S09 #02 - A free-religious community re-reading of the Parable of the Prodigal Son — “the saviour was not the father but the home” - A thought for the day

The full text of this podcast can be found in the transcript of this edition or at the following link:

https://andrewjbrown.blogspot.com/2025/02/a-free-religious-community-re-reading.html

Please feel free to post any comments you have about this episode there.

The Cambridge Unitarian Church's Sunday Service of Mindful Meditation can be found at this link:

https://www.cambridgeunitarian.org/morning-service/
 
Music, "New Heaven", written by Andrew J. Brown and played by Chris Ingham (piano), Paul Higgs (trumpet), Russ Morgan (drums) and Andrew J. Brown (double bass) 

Thanks for listening. Just to note that the texts of all these podcasts are available on my blog. You'll also find there a brief biography, info about my career as a musician, & some photography. Feel free to drop by & say hello. Email: caute.brown[at]gmail.com

Transcript

A short “thought for the day” offered to the Cambridge Unitarian Church as part of the Sunday Service of Mindful Meditation

Because I’ve been talking with you recently about the idea of our free-religious community moving away from a professional, minister-centred model, and towards a lay, community-centred model [see HERE], it strikes me that it might be interesting and helpful to offer you Imaoka Shin’ichirō-sensei’s free-religious interpretation of Jesus’ Parable of the Prodigal Son because I think it helps makes clear a central spiritual — you could even say theological — free-religious reason for making such a change to the way we do things and understand what our small gathering is about.

But, firstly, let’s remind ourselves of the story from Luke 15:11–32, here in David Bentley Hart’s translation:

And Jesus said, “A certain man had two sons. And the younger of them said to the father, ‘Father, give me the share of the property falling to me.’ And he divided his living between them. And not many days later, the younger son, having collected everything, departed for a far country, and dissipated his property by living prodigally. When he had spent everything a severe famine spread throughout that country, and he began to be in need. And he went and attached himself to one of that country’s citizens, and he sent him into his fields to feed the pigs; and he longed to fill his stomach with the carob pods that the pigs ate, and no one gave him anything. And coming to himself he said, ‘How many of my father’s hirelings are overflowing with bread, but I am here perishing from famine. I will get up 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. Make me like one of your hirelings.”​’ And he rose and went to his own father. And while he was yet far away his father saw him and was inwardly moved with pity, and ran and fell upon his neck and kissed him fervently. And his 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 slaves, ‘Quickly bring out the best robe and put it on him, and place a ring on his finger and sandals on his feet, and bring the fattened calf and sacrifice it, and let us eat and have good cheer, because this son of mine was dead and has come to life again, was lost and has been found.’ And they began to celebrate. But his older son was in a field; and as he came and drew near the house he heard music and dancing, and calling one of the servants over he asked what all this might be. And he told him that ‘Your brother has come, and your father has sacrificed the fattened calf, because he has got him back in good health.’ But in his response he was indignant and did not wish to go in; and his father came out and pleaded with him. But in reply he said to the father, ‘Look, for so many years I am slaving for you, and I have never disobeyed a command of yours, and you never gave me a kid goat so that I could make merry with my friends, but when this son of yours came, he who has devoured your livelihood with whores, you sacrificed the fattened calf for him.’ And he said to him, ‘Child, you are always with me, and all my things are yours. But we had to celebrate and rejoice, because this brother of yours was dead and came to life, and was lost and has been found.’​”

Now, when I was at Sunday School back in the late 1970s, there was no doubt at all that my teachers believed that the father was the salvific centre of gravity in this parable who, in turn, symbolised God the Father, who, I was told, was loving, patient, and eager to forgive sinners when they repent. Of course, the story contains much more depth than this simple, one-dimensional reading suggests — and perhaps we can bring some of that depth out in our time of conversation together — but the key point I want to make this morning is that established Christianity taught, and too often still teaches, that salvation — i.e. a return to sense of wholeness and unity — is something only brought about by God the Father.

But Imaoka-sensei felt the story’s salvific centre of gravity was not to be found in God the Father, but elsewhere. Now, if you come to the story solely from the established Christian perspective, just where this different salvific centre of gravity is to be found is probably not going to be immediately obvious — it certainly wasn’t to me.

To see what Imaoka-sesnei saw, firstly, we need to be aware that he was able to bring multiple religious and spiritual perspectives to his reading of the parable, not just the Christian one. His long journey of faith to free-religion allowed him also to bring into play Unitarian thinking (especially that of Ralph Waldo Emerson), Jodo Shinshu Buddhism (especially that of Shinran), Zen Buddhism (especially that of his teacher Anesaki Masaharu), Quiet Sitting (Seiza Meditation) that he learnt from Okada Torajiro, a kind of Tolstoyan-inspired New Buddhism that he learnt from Tenko Nishida-san, the philosophy of “Creative Evolution” as articualted by the French philosopher Henri Bergson, and also Shinto when it was interpreted as being a community religion akin to that practiced by the Community Church of New York began in the 1920s by the Unitarian minister John Haynes Holmes.

As he slowly developed his idea of a creative, inquiring, free and liberative religion (jiyū shūkyō) from out of these multiple perspectives he came ever more strongly to feel that salvation — this return to sense of wholeness and unity — is always-already something both personal and social, and this clearly reveals why he called his own, post-1948 Unitarian community the Tokyo Kiitsu Kyōkai (東京帰一教会 or 東京帰一教會), a name which can, and often is still translated into English as the “Unitarian Church”, but which is much more accurately translated as the “Returning-to-One Fellowship/Gathering.” In connection with the Parable of the Prodigal Son, the idea of returning to something is very important. But I’ll return to that in a moment . . .

Given all this, in an essay from 1950 called, “The Purpose of Tokyo Kiitsu Kyōkai (東京帰一教会 or 東京帰一教會)” Imaoka-sensei said:

“We don’t believe that a society is saved by the gathering of saved individuals; rather, we believe that individual salvation and societal salvation are two sides of the same coin” (Showa 25 [1950], September, “Creation” [創造], Issue No. 1).

And with this insight we now have in our hands the basic key required to open the door and catch our first sight of a different salvific centre of gravity in the Parable of the Prodical Son to the one taught by established Christianity.

In an undated essay called “What I have learned from Buddhism and Christianity” (“Selected Writings” p. 41), Imaoka-sensei begins to point directly to this new centre through the example of the historical Buddha, Gautama, who realised the need to take his own private and individual experiences to five friends who had themselves practised ascetic discipline with him. Imaoka-sensei interprets this famous encounter in the Deer Park at Vārāṇasī, not as the occasion of Buddha’s first *sermon*, but as the time when he first *conversationally* reports his experiences to others in order to ascertain whether his experience was right or not. The free dialogue and conversation between them that then followed led them to the conclusion that human existence has two levels, individual and community, and, therefore, that religion is not a simply private matter but always also a community affair. Accordingly, Gautama and his friends created a sangha — which in Sanskrit simply means “association”, “assembly” or “community” — i.e. they formed not a mere gathering of individuals but a corporate entity. It’s important to know that in Imaoka-sensei’s understanding and use, the word “sangha” is equivalent to the Japanese word “kyōkai” and the English word “church.” Consequently, Imaoka-sensei insists that Gautama Buddha was not to be thought of as the founder of Buddhism, but that Buddhism started as the religion of the sangha.

Imaoka-sensei then immediately reveals that we can see something similar going on in Jesus’ Parable of the Prodigal Son, saying briefly and simply that:

“The prodigal son was not saved by his father. The father was very much worried by his son’s dissipation. By the repentance and coming back home of the son, not only the son, but the father was also saved. The saviour was not the father but the home.”

I hope you can see that the Parable is now clearly showing up as being about, not the saving power of God the Father — or some other powerful divine founder of a religion or charismatic human individual — but about the creative, free and liberative salvific power of kiitsu kyōkai, a “Returning-to-One Fellowship/Gathering” or Unitarian Church, in which free individuals holding all kinds of different faiths and beliefs can genuinely begin to experience the liberation of a true homecoming and an associated profound and sustaining sense of wholeness and unity.

I have a dream, at times a real hope, that through our quiet and civilising practices of meditation, conversing, learning and growing together we can begin here to create a genuine Kiitsu Kyōkai of our own, a “Returning-to-One Fellowship/Gathering,” a Unitarian Church, in which, in modest, but nevertheless real ways, we can to use our own freedom with others who are also free to transform life toward the good, true and beautiful. And, right at this moment in human history, when so many people in our world want us to return to division and to scatter us apart, the creation of such a free, returning-to-oneness gathering has never been more important.