Lost & Found: Who’s to Say? by Blayney Colmore
This my son was lost, and is found…
From the parable of the Prodigal Son. Christian scripture: Gospel of Luke, 15:11-32
A wealthy man’s son decides to venture out on his own. He demands his share of the inheritance, which his father gives him. Through luxurious living the son squanders his inheritance and finds himself broke. The son is reduced to eating slop with hogs. As he considers his options, he thinks, “Even my father’s servants live better than this. I’ll go ask my father’s forgiveness and maybe he’ll at least take me back as a hired hand.”
When the father sees his son coming he orders his servants to kill a fatted calf and prepare a feast. He runs to greet his son, and before the son can recite the apology he has been rehearsing, the father slips a family signet ring on his finger, embraces, and kisses him.
The son’s older brother, who has dutifully stayed home working for his father, is pissed. In response, the father implores: “Rejoice with me, for my son was lost, and is found.”
Lost? Found? If you asked the son, might he have said he was never really lost—Just out to try his wings? But to the father he was. To his brother, he was likely not lost enough and too much found.
And might we say that the older brother had lived his whole life found? Or must one be lost before one can be found?
I know that sense of being lost myself, with a terrible visceral feeling, a rush of unwelcome adrenalin.
I have perhaps the worst sense of direction in human experience. When the GPS device became widely available it was as if it had been invented for me. My wife Lacey is only a slightly more gifted “directionalist” than I. We joke that if we come to an intersection and agree which way we should turn, the odds are that the other way will get us where we mean to go.
I was driving to the airport several years ago; a drive I have done scores of times. I came to a familiar intersection and drew a blank. I experienced what I imagine it might be like to have a stroke, a blockage of blood to a part of the brain that tells you where you are and how to proceed. Not merely that I wasn’t sure what to do next, whether to turn right or left, but as if I was an alien who had wandered into an alternate universe in which things looked familiar, but provided no clues by which to navigate.
I sat in the left lane, motionless at the wheel, staring ahead blankly. Lacey looked over at me and asked, “Are you going to turn?”
“I don’t know,” I answered. “Should I?”
“What do you mean, should you?”
I took that to mean I should, and I did. Something in making the turn restarted my directional computer, and I proceeded.
Lacey wanted to know what had happened. When I told her I was lost, she scoffed. “How could you have gotten lost at a place you have been many times?”
I could only tell her that I found the sensation of being lost terrifying, and of being found, after making the turn, as profoundly worthy of celebration as the father in the parable had felt.
When I was a parish priest, I buried a young man who had a promising start as a writer. He died of alcoholism. “He lost his way,” his mother told me. I wondered how that must have felt, and what it might have taken for him to have found his way.
I took it to heart more than most of my burials because I thought I might have understood his lostness, and how it might have caused him such despair.
Just a few days ago, as I was readying myself for my family’s annual migration from California to Vermont, I transferred a pair of tired, grubby, wax ear plugs, essential for sleeping while flying, from the plastic box I keep them in next to my bed, to another smaller, easier for travel, box. A few minutes later I couldn’t find it. Anywhere. On and off the rest of the day I wandered room to room randomly uncovering pieces of paper, opening drawers, emptying pockets As I searched, increasingly frantic, I began to accuse myself (You’re a hopeless asshole!), wondering whether the long expected onset of senility was underway.
After most of the day pretending I wasn’t really looking, casually lifting books and pieces of paper as I went by (so Lacey wouldn’t figure out what I was doing), the little box jumped onto the end of the guestroom bed just as I passed by.
I had looked there at least a dozen times. I would bet my life it wasn’t there five minutes earlier. Another cosmic trick calculated to shake my confidence. And to remind me, those miserable ear plugs, that no matter how anally I organize myself, I am lost here.
When I found the ear plugs I rejoiced. Silently, so Lacey wouldn’t catch me. Rejoiced all out of proportion to the objects’ significance.
I understand lost. It describes the situation an honest realist recognizes as “normative.” In order not to be lost one must have perspective; to view the entire landscape at a glance; know where things are meant to go. Our species is immersed in the landscape, we are a part of it. We cannot see it all any more than we can remove our eyeballs, turn them around, and stare back at ourselves.
And as for finding the finish line…
Why do you suppose we create so many illusory, arbitrary finish lines: races, graduations, anniversaries, deadlines (interesting word, deadline)? Perhaps so we can play author of this Story in which we in fact play an essential, but bit, part.
Murkier even than lost, is this notion of found:
Amazing grace how sweet the sound
That saved a wretch like me
I once was lost but now am found
Was blind but now I see
Am found? Now I see?
Found what? See where?
The so-called “medieval synthesis”, assembled by Thomas Aquinas on a platform constructed by Aristotle, describes reality as if a snapshot of it. Though long outdated—inadequate to portray what we now know—it is the unconscious working model just about all of us use in navigating our lives.
It’s philosophical name: causality.
If I drive my truck into a tree, the laws of physics predict its outcome. (I “tried” it once and the outcome looked much as predicted.) It seems such a solid, reliable scheme; who wouldn’t choose to follow it?
When Albert Einstein did the math that finally shattered our confidence in that scheme—which had been hanging by a thread since the Church placed Galileo under house arrest for declaring that we are not the center of even our own solar system—we became lost in the cosmos.
Or, finally, we had to acknowledge that because we are visitors here, not even permanent residents, we have always been lost in the cosmos.
And we hate it.
Einstein himself, when he saw that his work led to the inescapable understanding that the universe does not behave as we would want, spent his last years trying to disprove his own theory, that which had made him the world’s most celebrated thinker.
“God does not play dice with the universe,” he insisted.
Perhaps not. But what he wanted to dodge, what we all wish we could dodge, isn’t about God, nor about the universe. It is about us. Being lost.
Albert Einstein was haunted by his blackboard, covered with symbols and numbers no one before him had understood, convinced that he couldn’t even be certain of the boundaries of the little room in which he spent 30 years working out those formulas.
Found, the elusive sense for which we long, turns out not to be about unlocking the secrets of the universe, but about allowing ourselves to be embraced by the rich mystery of those secrets in which we are immersed.
The fun, the satisfaction, the sense of accomplishment we grew up thinking would be ours when we became smart, rich, old, settled, turns out always to be just beyond the next achievement. Not, we insist, because we are lost, but because we haven’t quite yet done what is required to be found.
I swim with a man who is paraplegic. He drives his van onto the beach, wrestles himself into his chair, drops his electric lift onto the beach, wheels into the ocean, raises off the chair with strong arms, and plunges headlong into the surf.
Early in our companionship I told him how awesome I thought he was. “Of course you do,” he laughed. “You can only imagine doing it the way you do it. But have you ever thought that I only have to endure the 58 degree water with half my body, while you feel it all the way to your toes? I find that quite hard to imagine. And heroic.”
Some people find a way to let go and fall willingly into the embrace of the unknown. Others wait until their final exhale. But whether one chooses or waits to be chosen, the wish is futile. Only in wandering the wilds of lost can we be found.
Despite our fears, we seem wonderfully suited for this, to brave the rapids, navigating uncharted waters, as surely as that frantically swimming sperm was embraced by the egg that unfurled into you.
Lost is so simple. To discern it requires little more complexity that trying to predict tomorrow’s weather. But found turns out to require more—the seemingly Herculean suspension of effort. Trusting.
A brilliant thinker came up with the term “cognitive dissonance” to describe the experience of encountering a reality that trumps what we believe. His unnerving observation is that we will redraw our picture of reality sooner than we will surrender what we have come to believe.
A Sister of the Discalced Carmelites told me that each morning when she opens her eyes and sees light, she asks herself, “What? Still here?!”
Perhaps the only dependable antidote to the haunting sensation of being lost, of acknowledging that you don’t know exactly where you are or what may lie ahead, is to wait; wait with anticipation akin to a four-year old waking on Christmas morning.
Few of us much past four years can bear to wait for real reality to show itself.
No worry. No matter how seductive the illusion of being settled, found lost is the more dependable reality. And being lost is the way we are made ready for the certain embrace.
Lost is the new found.Blayney Colmore stepped down after 30 years of Episcopal parish ministry to explore what he considered best kept to himself about all those years. He retains the indelible mark of “priest” and continues to consider ways to uncover dimensions of our being here that elude usual inquiry. He will e-mail a piece of short writing (most weeks) to people who ask. blayneyc@earthlink.net. His third book, the novel “Meander, The Wonder of Wooing Ms. Maudie” is scheduled out late summer 2010. He and his wife Lacey seasonally migrate between rural Vermont and coastal Southern California.