By Conor M. Kelly
I never understood what the word “prodigal” actually meant when, as a child, I heard it associated with the Gospel “parable of the prodigal son”—the story of the younger of two brothers who, after asking his rich father to liquidate half his estate so that the son can enjoy a lavish lifestyle, wastes his inheritance and returns to beg his father to take him back so that he can at least eat a decent meal (Luke 15:11-32).
Now, as an adult theologian, I’ve learned that, first, prodigality is all about extravagance—like spending your inheritance with reckless abandon— and second, as the Presbyterian pastor Timothy Keller points out in his book The Prodigal God, prodigality is just as applicable to the father in the story as it is to the reckless son.
This second aspect of prodigality has transformed not just my understanding of this familiar story, but also of my sense of my own vocation. Over the course of the pandemic, the vision of generosity at the heart of the Gospel story has helped redefine what it means for me to be an educator.
It was the late Boston College theologian Michael Himes who helped me see the link between prodigality and generosity, for he argued that this parable is about the father’s extravagance rather than the son’s repentance.
As the second-born child in a society governed by the norms of primogeniture, the younger son not only has no right to ask for an inheritance from his living father, but no right to an inheritance at all. The father’s prodigality manifests early in the story, then, when he dismisses all sense of decorum and voluntarily gives the “impertinent son,” as Himes called him, far more than he merits. When the son later tugs on his father’s heartstrings in the hope of securing a job, the father’s prodigality is underscored again: he interrupts his son, embraces him, and welcomes him back with a party.
Seen from this vantage, the whole point of the story becomes the absurdity of the father’s actions. The father, who represents God, is prodigal with his love in a manner that seems just as reckless as his son’s thriftlessness. The stark difference, though, is that the son expends a finite good, whereas the father gives of his very self. While the first kind of prodigality leads to bankruptcy, the latter restores broken relationships and opens new opportunities to pursue a brighter future together.
So, how has prodigality informed my work as an educator in these hard times?
As we all know, students have been pushed to their limits in recent semesters. Early in the pandemic, when extenuating circumstances collided with the conventional norms of a standard semester, I found myself asking how much latitude I should give for late assignments, or how I should enforce an attendance policy. And I felt conflicting impulses: I wanted to be as compassionate as possible; yet I still felt beholden to official policies and questioned how much leeway I had to diverge from them.
Somewhere in this tension, I returned to prodigality and my qualms about fidelity to the letter of the law quickly became replaced with a much more pertinent question: Who am I to be stricter than God?
This brought the freedom to be the caring and understanding professor that my students needed and still need, and in the process, helped me rediscover that this was the person I longed to be. If theologian Frederick Buechner is right that our vocation is found in “the place where [our] deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet,” then there could not have been a clearer calling in this moment than the call to prodigality, for I was deeply gladdened to be there for my students in this way.
For theological educator, Conor M. Kelly, living out a new form of generosity toward her students during the severe period of the pandemic resulted in a realization that even under “normal” circumstances, “our students’ real lives repeatedly smash into our course expectations.” Photo courtesy of Xavier University.
Yet for me, the most important revelation was that, rather than adapting to the unique problems of the pandemic, I was actually adjusting to the challenges of being a student today. As I lived out a new form of generosity toward my students, I eventually realized that even under “normal” circumstances, our students’ real lives repeatedly smash into our course expectations.
COVID-19 did not change that reality; it merely raised my awareness of it.
So, the question became: How will I operate now that I have seen the truth of what it takes to be a student today? In answering this question, I came to the conviction that I am called to become prodigal pedagogue, one that leaves the door open as wide as possible in the hopes that every last one of my students will make it to the (metaphorical) banquet at the end of the semester, no matter where they started—or where they diverted—along the way.
In order to explain what this prodigal pedagogy means in practice, I turn to another of Jesus’ parables, one seldom associated with prodigality: the “parable of the sower,” which is presented in three slightly varied forms in the Gospels of Matthew (13:1-9), Mark (4:1-9), and Luke (8:4-8).
A farmer heads out to sow seeds one day and scatters the seeds across four different types of soil, producing four different outcomes. The seeds that land on the path do not get buried deep enough to grow; instead, they are eaten almost immediately by birds and therefore bear no fruit. Those that fall among the thorns eventually arrive at the same fate, because the thorns choke them. The seeds that fall on rocky ground fare only slightly better, sprouting but withering in the sun because they could not draw enough moisture from their environment. Only the seeds that fall on “good soil” (Matthew 13:9) survive to bear fruit, and they do so with abundance.
After finishing the story, Jesus explains the parallels between the seeds sown on different soil types and the different reactions of those who hear his parables. Some never ask the questions they need to understand and therefore have their potential insights taken from them before their comprehension can emerge, just as the birds eat the seeds on the path before they can grow. Others like what they hear, but eventually find that “the cares of the world and the lure of wealth” (Matthew 13:22) surround and strangle them.
Those who mirror the rocky soil, meanwhile, are the ones who hear Jesus’s teachings with excitement, but do not undertake the reflection necessary to develop deep roots in their new faith. Consequently, “when trouble or persecution arises…that person immediately falls away” (Matthew 13:21). Finally, those who receive the teachings, like the good soil, are, of course, the ones who hear and internalize the message so that it can transform their lives and bear much fruit.
Ultimately, this parable has been just as influential as the parable of the prodigal son in my new understanding of the educator’s call to prodigality. Why? Because, as Jesus’ explanation of it underscores, the parable is all about the relationship between the teacher and the student, and we who are educators are invited to look at the parable from the sower’s perspective. Reading the parable this way, we arrive at a startling discovery: This person is one crazy farmer! Who tries to plant crops along a path, or among thorns, or amidst a bunch of rocks? But if we persist and move beyond this initial reaction, we can come to see the sower as someone who wants to give every patch of land a chance to bear fruit. After all, the sower must know that the seeds on the path are unlikely to make it, but they toss seeds onto the path anyway.
In a word, the sower is truly prodigal. And it is only because of that prodigality that any lessons get conveyed.
I have taken heart from this vision and tried to make a similar type of prodigality the hallmark of my teaching. Much like the sower, I have begun to pitch my lessons more expansively, so that they land on all kinds of soil. Students still come to my courses with varying degrees of investment and preparation, but I have stopped trying to ascertain in advance which ones are going to cultivate deep roots and which ones are going to get distracted by the thorns. Instead, I have worked to provide every student with an equal opportunity to decide that this is the day they are going to put in the effort to grow real fruit.
This strategy is fairly easy on the first day of the semester, when I have little knowledge of my students. It is much harder on the last day, when their previous participation and engagement have given me a pretty good idea of who has done the work to show up with receptive soil and who is sitting on a pile of rocks. It’s then that I channel the sower and remember the prodigal choice to cast seeds on ground that looked to every reasonable observer like an inhospitable path. The only way I can make sense of that decision is with the conviction that the sower believed the path could become the loam, even if the evidence pointed to the contrary. Ninety-nine times out of one hundred, that evidence is probably right, and the seed will die. But the sower spreads the seed nonetheless, preferring to wait and see if this is the one time out of one hundred the unexpected occurs.
The ongoing challenges of these past semesters have led me to the conviction that I have no business trying to guess who that one student holding rich soil on an apparent path will be. I have seen too clearly that I do not know enough—I cannot know enough—about my student’s lives beyond the classroom to make this determination. I can only cast my teaching wide and give all of them the freedom to decide how they will engage each time we meet. That way, I have a better chance of becoming the teacher and person I am called to be.
And in the end, I’m left with the task of figuring out how to let this lesson in prodigal pedagogy burrow deeper roots in me, because the next semester is coming, and I am still worried that I am unwittingly not representing the rich soil, but the dusty path.
Conor M. Kelly is associate professor of Theology at Marquette University. This essay is an edited version of a longer chapter from On the Vocation of the Educator in this Moment, edited by Jennifer S. Maney and Melissa M. Shew.
The featured cover photo (above) is courtesy of Headway via Unsplash.