The Prodigal Son / Advent Day 9

The sun was slanting across the bay as Marin, John, Teo and I had a breakfast in the 46th floor restaurant of the Hilton. Dan, my friend from Emmaus, called again. Our rendevous shifted to the community park in Chinatown.

We walked over, pushing Teo in an umbrella stroller through the canyons of downtown San Francisco. The portentous meeting came quicker than we imagined. In the middle of an ocean of Asian elders, kids, parents, shouts and careening young bodies and circles of men (gambling, we learned later), I was looking for Dan’s six-year-old triplets, John was trailing Matteo around, and Marin was using her cell phone to call Dan’s, when a man with a ball cap and sunglasses started across the square toward me.

It’s amazing to me how, in an instant, a figure goes from being a stranger to being an intimate. The alien advancing on me had to be Dan, but he looked like anyone but. Then I saw his older brother Willard in his chiseled features. I grabbed him in a hug. It has been probably upwards of 20 years since we’ve seen each other.

Myhanh, Dan’s wife, led us through the wilderness of Chinatown. With much asking around she found us a dim sum lunch spot. It was mobbed with locals. Somehow she talked us to the front of the line, our mob-let consisting of their four kids, our one, plus five adults. We entered a huge cavernous room with two hundred people around thirty round tables. The tables had a lazy susans to spin foods around, and Myhanh instantly was ordering things and rejecting other things, in what seemed to be Chinese. Does Myhanh, a Vietnamese woman, know Chinese, I asked Dan. Vietnamese is derived, he told me, from Chinese.

As the food went round, found plates and got eaten, Dan and I talked about how his three brothers are, with whom I have varying, fond friendships. And how his life is going, and mine. And about religion, which fascinates us both. I replayed Sam Harris’ (Letter to a Christian Nation) speech at the Aspen Summer Festival last night for Marin, so I was pretty fired up on how important it was to find a "non-religious" community to ally oneself with, one which behaved with the enthusiasm, kindness, vision, and certitude of a religious community (by, for example, taking in members, and bringing up children in the "faith"), but which focused on the blessings of life and the conservation of the earth rather than on using stone-age scriptures as the main guidepost for the challenges of our life together today.

Later, back at the community playground, while Dan and I aided Estelle in her quest to monkey across the overhead bars, one of the triplets, Peter, lost track of us, took off a couple of blocks away to a candy shop where he knew he could talk to the proprietor, and got him to look on Peter’s arm where phone numbers were inscribed in sharpie, and to call up Myhanh who was shopping. Dan was nonplussed by all the action, none of which we knew about until it was past. But he knew Peter would be utterly freaked out by being lost, and so he held him in a tight embrace for a while when they were reunited.

Lost and found, the prodigal son. It’s happening over and over to our children, to us, and also, as Jesus tells the story, to the one who catches up in a desperately happy embrace his lost and found child, to God himself.