I do not believe I am alone in sometimes feeling that my spiritual journey lacks a great conversion story, either at the start or somewhere along the way. Those of us who were baptized as infants, have been attending church every Sunday and praying at home as long as memory serves, do sometimes wonder if we are missing something. Is our spiritual life as full as those with a more mixed and wide-ranging experience?

Some churches have altar calls in which members can come forward to commit or re-commit their lives to Christ. In my very limited knowledge of this it seems to me most of those “saved” were not really that lost to begin with. In my own case, I would not want to do anything that would seem to deny the sacramental effect of Baptism on my life, but even apart from that, such a “conversion” would seem artificial and pretended. I simply do not remember a time when I did not intend at some level of consciousness to be committed to Christ. My life is more of an incremental conversion, a journey without any dramatic disruption to speak of. Certainly I would own up to having dallied along the way at some points, but I have never made a convincing retreat or deliberately chose another path.

I suspect this experience is the more common one among Christians, but it is still the great stories of spiritual rebirth and the heroically transformed lives that emerged from them that we read about. There is St. Paul, for example, or our own Patron St. Augustine, whose insightful description of his conversion is a classic in Christian literature. We have also the well-known parable of the prodigal son in the Gospels. A convincing argument can be made that the main figure in the story is the father with his remarkably magnanimous behavior toward both his sons, or that the focus of the story is on the elder son who grumbled like the Pharisees, to whom the story was told. Yet if a movie were to made can anyone doubt that the younger son would be the staring role and the others merely supporting parts?

Once, however, while proclaiming this Holy Gospel during Mass I was suddenly struck with the words of the father to the elder son, “Son you are always with me, and all that is mine is yours.” I thought to myself, “That’s me, that’s where I can identify myself in the story.” We often listen to these words only in the shadow of the selfish and self-pitying behavior of the older son, which is their immediate context. Yet these words can stand alone. They express a truth independent of the older son’s immature behavior. This is the normal relationship that God intends to have with us. The older son can (or should) rejoice that he has “always” enjoyed it, while the younger son after his return can rejoice that he again enjoys this relationship.

That the behavior of the older son should not dim these words is suggested also from the fact that they could be used to express the relationship between God the Father and His only begotten Son. This is especially true in the Gospel of St. John, as when our Lord says, “the Father loves the Son, and has given all things into his hand.” We have in the common room of the Retreat House a statue of Christ embracing a bowed figure before him. I have been told that it depicts Christ in the role of father in the parable with mankind as the repentant prodigal son. Christ is like the older brother in the parable, except that he shares so fully and so confidently in the Father’s love that he is perfectly united with his Father and is equal with the Father in His love for the repentant sinner.

It took months or perhaps years of exile before the younger son “came to himself,” and then there was a long journey back to his father’s house. For the elder son everything was much simpler. For him to come to himself all he needed to do was turn to his father and say, “Yes, you are right; I was forgetful and unappreciative of the goodness always so close at hand.”

Perhaps the elder son is a less attractive figure to us because we are not told what his response was to the words of his father. It could very well have been a positive one, and why should we not hope that it was so? If for a time he suffered from adolescent hurt feelings and forgot gratitude and the humility that genuine gratitude brings, is not this more the kind of sin with which many of us can identify? Whatever his reaction certainly we should take the relatively short journey back to the heart of the Father.

“Peace, peace,” cries the Prophet Isaiah, “to the far and to the near, says the Lord; and I will heal him.” The penitential season of Lent and the renewal of Easter is a time for healing and for growth. Those objectively estranged from the sacrament life of the Church should hear the summons to return to the Father’s house. For those of us without creditable stories of apostasy it is a time for the more hidden conversion of growth, a time to battle negligence and lethargy, to become more perfectly united with the will of the Father. The words of the father, “Son, you are always with me, and all that is mine is yours” give us “at home” much for self-examination and much to live up to.

Sincerely,