The Return of the Prodigal Son: A Story of Homecoming

Henri Nouwen, a Dutch Catholic priest and professor, traces a spiritual journey that begins with a seemingly minor encounter and unfolds over several years into a sustained meditation on Rembrandt's painting The Return of the Prodigal Son, the biblical parable that inspired it, and his own search for a lasting sense of home.

The book opens with the full text of the parable from Luke 15:11–32, in which a younger son demands his inheritance, squanders it in a distant country, and returns in destitution to a father who runs to embrace him and orders a lavish feast. The elder son, returning from the fields, refuses to join the celebration, complaining that despite years of obedience he was never similarly honored. The father responds that the elder son has always been with him and that everything he has belongs to him.

In 1983, Nouwen was spending several months at L'Arche, a community in Trosly, France, founded by Jean Vanier to offer a home to people with intellectual disabilities. While visiting a friend, he noticed a poster of Rembrandt's painting on her office door. The image of an old man in a red cloak tenderly touching the shoulders of a kneeling, disheveled boy moved him deeply. Exhausted from a lecture tour and feeling vulnerable and lonely, Nouwen longed for the embrace the painting depicts. The image remained imprinted on his soul, awakening a yearning for homecoming that transcended any temporary comfort.

Two years later, Nouwen resigned from Harvard University and returned to L'Arche to discern his calling. He then traveled to the Soviet Union to see the original painting at the Hermitage, a museum in Saint Petersburg. He gained private access and spent hours sitting before the massive canvas, absorbing its shifting light and noticing details invisible in the poster, including four bystander figures surrounding the central embrace.

Nouwen arrived at L'Arche Daybreak in Toronto as the community's pastor and hung the poster in his workspace. He began reflecting on the bystander figures as representations of his own habit of remaining an observer rather than entering the divine embrace. The years at Daybreak proved marked by inner struggle but also by gradual movement from teaching about love to allowing himself to be loved.

Nouwen describes his spiritual journey in three phases that provide the book's structure. In the first, he identifies with the younger son: After years of university teaching, he felt lost and saw himself in the returning son who longs for the father's embrace. In the second, his friend Bart Gavigan suggested that Nouwen might be more like the elder son. As the eldest child in his own family, Nouwen had lived a dutiful life yet harbored jealousy, resentment, and self-righteousness. In the third, during a period of immense inner anguish, Sue Mosteller, a long-time member of Daybreak, told him he was called to become the father, the one who welcomes his children home without asking questions. Nouwen felt deep resistance to identifying with the old, nearly blind father who has nothing left to lose.

In Part I, Nouwen reflects on Rembrandt's life as a parallel to the younger son's journey. As a young man, Rembrandt was brash, spendthrift, and arrogant; at 30, he painted himself with his wife Saskia in a brothel scene. His brief success gave way to devastating losses: the deaths of three infant children, of Saskia, of his later companion Hendrickje Stoffels, and finally of his son Titus. Yet these losses had a purifying rather than embittering effect, and his later paintings reveal a deepening interior light.

Nouwen explores what it means to leave home spiritually. Drawing on the work of scholar Kenneth Bailey, he explains that in the parable's cultural context, a son's request for his inheritance while the father lives amounts to wishing the father dead. Nouwen interprets this departure as a denial that one belongs to God, a turning from the voice that says "You are my Beloved, on you my favor rests" (37). He identifies the voices urging one to prove worth through success, popularity, and power as forces that pull people into a distant country, and confesses that anger, jealousy, and the pursuit of conditional love are signs of his own repeated departures from home.

The younger son's return, Nouwen argues, begins when he remembers he is still his father's child. Nouwen shares a personal crisis in which an obsessive friendship pulled him from prayer, work, and community; when it collapsed, he faced the choice between self-destruction and trusting that the love he craved existed back home. He identifies receiving God's forgiveness as one of the hardest spiritual challenges, because it demands total surrender rather than negotiation. A friend observing the painting remarks that the prodigal's shaven head resembles a newborn emerging from the womb, suggesting the return is not merely to a father but to the womb of God who is Mother as well as Father.

In Part II, Nouwen turns to the elder son, whose figure stands at the right of the painting: stiffly erect, hands clasped in shadow, face lit but body in the dark. Drawing on a study by Barbara Joan Haeger, he establishes that Rembrandt deliberately included the elder son as a prominent witness, holding "not to the letter but to the spirit of the biblical text" (63). Rembrandt's own life contained the elder son's bitterness; modern biographers portray him as capable of cruelty, particularly in his treatment of Geertje Dircx, his son Titus's nurse, whom he had confined to a mental institution after their relationship soured.

Nouwen identifies the elder son's lostness as more pernicious than the younger son's because it is wedded to virtue. Duty has become slavery, and obedience has bred resentment rather than freedom. Each perceived rejection spirals into deeper isolation until even joy becomes a provocation. Nouwen shares a personal example of discovering a party he was not told about, being warmly invited to join, yet storming out because his resentment made it impossible to accept the joy offered. The parable and painting leave the elder son's response open, confronting every reader with the choice of trusting God's love or remaining imprisoned in bitterness.

Nouwen identifies trust and gratitude as the disciplines necessary for the elder son's conversion. Trust means believing the Father is actively seeking him and stepping over chronic complaint. Gratitude means choosing to acknowledge life as gift, even when emotions remain steeped in hurt. He shares a turning point: While hospitalized after being hit by a car, he realized he could not be free to die while clinging to the complaint of not being loved enough. When his elderly father flew from Holland to visit, Nouwen told him for the first time that he loved him, beginning a shift from dependence on a human father to dependence on the divine Father.

In Part III, Nouwen focuses on the father in Rembrandt's painting as the human expression of divine compassion. He observes that the father's two hands are strikingly different: The left is strong and muscular, a hand that grips; the right is refined and tender, a hand that caresses. This discovery reveals a God who embodies both fatherhood and motherhood. The great red cloak evokes not only a sheltering tent but the wings of a mother bird. Nouwen stresses that God's love does not compare or rank: The father goes out to both sons, responds to each according to his unique journey, and the return of one in no way diminishes the other's place.

Nouwen reflects on the father's command to bring the best robe, ring, and sandals as an investiture restoring the son's full dignity as heir, and on the feast as an expression of God's eagerness to share joy. He frames the choice between cynicism and joy as a daily discipline, arguing that joy and sorrow do not exclude each other in God.

In the Conclusion, Nouwen identifies grief, forgiveness, and generosity as the three pathways to becoming the father. Grief means allowing the sins of the world to pierce one's heart in prayer. Forgiveness requires climbing over walls of anger and pride to offer unconditional pardon. Generosity means giving one's very self, acting on the truth that all people are kin. At the center of this spiritual fatherhood lies a dreadful emptiness, a place with no power or easy satisfaction that is simultaneously the place of true freedom.

In the Epilogue, Nouwen reflects on how life at L'Arche Daybreak has made him live out all three movements of the painting. The community's warm welcomes let him experience the younger son's return; its honest confrontations unveiled the elder son within him; and its need for a pastor who blesses without demanding pressed him toward becoming the father. He closes by looking at his own aging hands, recognizing they have been given to him to stretch out toward all who suffer and to offer the blessing that emerges from the immensity of God's love.