You're listening to a podcast by the Center for Action and Contemplation.

To learn more, visit cacac.org. I'll never last too long. The Lord be with you. A reading from the Holy I'm going to ask you to be seated and I'll just comment on this most beautiful of texts as we read it.

Many say that this particular gospel more than any other gives Jesus image of what God is like.

Luke 15 has three stories of losing and finding.

There's the lost sheep, the lost coin, and here the lost son.

And this, I'm sure, certainly in my own experience,

has probably converted more people than any.

A man had two sons.

And the younger son said to his father,

Father, give me the share of your estate that should come to me.

Now right there we see the drama set in motion. You normally don't ask for your

father's inheritance while he's still alive. So we have an arrogant young man here who wants to take care of

himself who has no respect for his father or the rest of the family.

But the father divided the property between the two sons.

After a few days, the younger son collected all his belongings, he just wanted to get out of the house and set off to a distant the dissipation is, but we'll see later in the text that as always we think it's sex and names it as prostitution.

It doesn't really say that.

But at any rate, when he had freely spent everything,

a severe famine struck that country.

And he found himself in dire need. So this is what men and women

in AA called hitting the bottom or reaching the point of powerlessness. He even

hired himself out to the local citizens who sent him to his farm to take care of the pigs.

Now in Jewish culture still to this day, pigs are not allowed to be eaten.

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