The Beauty of U-Turns
-
April 2, 2025Perhaps you’ve had the experience of taking a wrong exit on the open highway and find yourself on the wrong road, one where you can’t change direction for many, many miles. All you want to do is turn around, but the road-scape isn’t cooperating.
Religious practice and our faith can be like that. Sometimes, after many years, or a lifetime, we realize we took a wrong turn and ended up somewhere we don’t want to be. We begin to look for ways to turn around but the landscape of our choices and the lives we’ve created, makes it difficult to find the off-ramps and U-turns.
Luckily, as Catholics, we have seasons, like Lent, that invite us, year after year, to return to God. We have many opportunities to make spiritual U-turns, if we choose to take them. Our U-turns can be made with confidence that a loving Father is waiting for us with open arms.
Such was the Gospel story we heard at Holy Mass this weekend for the Third Sunday of Lent. A powerful story of a Father, willing to forgive not one, but two prodigal sons. One a philandering prodigal son, and the other a more covert one who was at the same time in his Father’s house, but whose heart, mind, and soul were far from Him.
You know the story. After spending his entire inheritance on licentious living the wicked and hungry philanderer returns to the arms and the house of the forgiving Father, who not only accepts him, but throws him a party! We are left to wonder about the fate of the other son who rebels at the Father’s mercy and generosity. This story presents Good News for all of us regardless of which son we identify with. We can take comfort in knowing that the Father loves both sons and wants them both to come into his House and experience His joy.
St. Paul expresses the beautiful idea of the Father’s great love for us in his letter to the Romans (Rom. 8:38-39.
“For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor present things, nor future things, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.”
Human beings are the pinnacle of our beautiful creator God’s masterpiece. We are creatures made in God’s image and likeness, and endowed with divine gifts. The greatest gift is also our most tragic… free will; our ability to choose. We are free to choose to love God, or not. God is a true lover, a true lover wants to be chosen by his Beloved. We lost a lot with Original Sin (thanks a lot Adam and Eve), but we lose even more every day, when we turn away from Jesus and create idols for ourselves and make palaces out of dung heaps.
Last month, you may have been startled, or amused by the title of my article… “Lent is for Losers”, but isn’t that ultimately what the season is all about? Aren’t ashes on our heads the most visible of signs that we are a sorry mess? We have lost our way down roads that seem to have no off ramps but this glorious season allows us to seek out the U-turns that God puts all around us, to help us find our way back home.
So enough with the “off-roading” it’s time to go home. What better way than to declare to God that we finally see the U-turn, down there, on the horizon and we are prepared to take it.