So far in my first three posts I’ve been describing my introduction to humiliation, my discovery that it’s the most wonderful and liberating blessing I have ever received, and how my embrace of my total loss of face has inaugurated a new era in my life in which I’ve begun to experience the “supreme happiness” and “abundant life” that Jesus offers in the Gospel.
In Alcoholics Anonymous we’re invited to share our “experience, strength, and hope.” It’s my intent to use this space to do that. We’re also asked: “Tell us what it was like, what happened, and what it’s like now.”
Thus far I’ve dwelt on what it was like and what happened. Today I’d like to focus more on what it’s like now. By way of so doing, please bear with me as I insert a lengthy quote:
The Parable of the Prodigal Son (Luke 15:11ff)
11 Then [Jesus] said: “A certain man had two sons. 12 And the younger of them said to his father, ‘Father, give me the portion of goods that falls to me.’ So he divided to them his livelihood. 13 And not many days after, the younger son gathered all together, journeyed to a far country, and there wasted his possessions with prodigal living. 14 But when he had spent all, there arose a severe famine in that land, and he began to be in want. 15 Then he went and joined himself to a citizen of that country, and he sent him into his fields to feed swine. 16 And he would gladly have filled his stomach with the pods that the swine ate, and no one gave him anything.
17 “But when he came to himself, he said, ‘How many of my father’s hired servants have bread enough and to spare, and I perish with hunger! 18 I will arise and go to my father, and will say to him, “Father, I have sinned against heaven and before you, 19 and I am no longer worthy to be called your son. Make me like one of your hired servants.”’
20 “And he arose and came to his father. But when he was still a great way off, his father saw him and had compassion, and ran and fell on his neck and kissed him. 21 And the son said to him, ‘Father, I have sinned against heaven and in your sight, and am no longer worthy to be called your son.’ 22 “But the father said to his servants, ‘Bring out the best robe and put it on him, and put a ring on his hand and sandals on his feet. 23 And bring the fatted calf here and kill it, and let us eat and be merry; 24 for this my son was dead and is alive again; he was lost and is found.’ And they began to be merry.
Don’t worry, it’s not my intent to give an exposition of this passage. If you want one, I highly recommend the Rev’d Tim Keller’s book The Prodigal God. But I do want to note that this parable has both haunted me and allured me for a long time.
What haunted me was the misery of Prodigal in the far country. I’ve identified with it as long as I can remember. He was alone, orphaned as it were by his own actions. He was hungry for the things which truly satisfy the soul as well as for the necessities of life. And he was in servitude to a master he wasn’t meant to serve.
(After what I’ve laid out in my first three posts I trust I need not make the obvious connections to my life.)
For many years, I have used the Book of Common Prayer’s Morning Prayer as a part of my devotions. The prodigal son’s rehearsed plea to his father is among the Scriptural sentences in the opening of the Morning Prayer liturgy. I can’t tell you how many times those words have rung in my heart as I approached the Lord in prayer:
I will arise and go to my father, and will say unto him, “Father, I have sinned against heaven, and before thee, and am no more worthy to be called thy son.”
However, no matter how much I have known and believed the Gospel’s truth that the father’s response to the boy is still God’s response to the sinner who comes to Him in repentance, the reality is that in my heart of hearts I had despaired that the Lord would still do unto me as the father does unto Prodigal in the story.
In other words, I was faithless. And being faithless, I was hopeless. And being hopeless, I was miserable.
And though misery can drive one to spiritual destitution, misery alone isn’t what Jesus meant when He said “Supremely happy are the spiritually destitute, for theirs is the Kingdom of God” (Matt. 5:3).
Misery, “pitiful and incomprehensible demoralization,” death, and humiliation – while being some of the greatest blessings of my life – were only blessings in the sense that they drove me, like Prodigal, to realize that I am “spiritually destitute” and then to set out to return to my Father.
And what I have found, and what I want to impress upon you, is that when I got to that point I found that my God really does respond to the brokenhearted, spiritually destitute, humiliated sinner as Prodigal’s father did in the parable.
Here’s the beauty and liberation of humiliation: it confirms to the heart that you are spiritually destitute. Humiliation is a great blessing because it leads you to the point that you finally despair of yourself. In other words, inasmuch as humiliation is a bootheel crushing the ego and the pride, it liberates you from “doing” – from so desperately trying to establish and maintain your (real or perceived) righteousness and sets you free to accept the truth that you have no righteousness.
It liberates you from doing and liberates you to be – to be the beloved child of your Father.
Indeed, once so utterly humiliated you are left with two options: 1) You can kill yourself (either immediately or, in my case, on the alcoholic installment plan), or 2) You can die to yourself.
For me, suicide and a return to the bottle were both so unappealing as to cease as options. Therefore, I was left with the second option.
When all pride is gone, and when it is impossible to hold your head up in public (or even in the mirror), the only way that your head can be lifted and your countenance brightened is if Someone Else does it for you.
To return to Prodigal’s story, the poor lad had reached this point. Sitting in the pigsty surrounded by filth and left eating what the swine disdained, the young man saw his destitution. And so, he said to himself,
I will arise and go to my father, and will say to him, “Father, I have sinned against heaven and before you, and I am no longer worthy to be called your son. Make me like one of your hired servants.”
His last shred of self-esteem, self-worth, and self-righteousness finally evaporated like the morning dew in the desert’s heat. It was (if I may mix my metaphors) a mirage, and now it was exposed as such. Like the mirage shimmering in the distance in the summer heat of the desert, his pride and righteousness and desire to seem to be something was revealed to be nothing more than dry dust, and not the refreshing water for which he thirsted.
He was humiliated.
And it was liberation; sweet, sweet liberation. It was liberation because the young man could return to his father, not as a man about town, but as a mere supplicant seeking nothing more than to be a servant in his father’s house.
And here’s the beauty of humiliation: freed from self, he was able to see his true condition and accept it. No longer did he deserve a thing. He was, as he said, “no more worthy to be called thy son.”
And this is where humiliation, having led to liberation, becomes a thing of beauty.
20 And he arose and came to his father. But when he was still a great way off, his father saw him and had compassion, and ran and fell on his neck and kissed him. 21 And the son said to him, “Father, I have sinned against heaven and in your sight, and am no longer worthy to be called your son.” 22 But the father said to his servants, “Bring out the best robe and put it on him, and put a ring on his hand and sandals on his feet. 23 And bring the fatted calf here and kill it, and let us eat and be merry; 24 for this my son was dead and is alive again; he was lost and is found.” And they began to be merry.
When Prodigal came to his father in utter brokenness – the sort of brokenness that comes only through the severe mercy of a shattered self through one’s own actions – his father disregarded his son’s protestations of worthlessness and declared that this boy, long lost in sin and error, was now the most honored of all in his father’s house!
If I may point out what may be obvious, the parable gives us the clear impression that Prodigal’s humiliation is the very thing that makes him worthy to be his father’s son! When he was high on himself (as his older brother was) he was truly worthless. But when he saw himself as worthless he discovered the beautiful truth that he was the son of unparalleled worth!
And as it was in the parable, so it was with me. When I based my self-worth on my performance, my intelligence, my skills of whatever sort, and so on – that is, when I was desperately seeking to earn my place in my father’s house and in your good graces – I was deserving of “all miseries in this life, death itself, and the pains of hell forever,” as the Westminster Shorter Catechism puts it. What’s more, not only was I deserving of these things, I was living them out, filled with a sense of “uselessness and self-pity” and a “pitiful and incomprehensible demoralization” (as the Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous puts it). I was riddled with “fear of people and of economic insecurity” (ibid.) and life was utterly baffling.
But when I arose and went to my Father and said, “Father, I have sinned against heaven, and before thee, and am no more worthy to be called thy son,” then He received me with joy.
And since that day we have made merry, my Father and I.
Dear reader, the things from which you have fled, the realities from which you have hidden, and the pains which you have sought to anesthetize are the blessed doorway to your Father’s house. You, like I, have a choice. We can continue to play hide and seek with God and with the truth about us. Or we can come out of our hiding, accept (even embrace!) the truth that we are far, far worse off than ever we imagined, and allow Him to give us entrance into His blessedness.
I have made my choice, and I now see my humiliation and the shattering of my life as the best things that ever happened to me. And they are so precious, for they allowed me to reject the ways of the elder brother, to join Prodigal in his self-awareness, and to become the honored son of my Father.
What choice will you make? The initial plunge is cold and painful, I know. (Oh boy, do I know!) But once the shock wears off those waters are cool and refreshing, a never ending stream of living water that satisfies your thirst like nothing this world can offer.
Join me, and know the supreme happiness only those who are dead to self and alive to God can know.
Pax.
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