A book that combines theology with one of my favourite Dutch Golden Age painters? Profound and beautiful meditation on the parable of the prodigal son.

Without question, this book is among the GREATEST TREASURES in my library.

I hold it in Olympian esteem, for it got me thinking seriously, and continuously - after retiring from a frenetic career - about the lengthy trajectory of redemption in my life.

It was a trajectory fraught with the sudden appearance of many threateningly proximate, and quite inimical, foreign objects, and fewer guideposts of refuge and certain guidance, along the way.

That was my spiritual struggle.

When I joined GR three years ago, that personal trajectory was all I talked about in my reviews, for to me a book is a spiritual mirror held up to the struggles of my soul.

So much for my own story...

Now these miraculous mirrors, books, are gaining universality in all of our thoughts, as we digest the literary experiences of a vast array of wonderful GR friends - who are now, through their variegated reactions to their fave books, becoming, in our mind’s eye, like One Universal Human Being attempting to accomplish spiritual - inward and outward - self-mastery.

Socrates said, “KNOW YOURSELF” - and we will learn ALL we need to know in life.

That’s what reading does - and it turns an inner self-fascination into an outer, and infinitely vaster, love.

Now, the secret of religion is that God is what IS.

Only that - and All that.

THE MIRACLE, though, is that He has entered into us, and directs us, in our lives and our reading, to become WHAT WE ALWAYS HAVE BEEN - as the great psychologist Carl Jung posited in his Theory of Individuation.

He will turn our endless BECOMING into eternal BEING, if we are awake.

That’s what Heaven, or enlightenment, is.

A vast whole comprising everything and everybody - as Dante saw it: “the scattered leaves of the universe.”

That, for me, is the meaning of this beautiful book - in my own life, and the author’s.

So it is with Henri Nouwen... as he starts with the human family relationships in his own life (through the mediation of a Rembrandt masterpiece) and turns them, in slowly turning and evolving progressive méditations, into the incredibly rich array of family experiences - displayed in the many stories of family interrelationships in books - that help, or hinder, our growth into an inner and vast outer human whole:

Founded in God’s love, but ONLY visible in our many Differences.

"I have heard that voice...when I hear that voice, I know that I am home with God and have nothing to fear. As the Beloved of my heavenly Father, I can walk in the valley of darkness: no evil would I fear. As the Beloved, I can cure the sick, raise the dead, cleanse the lepers, cast out devils. As the Beloved, I can confront, console, admonish, and encourage without fear of rejection or need for affirmation. I can receive praise without using it as proof of my goodness. I can be tortured and killed without ever having to doubt that the love that is given to me is stronger than death." oof

This was a really great Lenten read. There were many sections I highlighted and will need to revisit in the future.
This excerpt from the epilogue sums up pretty well the challenge for spiritual growth this book provides:
"Rembrandt portrays the father as the man who has transcended the ways of his children. His own loneliness and anger may have been there, but they have been transformed by suffering and tears. His loneliness has become endless solitude, his anger boundless gratitude. This is who I have to become. I see it as clearly as I see the immense beauty of the father's emptiness and compassion. Can I let the younger and the elder son grow in me to the maturity of the compassionate father?"