Homecoming and Returning

When a student in London in 1970’s I lived at Mill Hill, where the Mill Hill Missionaries had their HQ. On my wall I had a poster which said ‘Life’s a voyage that’s homeward bound’ (A quote by Herman Melville). This seems relevant to the theme of this year’s Annual Ecumenical celebration for the feast of St Mungo.

St Mungo was driven out of Glasgow by the anti-Christian king Morken of Strathclyde around 565AD and made his way through Cumbria to Wales where he worked as a missionary for many years … but eventually came home to Glasgow and is credited with the founding of that city. Hence the four symbols of the fish, bird, tree and bell – all stories linked to the saint. We are familiar with homecoming and returning …people coming back to Scotland for Christmas, soldiers returning from war, our children returning from college or university. But there is another type of homecoming that involves returning that is much more difficult; and that is returning to our true selves after being “away.”

Saint Mungo, also known as Saint Kentigern.

For for this to happen we sometimes need a good jolt to the system to wake us up, an experience which lays bare the truth of our lives. This was the case of the Prodigal Son, the Gospel chosen for this celebration… In his experience of want and loneliness the younger son had an awakening: “Here am I with nothing to eat…I will go back to my father and say to him “Father, I have sinned against heaven and earth I am not worthy to be called your son. Treat me as one of your hired men”. The father’s reaction is interesting. He does not let his son finish his speech but clasps him in his arms in love and forgiveness…and then tells his servants “Let us celebrate with a feast because this son of mine was dead and has come back to life, he was lost and is found” There is a rabbinical (Jewish) tradition that says that when we had to leave the Garden of Eden we experienced this as a loss, an emptiness, a sadness, an ACHE - and our whole lives consist in trying to deal with this ache …. to find our way back to the Garden and into the arms of our loving God. Because we live in a world where many of us want to find an instant remedy for dealing with emptiness or pain we easily reach for the bottle, the remote control, something to fill the emptiness, to take away the ache. We know that a few glasses of wine deadens the pain - for a while - but does not remove it. We remain, like the Prodigal Son, unsatisfied because we are far from home, from our true selves, from the One who loves us. Addressing his own experience of ache/emptiness, St Augustine wrote “You touched me, Lord, and I have been hungry for you ever since.” And famously he concluded that “Our hearts are restless until they rest in you.” In our efforts to “return” there is

some very good news … There is a Jewish Story of how God, before the Fall, would regularly rendezvous with Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. Then one day God turned up but there was no Adam or Eve – and he was devastated. Since then, goes the story, God has been searching for them/us because he has lost part of his creation. In losing us God experiences the ache as well because in losing us, he has lost part of Himself … and so, we Christians would say, he becomes incarnate, he became a human being. The God who became flesh in JESUS now shows us how to address the issue of the ache/ emptiness – because he experienced it, too. Jesus is the seeking God made flesh (The One who leaves the 99 sheep to go after the lost one …. ). And so just as the Prodigal son came to his senses and returned home, to a Father who was there with open arms to welcome him back, so the invitation is there for each of us: to set aside our desperate searching for happiness outside of God, in the things of creation, and to wake up to the

The Return of the Prodigal Son by Pompeo Batoni (1773). (Luke 15:11–32)

fact that it is only when we open ourselves to the embrace of the loving Creator, that we will truly have arrived home. “Our hearts are restless until they rest in you.”