Beyond the Patio

Where Are You Heading?
The Need to come to Ourselves
Luke 15:1-3, 11b-32

 Frederick Buechner in his book of daily meditations Listening to Your Life talks about self examination during the Lenten season. He says:

Jesus went off alone  into the wilderness where he spend forty days asking the question  what it meant to be Jesus. During Lent, Christians are supposed to ask one way or another what it means to be themselves.

If you had to bet everything you have on whether there is a God or whether there isn’t, which side would get your money and why?

When you look at your face in the mirror, what do you see in it that you most like and what do you see in it that you most deplore?

If you had only one last message to leave to the handful of people who are most important to you, what would it be in twenty-five words or less?

Of all the things you have done in your life, which is the one you would most like to undo? Which is the one that makes you happiest to remember?

Is there any person in the world, or any cause, that, if circumstances called for it, you would be willing to die for?

If this were the last day of your life, what would you do with it?

To hear yourself try to answer questions like these is to begin to hear something not only of who you are but of both what are you becoming and what you are failing to become.

(Frederick Buechner Listening to Your Life HarperSanFrancisco, 1992  p. 56)

When you examine your life like this one is also faced with the question “What changes do I need to make in order that I might find a better life?”

*

In the Gospel this morning we find the story of what has become known as the “Prodigal  Son”. It is about a young man who decided to take his share of the family’s property and go off on his own to “do his own thing”.  However he spent all of it in riotous living and he ended up broke. It was time to examine his life what he needed to do to change his life in order to become to live a meaningful life. In the midst of his self-examination he says that  he came to himself  and  decided what he was to do.

“But when he came to himself….he set off and went to his father”

*

When I was counseling full time in the field of Addictions I often discovered people in the midst of the counseling sessions “coming to themselves” and making some important decisions that would affect their lives profoundly .

For example there was a woman, we’ll call her Jane, came into see me one day. She sat there for awhile in my office without saying anything and finally she blurted out that she was an alcoholic.  She went on to say that she had been sober about two years and now it was time to make some decisions about her life and wanted counseling in order to make these decisions. She came to see me about once a week for a number of weeks and she talked to me about making decisions about what she was going to do with her life, that is, whether she was going to continue as a housewife, or go back in to nursing, or chose another totally different career. She also was interested in doing some volunteer work in the community. She realized as well that she needed to make some decisions about her marriage. It had suffered over the years of drinking. It wasn’t  great to begin with but through her years of drinking she was able successfully to avoid the problem. Now she realized in her sobriety that she was unable to avoid them any longer.

She also had some problems with God . They stemmed from her  image of God as Judge ready to condemn her for any indiscretion that she might have done. She wanted to believe in God, she had what one might call a “yearning for God” but at the same time was afraid of God and spent most of her time avoiding God.

At first she continued to avoid making decisions, but as time went on she began to make a few decisions that eventually changed her life quite a bit. She became more confident, she changed her career, she faced the end of her marriage. She no longer avoided God but began to have a more hopeful relationship with God.

At this time I was doing some work with nursing students. They came to the clinic to find out some things about addictions and to discover some things about counseling. I decided that Jane  would be a good person to take with me into the group of students. She readily agreed to do the job. After all, she was a nurse and could related to them on that basis. Also she had a good counseling experience.

She began the session by talking about the problem she had with Alcohol, then she went on the tell what she got out of counseling. It was an eye-opener for me because I didn’t realize some of the struggles that she was having with the counseling process.

She said : 

“when I came into counseling I thought that the counselor should make the decisions for me.”                                       

She went on, 

 “Alex would not make the decisions for me. He kept putting them back into my lap. I would leave very angry. I would storm down the stairs and out the door vowing never to return, but then again he did help me to consider some aspects that I hadn’t considered before and if I waited long enough and gave it time to sink in, I did feel better after counselling and began to feel better about myself, so I would come back and we would go over the same ground again and maybe even break some new ground.”

Then, she said, 

” I came to myself. I was the one who had to make the decisions to change my life. No one could make it for me. This is the only way that I could become a responsible human being willing to accept the consequences of all my decisions. As long as I let others make decisions  for me, they were their decisions. If they were right, I still had the knowledge that they were made by someone else so they didn’t give me confidence. If they were wrong, I could blame someone else but I couldn’t consider myself as growing in responsibility.”

“Counseling was important because at first I was looking for another dependency and I needed someone to keep passing the decisions back to me. I needed someone to make me face myself so I could become a mature individual.”

She spoke with emotion and certainly I could share the emotion. We had shared a great deal but it brought home to me like nothing else the dynamic of a counseling relationship.

She had come to herself at an earlier time when she had made the decisions  that she was powerless over Alcohol and needed a power greater than herself to deal with it and she first entered A.A. but she had to come to herself again when she had the temptation to transfer to another kind of dependency….to allow someone else to make her decisions for her. It was almost as important as the decision to seek help with her alcoholism because it too had far reaching effects on her life.

*

I have had to come to myself from time to time.

I had to come to myself and face up to end of a marriage at one time in my life. Connected with that was the need to face my loneliness.

When I was first alone I would lose myself in activity.  I thought all this activity was a answer was what I needed to deal with my aloneness. When I didn’t have anything to do and would visit other people just so I wouldn’t have to be alone.  I thought that clinging to other people was the answer to my loneliness. Eventually I had to come to myself in order to live with myself .  I had to make changes.  I developed activities that I could do alone and enjoy just being with myself. I wrote poetry.  I painted.  I sang, played the Guitar and listened to music. I didn’t have to be with someone else.  I was free to choose to be with someone or not be with someone. I no longer desperately needed someone.  I began to discover what the theologian Paul Tillich meant when he said,

“Loneliness is the pain of being alone, but Solitude is the glory of being alone.” 

(Paul Tillich The Eternal Now Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York , N.Y 1963,  p. 17-18)

When I came to myself I learned of solitude.

There have been other times of coming to myself.  I had to come to myself and  decide to commit myself to a second marriage.  I had to come to myself  in regard to vocational choices.  Each time it was like choosing life.

In those times I came to myself and chose a more authentic life. I am sure that you have done that sometime in the past.  Ruth, the woman I talk of earlier did that.  The younger son in the Gospel story did that.

“when he came to himself….he set off and went to his father”.

*

When in the past have you examined yourself then came to yourself and made decisions that affected your life greatly?  What happened.  What did you learn?

Where in your life at this moment do you need to “come to yourself” change direction?  Choose life, defy death.  What hinders you from doing it?  What is yours greatest fear?  What would help?

What is the lesson for you in this section of the Gospel story?

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