophet Joel “Now, now it is our God who speaks. Come back to me with all your heart” (Joel 212).
For it is back here at the source we will find what St Augustine found so many years ago .

Late have I loved you, O Beauty ever ancient, ever new, late have I loved you! You were within me, but I was outside, and it was there that I searched for you. In my unloveliness I plunged into the lovely things which you created. You were with me, but I was not with you. Created things kept me from you; yet if they had not been in you they would have not been at all. You called, you shouted, and you broke through my deafness. You flashed, you shone, and you dispelled my blindness. You breathed your fragrance on me; I drew in breath and now I pant for you. I have tasted you, now I hunger and thirst for more. You touched me, and I burned for your peace.
from The Confessions of Saint Augustine