Another Point of View - The Younger Brother - 2

"For the Jews, the pig is an unclean animal, which means that the swine-heard is the expression of man's most extreme destitution. The totally free man has become a wretched slave.

At this point the "conversion" takes place. The prodigal son realizes he is lost - that at home he was free and that his father's servants are freer than he now is, who had once considered himself completely free. "He went into himself.", the Gospel says (Luke 15:17). As with the passage about the "far country," these words set the Church Fathers thinking philosophically: Living far away from home, from his origin, this man had also strayed far away from himself. He had lived away from the truth of his essence.

His change of heart, his "conversion" consists in his recognition of this, his realization that he has become alienated and wandered into truly "alien lands", and his return to himself. What he finds in himself, though, is the compass pointing toward the father, toward the true freedom of a "son."

From pages 204-205 of "Jesus of Nazareth" by Pope Benedict XVI