“Not long after that, the younger son got together all he had, set off for a distant country and there squandered his wealth in wild living. After he had spent everything, there was a severe famine in that whole country, and he began to be in need. So he went and hired himself out to a citizen of that country, who sent him to his fields to feed pigs. He longed to fill his stomach with the pods that the pigs were eating, but no one gave him anything. When he came to his senses, he said, ‘How many of my father’s hired servants have food to spare, and here I am starving to death! I will set out and go back to my father and say to him: Father, I have sinned against heaven and against you. I am no longer worthy to be called your son; make me like one of your hired servants.’ So he got up and went to his father. Luke 15:13-20
“The son found a resolution to his abandonment. He went back home to his rightful place. He resubmitted to the reality of that place, to its requirements, to its expectations, to the expectations of his father, to the irksome presence of his brother, to a place infused with abundance and rootage, the very abundance and rootage from which he had fled. In order to start that return journey, however, he had to acknowledge his hunger; he had to abandon his utopian (“no-place!”) fantasy of being unfettered by his rootage. He had to recognize that his anticipation for a far country was in fact a lethal illusion. Until he came to that “consciousness,” he could not make a move back to a place of human viability. The wonder for him, of course, is that when he got home, he was welcomed. That was not what he had expected, because he had become inured to the callous indifference of the far country that never welcomed anyone and that made every relationship transactional. It turned out that his home and his homecoming radically contradicted his experience in the far country of homelessness of mind and body.”
Walter Brueggemann in Materiality As Resistance: Five Elements for Moral Action in the Real World (Louisville: WJKP, 2020), 68-69.
Some may wonder what the prodigal son story has to do with generosity. Everything. We all succumb to illusions. This story teaches us how to get back on track. And if we want to pass on this way of living to our children, then it means everything.
The world bombards them with a “lethal illusion” to abandon the abundance and rootage of home. If the word rootage sounds odd to you, join the crowd. It did to me too. It just means system of roots.
And interestingly, Brueggemann draws out that a utopian fantasy literally takes a lost person to no place. We could call it homelessness. That said, notice the unexpected welcome that also comes when he returns to the abundantly generous and deeply rooted home.
The lessons for us today are many. For each of us with homes, we want to create a welcoming environment of abundance and roots. Simultaneously, we must all ignore the lies that advance lethal illusions.
And we want our homes to appear as places that radically contradict the craziness out there. So our children and anyone who enter, find it as a place of generosity and vitality.
We do this not by hoarding wealth, but by living obediently and generously in a world filled with scarcity thinking and lies. We show the veracity of our faith through our generous living.
And that’s really what creating a contextualized generosity curriculum for indigenous workers in the Coffee Triangle is all about. Everyone, everywhere needs to put this thinking to practice.