Priest Ioan Istrati
A child with a high social position, a spoiled child, used with the good things. Disgusted by the obedience towards his father and tired of the work on the estate of his family, with dreams of escape from the vise of laws. He asks for the fortune he has the right to inherit only after the death of his father, as if his father had been already dead. He had a boundless impudence, an audacity of a mean man
He is not sensitive at the sigh of his father, he doesn`t care of his brother and everything he had learnt in his family. He leaves. He is full of goods he did not work for. He has a lust for carnal pleasures, for the odors of sin, for the oblivion brought by irrational passions. He is thirsty after the wine of debauchery, he falls lower and lower in the passionate obsession of death. He wastes his fortune, the prostitutes go away, the foods and drinks vanish. They are followed by poverty, hunger and remorse.
In his mind the wrong justifications of the demon show up. Your father won`t receive you, you are a trash, you don`t deserve anything anymore. It is too late. You stay here among pigs and eat the bitterness of your misery. The fall is absolute, the dirtiness is overwhelming, the hate against those who have, the envy and the disgust for life destroy him.
However something still ripples in the depths as a hidden spring. It is the voice of the blood of his Father. It is the image of God from within him, dimmed, dirtied, devastated by sin. He remembers the sun from his home, the look of his father, the hot bread of his heart
In the hogsty of the pigs the remembrance of the first purity is the most terrible wound. It is a knife stabbed in his heart of disobedient child dead among strangers. In the darkness from the outside of his life he feels the boundless longing for his father, the pain of his father waiting in vain. It is the quake beyond nature of the revolt before death. It is the dignity of son who struggles among the piggish miseries.
His heart is torn to pieces and he leaves shaking off the pest of death, dirty, ragged, full of wounds, sick of death. He falls on his way and he swallows the rough and bitter dust of the foreign lands. He sees at the horizon the family home and falls down seeing the shadow of his father waiting. He is taken up from dust and kissed on his dirty face and hugged in the fatherly arms and comforted and embraced by the hands which had taught him to live. He is washed by the tears of his Father and purified by the salvatory Blood and dressed in royal clothes and put at the table as a son while being the most wretched of all the people. He has nothing because he wasted his fortune with the prostitutes. But he has the heart of his Father entirely and his endless Love and the sacrifice of the Son.
It is the history of anyone of us. It is the autobiography of the man par excellence. It is the history if the world. It is the plan of God for eternity. It is the record of the fallen humanity saved by the self sacrifice of God, the endless Love.
