Again, But With Feeling

In the story of the Prodigals the younger son runs away with his inheritance and spends it all, only to come back to his father, humbled. His father throws a big party for him, which irks the responsible elder brother, because dad never threw him a party. “All these years I’ve been slaving for you,” he says, “and never disobeyed your orders. Yet you never gave me even a young goat so I could celebrate with my friends” (Luke 15).

We’ve heard a lot about this story and what it means in Sunday school over the years: in the extended metaphor, we are both the brothers, and the father is God. We are the obvious and the secretive sinners, and God runs to welcome us back no matter what kind of sinner we are on any particular day. It is the secretive sinner, of course, that is more interesting to me.

A few weeks ago, I made Austin and my mother-in-law watch World War Z with me. (Sorry, Kathy).

I’ve loved this movie for a long time, which Austin says is “out of character,” just like my obsession with frozen pizza. I love it for lots of reasons—I like that it’s family instead of romance based. I like that it’s smart, that killing the zombies isn’t just about shooting them, but also about thinking. I like that there are strong women in it who are strong in different ways. What I wanted to watch it for this time, though, was the hope: in the movie the world ends, and it’s awful, but there’s still hope. It’s the worst case scenario, and then things keep going.

I’ve been thinking about how the world has ended lots of times. On March 13, the same day Austin and I decided to get out of Boston and left our apartment two hours later, I was listening to a podcast called Hardcore History on the Celtic Wars. The world ended for the Celts. Their society and culture were razed and their people were slaughtered. The world ended with Noah’s flood. Worlds ended in colonialism—with Native Americans wiped out by disease and violence, with tribes in Africa that lost their cultures and peoples to slavery, with the Hawaiians who saw Captain Cook’s soldiers walk up the beach and called them “ha ole,” no breath, because they were so pale they looked like the death they would bring.

The Elder Prodigal: Sons and Slaves

Hope and the End(s) of the World