The
prodigal son
Once
the Alliance broken… They realized that
they were naked. There remains shame or
exhibitionism. Our modernity chooses the second term of the
alternative.
There
was a man who had two sons. The younger one said to his
father,`Father, give me my share of the estate.' So he divided his
property between them. Not long after that, the younger son got
together all he had, set off for a distant country and there
squandered his wealth in wild living. After he had spent everything,
there was a severe famine in that whole country, and he began to be
in need. So he went and hired himself out to a citizen of that
country, who sent him to his fields to feed pigs. He longed to fill
his stomach with the pods that the pigs were eating, but no-one gave
him anything.
(Luke 15,11-16)
No
doubt, the evangelical parable takes a particular significance face,
on the one hand, with the Western adventure but also, more largely,
face with the adventure of our world. For how long will the prodigal
son of our modernity want to keep the pigs before finding the way
towards the house of Father? First, undoubtedly, he should find the
way of anamnesis and the huge cry of the Spirit in his encumbered
depths.
The
most rational way to keep pigs is to start locking up those sometimes
turbulent animals behind a fence. Buckling the loop of man on himself
we constituted for ourselves an empire of humanity. Without the Other
one.
This
our world is undoubtedly characterized by an extraordinary
multiplicity of rich and particular spaces. This multiplicity,
however, is just scattered in a same
including space. Off this enclosing
space is expelled everything that is too much to fit in the
enclosure. For instance: Death, Evil, Sin, Grace, Transcendence,
Accident, Mystery…
The
enclosure produces 'main thinkers' at its measure, that is lucid only
as far as the impassable horizon of
the fence. When lacks the sense which gives sense, infinite
chattering gets possible. All you have to do is to speechify… But,
attention, not beyond the limits of the enclosure!
The large enclosure… A
specificity of our modernity! Michel Foucault marked its contours. On
side of prisons. On side of psychiatric hospitals. On so much and so
many sides! A perfectionist needs to classify and to put into boxes or
inside cages. The large enclosure is of course not only of
sociological nature. Souls had to be parked. Spirits had to be formed
in accordance with the narrowness of the enclosure.
However, isn't this in a marvellous
world in which we were locked up? A world where 'to live' is combined
with so much and so many facilities. Gushing of inventions and
discoveries. Scientific conquests. Technical prowness. Improvement
of the producing tool. Abundance of consumer goods. Extension of
communication networks. Improvement of work conditions and of
possibilities of leisure. Progress of purchasing power, of medicine
and of life expectancy. Creation of equipment for the soul and the
body. Superabundance of information. Expansion of artistic and
cultural productions. Plethora of insurances against all conceivable
risks…
Spendthrift…
Prodigality is undoubtedly not a great sin. It sometimes happens
to be virtue. Here, however, it is not a question of any spendthrift.
It is about the son.
It is even about the junior, undoubtedly the preferred one. What he
wastes is his only in alliance. First he wastes a family
estate. And, by doing this, it is the
bond of Alliance
which gets broken. Is it necessary to speak here about spoiled
children? The son knows seldom the price of family fortune and the
work it costed to the father. As if abundance were due and went from
itself. At times of euphoria, their wasting is in accordance with
their carefree irresponsibility. They begin to weigh the price of
resources only when they are missing.
It
is of an immense family estate that the sons of Occident, and through
them all the sons of modernity of the earth, are heirs. Taken by
giddiness in front of their prowesses, they forgot it. Believing that
their resources and their energies, already the material ones,
especially the spiritual ones, were theirs like the most natural
things of the world. You need undoubtedly failures and setbacks to
begin to understand that far from being natural these resources come
us by heritage.
Our
modernity, still too dazzled by its own prowness, did not yet take
the exact measure of its dead end. Perhaps the prodigal son didn't
touch the bottom of anguish
of his recluse condition? But already the too
easily euphoric answers and the
escape ahead feel less assured. They are even a little ridiculous in
front of the rise of a radical questioning. Already there is a
suspicion. Wouldn't the 'modern' man be sick? Sick of an evil much
more pernicious than the current
more or less safe making diagnostics
tend to admit.
Fatal
sequence of a repression, of a schizophrenia and of an enclosure. Our
autistic reason closed on itself until the insanity! Fighting until
despair and absurdity with this radical question. Sisyphus task
unceasingly taken again and unceasingly failing. With man alone
supporting the responsibility of being a creator and founder of
truth, of value, of rights, of duties and of sense. Of sense
especially! From now on man is responsible for man. Radically.
Without recourse and guarantor other than man.
Which image of himself can the prodigal son get while trying to be reflected in the turbid puddle poolsof of his enclosed field?
When
he came to his senses, he said,`How many of my father's hired men
have food to spare, and here I am starving to death! I will set out
and go back to my father and say to him: Father, I have sinned
against heaven and against you. I am no longer worthy to be called
your son; make me like one of your hired men.' So he got up and went
to his father. (Luke
15,17-20)
At
the time when man believed to buckle the loop of his own divinity,
there already rose 'Master thinkers' of suspicion. Marx. Nietzsche. Freud.
The Masters thinkers of suspicion had not finished announcing the
death of God when already the Masters thinkers of absurdity were announcing
the death of man. Many settle now in this field of ruins, tried by
despair. Others, fewer and more lucid ones, discover that the deserts
are made to be crossed. It is faith in the Exodus which makes the
difference.
It
is now through absurdity
that the loved child of the Father, become prodigal, experiences that
he is made for another job than keeping pigs. Today, in this fracture
of history, isn't it through absurdity
that we start having a presentiment with an increasing obviousness
that man passes man infinitely?
Father,
I sinned… In the enclosure of the pigs remains, possible, the only
authentic cry. And the only liberating one. Because man revealed
divine by grace does not refuse this grace without playing the
animal. When man is diverted from the Source of his being and of his
sense there remains an extent of absurdity. You have to take the
measure of this contrast to feel the distance
which separates the schizoid prospect on man from the original
Christian vision. In the reciprocity of Alliance the Father says: You
are my son. At this very moment your
'I' self is given to you. You can say: You
are my Father.
goto