"I WILL ARISE AND GO TO MY FATHER."

John B. Willis

One of the most significant features of the story of the prodigal is this, that when understood it is found to be not a far-away Oriental tale, but a near-by experience. We are all prodigals, in a way, for we have turned our backs many a time upon our highest ideals, and sought satisfaction in response to the seductions of material sense; and we have all found, or are sure to find, that this course means rapid expenditure and fleeting joy. It means a deep sense of unworthiness and degradation, of enslavement and shame, all the heart-hunger, humiliation, and despair which filled the swine-feeder's cup with bitterness to the brim.

The experience of all this has been so keen in many a noble nature as to beget a splendidly sincere effort to gain the peace and joy which pertains, as he is sure, to true living. Too often, however, though the endeavor to "arise" has been genuine, he has not gone to his Father, for he has not understood that, if there is no reconciliation with Truth and Love, there can be no home-coming, no entrance into the inheritance of good. In his ignorance and desperation he has tried to find the homeward path in ascetic vigils, in conformities, and in prayers that were mingled with tears. His struggle has been an honest one, but he has utterly missed the way because he has not understood the import of the Master's teaching, that freedom is gained by Truth-knowing, by the right understanding of God and His law, and by this alone.

This has been most clearly instanced in the case of those for whom the penalty of material sense has assumed the form of physical suffering. Prompted by pain, they have arisen, and have bravely tried to find escape from their miseries; but instead of going to the Father, instead of looking to the apprehension of that divine law which was effective in Christ Jesus for the healing of all diseases, they have entered the devious and labyrinthine paths of materia medica. This has been the place of stumbling for the great body of Christian people, and in the hour when they knew that no earthly arm could save they have proved again that to be without God is to be without hope.

Human experience and Christian Science are at one in teaching that the most heroic effort to "arise" is forever futile unless it preludes a going to the Father. To this Christ Jesus gave persistent emphasis. Indeed his whole history might be epitomized as a continuous endeavor to show wanderers the way home, the way of return to the acceptance and realization of Love's legitimate and eternal rule. So, too, Christian Science teaching is always theocentric. Whatever the prodigal's stage of advance, whatever the nature of his need, its counsel is ever the same: Go to thy Father, and be reconciled. Divine Life is thy only strength, divine Truth thy only refuge. The Christian Scientist seeks ever to define God to his own consciousness, as Mrs. Eddy has said, "by feeling and applying the nature and practical possibilities of divine Love" (Messages to The Mother Church, p. 37). This is the one way home, and happy are they whose feet are following it.

The promise and possibility of the prodigal's redemption lay in his realization that he was his loving father's son, and in his determination to arise and go to him. The moment these were given the scepter, that moment his problem was practically solved, and he had a right to begin his home-coming song. And this is just as true for us as for him. To apprehend God, the undying Life, the omnipresent Truth, the eternal Love, as our Father, is to have immediate and perennial occasion for rejoicing. We have not completed our demonstration, and perchance are still a long way from home; nevertheless, if in every hour we are thus remembering God, and if in every crisis and determination we are arising and going to Him, it is fitting that the days of our mourning should cease, for (so the story reads), when the prodigal "was yet a great way off, his father saw him, and had compassion."

John B. Willis.

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THE RIGHT ATTITUDE

February 5, 1910

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