The Return of the Prodigal Son by Henri J.M. Nouwen
Week 5: Epilogue — Living the Homecoming
Read the Epilogue of The Return of the Prodigal Son. Return also to the Prologue for comparison. Primary Scripture: 2 Corinthians 5:17–20 ("Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, the new creation has come...").
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The Epilogue is where Nouwen brings his meditation home — not to a tidy resolution, but to a lived, ongoing commitment. These final pages invite us to ask what it means, in the ordinary texture of daily life, to dwell in the father's house.
Discussion Questions
7 questions1.Nouwen ends the book having been called to leave Harvard and move to L'Arche Daybreak, a community of people with intellectual disabilities, in Toronto. He describes this as the concrete form his homecoming took. What strikes you about that particular form? Why might living in a community of vulnerability be a fitting destination for the journey this book describes?
2.Throughout the book, Nouwen insists that returning home is not a single event but a repeated, lifelong movement. Does that feel encouraging or exhausting to you? What does it suggest about how we should view our ongoing failures and false starts?
3.Nouwen writes that the parable's house — the father's house — is a place we carry within us, a place of inner belonging that no external circumstance can take away. What disciplines, practices, or relationships have helped you cultivate that kind of inner home? What has threatened it?
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