This week’s gospel reading at mass was the wonderful and polyonymous parable of the prodigal son. The parable reveals to us something about God and I encourage you to read it if you aren’t familiar with it. The beautiful Bride wrote about it here, with an emphasis on the younger son (who squandered his father’s inheritance) and encouraging people to consistently return to the unconditional love of God the Father (do read hers, my prose is dry chaff compared to hers). As she was writing it, she told me she felt strongly about getting her expression of that message out. However, after reading it with her, it’s not a message that deeply resonated with me. After considering why this was the case, it occurred to me that I can identify more with the older son. While the younger, who rejects his family and the land and cuts himself off, returns to the father and asks him to treat him as a hired servant, the older son, who while still seemingly within the family and land, reveals he considers himself cut off, describing himself as a servant and describing his brother to his father as “your son”. So while the younger son exemplifies an external sort of severance from family, the older exemplifies an internal sort of severance; he’s still acting as if he’s in the family but he does not think of himself as truly in the family.

I said I could not relate to the younger son as much as I can with the older son. For me, I didn’t know what it meant to be a part of God’s family. I grew up thinking it was metaphorical, something sentimental but unfounded in reality or at best, conventional. Like how people call their pets children, or two best friends thinking of each other as if they were siblings, or an adopted child. I tended to think the church was a fancy institution essentially built on this and people served in it. It took me quite some time to realise Scripture and Tradition teaches that being a part of God’s family is analogical, between metaphorical and literal. And it is certainly real. Jesus is the vine that I am grafted on to. I am being made into a partaker of the divine nature. I am united and reconciled to God, becoming the goodness of God. I am being turned into the image I reflect. God became man so that man could become God. And so on. Deification just is “being a part of God’s family”.

This is how I can relate to the older son of the parable. I learned that I am not merely a servant but that in Jesus Christ, I am a son. I am a son whose Father unwaveringly desires for all to choose to inherit his eternal life of mutual delight and lavish celebration in a manner beyond our comprehension.