From "Four Soliloquies from the Prodigal Son Story":

The Fatted Calf’s Soliloquy

From “Four Soliloquies from the Prodigal Son Story”

March 30, 2003

First UU Church of Austin

4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756

www.austinuu.org

The Parable of the Prodigal Son

There was a man who had two sons; and the younger of them said to his father, “Father, give me the share of property that falls to me.” And he divided his living between them.

Not many days later, the younger son gathered all he had and took his journey into a far country, and there he squandered his property in loose living. And when he had spent everything, a great famine arose in that country, and he began to be in want.

So he went and joined himself to one of the citizens of that country, who sent him into his fields to feed swine. And he would gladly have fed on the pods that the swine ate; and no one gave him anything. But when he came to himself he said, “How many of my father’s hired servants have bread enough and to spare, but I perish here with hunger!

I will arise and go to my father, and I will say to him, “Father, I have sinned against heaven and before you; I am no longer worthy to be called your son; treat me as one of your hired servants.” And he arose and came to his father.

But while he was yet at a distance, his father saw him and had compassion, and ran and embraced him and kissed him. And the son said to him, “Father, I have sinned against heaven and before you; I am no longer worthy to be called your son.”

But the father said to his servants, “Bring quickly the best robe, and put it on him; and put a ring on his hand, and shoes on his feet; and bring the fatted calf and kill it, and let us eat and make merry; for this my son was dead, and is alive again; he was lost, and is found.” And they began to make merry.

(Luke 15: 11-24, RSV)

HOMILY: – The Fatted Calf’s Soliloquy

A fatted calf doesn’t have a lot of choices. The end is known from the beginning; for we will be sacrificed for something, and we do not get to choose what it will be. Our whole life gets its meaning from the celebration at the end of it, a celebration we never see. We have no story of our own; you hear about us only through the story told about the feast we are given to.

I was meant for a harvest feast. Many months ahead they began to fatten me. I didn’t mind; in fact, I liked it, because I ate so much better than all the other calves. I thought I was special; I suppose I was, in a way. Still, it was just a harvest feast they had in mind. They do it every year. Every year there is a harvest, and every year a calf is fattened for the occasion. It is always the same, I was just this year’s main course. Nothing special, just part of the annual cycle, as regular and indifferent as a machine, like all of Nature’s cycles.

You may not be very interested in my story, since it sounds so different from your own. And you are different from fatted calves, it is true. But we are much alike, too. For your life is also given for something. Your days and years, your energies and allegiances, are given over to something, and you serve it mostly without thinking about it, maybe without even being aware of it.

You serve a job, a career, an army, a country, another person, even a set of beliefs. So much of your life is defined by the things you give it for; your whole life is a kind of sacrifice offered to your gods large and small, to your values good and bad, even to your lusts, your greeds, your habits and your whims.

And you are fattened, too. You are fed differently according to what you serve, but you are fattened. They feed you money, power, popularity, success, recognition, a sense of purpose, a sense of place, a kind of inner satisfaction – that is the fattening you’re given while your life is spent on the things you serve with it.

And much of your story, like mine, will be told by the things you have served. In truth, you give more of yourself than you think. You serve well, even when you don’t serve wisely.

Yet in the end, how often it is that the things you serve do not serve you in return, but only take from you until at last they take your life. And then when the story is told, you are just left out, forgotten. You were just a little part in some kind of a giant game, or a play (whether comedy or tragedy), like the sacrifice of a fatted calf at an annual harvest.

This is where you are really not so different from me as you think. You may chatter about being master of your fate: but did you choose your sex and race, your family, your gifts and handicaps, your social and economic station, your country, or the times into which you were born? No, much of your play had already been written for you, and you have mostly just acted out your assigned part, just as I have.

A soldier commits his service, even his life, to the commands of his country. But he does not get to choose his war, whether it will be a popular or unpopular one, whether his sacrifices will be respected or reviled. His life hangs from threads controlled by others, and he does not choose what his life will be given to, though he knows it may be given to something, and the value of that something may not even be assessed until after he has died.

A woman may serve a business, playing in good faith the small part assigned to her, only learning at the end that it was an evil business after all; all of her good works were part of a bad story, and she will be defined by that story for the rest of her days.

You are as innocent as I, and often as powerless. So you are more like the fatted calf than you may like to think. And now perhaps you will be able to hear my story:

I was born anonymous, I lived anonymously, and I was scheduled to die the same way: as an extra, just another calf being used as calves have always been used, serving an end of no great or lasting significance to anyone. I went along as we always have, because a fatted calf doesn’t have many choices. And if everything had happened as it had been planned, you would never have heard of me. My life would have been given to a routine harvest feast on a small farm in an obscure country, and I would never have had a story to be told, for there is not much in a fatted calf’s life that is worth retelling.

I did not choose any of this. The meaning of my life was defined by the things that were chosen for me by others, by the larger play in which I was just a small part. And I was chosen to serve routine and anonymous things, things which never acknowledged or cherished me but only used me up.

So you see: that is why my story is worth telling. It is worth telling because I have a story. That’s the miracle of it: that I have a story at all! And it happened because someone came alive. A younger brother broke from the routine. He could not find himself in it. His heart, his soul, something could find no home in the routine he was expected to serve with his life. And in a burst of foolish young courage he broke free. He wasted all of his money, it is true. But he was searching, however awkwardly, for something with more life in it, for something to serve that might know his name, that might give him a more authentic life than the obedient security brought by just doing your duty.

He failed. He failed miserably. But in his failure there was a great awakening, and it made all the difference.

First the younger brother awoke, and came back home. And then his father awoke, and reached out to him – not with justice, but with forgiveness and love. That was the miracle. And with that miracle, a whole new world was born: a world with a gentleness and a wholeness that offend the workaday mind, as they have offended the older brother. But it is a world with more space to live, for those who are imperfect, who don’t find their true path on the first try. It is a world of grace and of hope for those who must fail before they can succeed – those who hope and pray for another chance.

In that moment of his father’s forgiveness, a new son was born, and a new world of possibilities, for all who can listen to this story and hear its message. Then suddenly there was something more important and more urgent than a harvest feast, for something sacred had broken into ordinary life, something with the power to transform it.

And the moment of its entry, the moment of the birth of a new son and a new world, must not be allowed to pass by without celebrating it. The birth of sacred possibilities in life must not be allowed to slide by with stopping to give thanks, without making all of life stop and look and hear and rejoice.

And so in place of a harvest feast there was a sacred feast; a holy meal; a communion. A meal not of food to be gulped down and forgotten, but of food consecrated to a holy purpose, food to be cherished and savored and never to disappear from memory. That is how this feast took place, this feast which has changed everyone who has ever truly understood it.

And I was a part of it! My life was changed by the choices others made. For now instead of being consumed by life and then forgotten, I have become a part of it all, and I will never be forgotten as long as this story is told and heard and cherished.

If a miracle is a gift of life beyond understanding, then a miracle happened here, you see? And I was a passive recipient of this miracle. The meaning of my life was changed forever because of the choices and the decisions made by others.

It’s ironic, but I could not tell my story to other fatted calves, for we have no choices, and could not elect to change what we shall serve with our lives even if we wanted to.

That is why I tell my story to you instead: because, you see, that is where we are so different. Fatted calves can not choose what we will serve with our lives. We cannot choose whether we shall serve something that gives our lives a sacred kind of glow, or whether we shall just serve something that drains our life from us until at last nothing is left of us, not even our story. A fatted calf doesn’t have many choices. But you do: you can choose.