Rembrandt, The Return of the Prodigal Son: When the Embrace Became a Homeland

Before Rembrandt's The Return of the Prodigal Son the narrator finds no noise, no crowds and no visible miracle, only a moment of return, and asks the painting why it is so quiet. In his imagined dialogue the father lays his hands on his son's shoulders without asking where he was, because the road has punished him enough, and the son, with shaved head, torn clothes and a shoe nearly gone, hides his face because the image he carried of himself has collapsed. Speaking as a Muslim, the narrator declines to call the father God and sees in his mercy a human reminder of the meaning of mercy, while the brother standing apart confesses that mercy disturbed his calculations. Rembrandt's light refuses to be called divine, the shadow protects the moment from spectacle, a hand and a bent back become tears, and the embrace itself becomes a room whose walls are hands and whose roof is a chest. Leaving the painting, the narrator turns its meaning on himself and on everyone who drifted from his heart without leaving home, and ends with the son still kneeling, the father's hands still upon him and the door still open.