READINGS: JOSHUA 5:9A, 10-12; PSALM 34, 12 CORINTHIANS 5:17-21; LUKE 15:1-13, 11-32
In my family of origin, I had five siblings. Three brothers and two sisters and among us there was no end to the competition for our parents’ attention, assistance, and affirmation. There was the elder/first son, Michael, who was expected to be the responsible one, the obedient one, and in our family’s case, the one who would be the priest. That expectation did not advance beyond seminary high school.
And then there was my next oldest brother, Charlie, the second born in our family, and as is typical with second children, they tend to be the jokester, the black sheep, and the one who challenges authority. Unlike my oldest brother Michael, who was expected to be responsible and in charge, Charlie liked to test the rules and the limits of authority. As you might expect, first sons tend to get much of the attention and admiration for their role as the responsible one. Charlie, like many second children, acted up I believe, out of the need for attention.
Unchecked Charlie’s “bad boy” persona culminated one night when he was only 15 years old. He was arrested along with his four friends for taking a ‘joy ride’ in a stolen car. Rather than let a 15-year-old spend a night in the county jail with all the possible things that could happen to him, my father bailed him out and spirited him away to a friend of his who lived in the mountains in West Virginia. Dad then returned to our home in Illinois, sold our home, resigned his job, and we all moved to Pennsylvania where we started anew. This was my first remembered example that my father never gave up on Charlie (or any of us). It also seemed that my mother, as we used to accuse her, “loved Charlie best.”
Throughout his life, Charles continued to have challenges on how to best secure his place in the world and my father and mother never relented in their attempt to help him. He was truly their prodigal son.
I figure us younger siblings had many of the judgments the older brother had it in today’s story of the prodigal son. Why would my father and mother lavish so much time, love, and heartbreak on somebody who is truly lost, because of his own poor choices? I didn’t realize then that I had a problem too. Like the older son in the parable, I felt superior to my brother and never ceased judging him (and others) based on their performance rather than loving others as Jesus commands us.
Charles tried a couple of different approaches to life but none of them yielded at him a stable place in the world. In 1967 when Charlie was 20 years old, he enters the army. Charlie arrived in Vietnam in early January of 1968 and was assigned as a radioman for a “Special Operations” unit and sent to Pleiku in the Central Highlands. Pleiku was the location of a major Communist offensive on January 30th. The Vietnam War entering a new phase with the Tet Offensive and Charlie was caught in the middle of it.
His unit’s job was to deny the enemy forces safe havens in villages where they could use the civilian population as human shields. Their job was to try to force the evacuation of the civilians so the villages by warning the villagers their communities would be bombed in three days. Then they would return a few days later to bury the dead they had met only a short time earlier. You see, the people in this area of Vietnam ancestral worshipers and there was nothing that his unit could do to convince the people to leave. After a year of this kind of operations, Charlie returned from Vietnam and when he landed in Los Angeles on a charter flight they had to walk through a gauntlet of war protesters who accused them of the atrocities of war including being called baby killers. The very sad reality of the situation was that for Charlie he believed it was true. He had been placed in the untenable situation of either following orders that would result in the death of innocent civilians or risk courts marshal. This set Charles up for a lifelong struggle with the effects of war including the loss of his teeth from bad food or water, poisoning by agent orange and post-traumatic stress. His experience wounded him, physically, psychically, and morally. The veterans hospitals were ill-equipped to treat his psychological wounds, unwilling to acknowledge is physical wounds from Agent Orange, and unaware of what are now know as moral wounds. This all led to a premature death at the age of 55 after years of suffering for him and his family. Charlie thought he left the hell of war behind, but it followed him home and he was never free if it until he died. My parents never gave up on Charlie nor did his wife and children. This prodigal child finally returned home on July 24, 2002, when he was only 55 years old.
The hard lesson I was exposed to was that a good parent always welcomes the prodigal son (or daughter) home, and never gives up on them. Us “well behaved” children often resort to judgment rather than love. And us parents of prodigal children must never give up on our children because good parents and the heavenly Father never gives up on us.
You must be logged in to post a comment.