Hurricanes are ravaging the Western hemisphere of our world.  People are fleeing for safety, enduring battering winds, rain and storm surges, as well as devastating losses.  Some are beginning the slow process of recovering from flooding storms already past.  People are helping people – each other.  We see and hear about it.  Many of us are actively participating in the beautiful and powerful manifestation of solidarity.  In this community of support and assistance are many who are being singled out as not “legal” to remain in the communities that they are now enlivening and embracing.  We live in a treacherous and paradoxical climate where some people are reaching out in connection while other people are contracting and recoiling in a dismissive and fearful reaction to perceived threats.

What is the fear?

Luke’s Gospel, (LK 5: 1-11) we have a description of an interesting situation.  Jesus is totally surrounded by a crowd on the edge of Lake Gennersaret.  Apparently, the crowd is so large that Jesus is literally being pushed into the lake.  Then we hear:

“He saw two boats alongside the lake…getting into one of the boats, the one belonging to Simon,
he asked him to put out a short distance from the3 shore.
Then he sat down and taught the crowd from the boat.”

The two boats had been pulled up onto shore by the fishermen who had had no luck in catching any fish.  We are told that “the fishermen had disembarked and were washing their nets.”  The Gospel story goes on to tell us that after Jesus finishes speaking to the crowds, he instructs Simon (Peter) to:

“Put out into deep water and lower your nets for a catch.”

Simon is reluctant, being as he has already been fishing all night long and caught nothing, and quite frankly on account of this, also rather skeptical about the prospect of catching anything.  Before we get to the divine “catch” of the story, let’s look at the situation being described again…

The crowd is “hungry” for something new, something different than what they have been relying upon for satisfaction and fulfillment.  Jesus “feeds” them his words from one of two boats that had been pulled up on the shore.  Now these boats represent an all-night fishing event that yielded no “catch,” no fish, and thus no “food.”  Empty boats on a shore crowded with hungry people.  What does Jesus do?  He gets into one of the empty boats and instructs Simon to put out into the water a ways.  Here is One who can provide something mysterious yet fulfilling to the emptiness of the people, a response to the yearning that drives them.  What is this “food” that he can provide?

Recall that there is one empty boat on the shore now, and one boat occupied with Jesus and ostensibly Simon and probably other fishermen.  The empty boat is surrounded by the massive crowd that is practically wading in the lake to listen to what Jesus has to say to them.  I wonder what he said.  I can imagine him looking lovingly at the shore full of people yearning to be “fed” with something that will truly fill their lives with meaning and direction.  Then we have Simon and the other fishermen exhausted from their own search for food, listening to Jesus or perhaps contemplating where their next meal could possibly come since they have caught nothing.

Earlier in the Gospel story, we hear that the fisherman had disembarked from the boats and were “washing their nets.”  I wonder what kind of nets these were?  What were they made of?   What were the “nets” that these fisherman were using to “catch” the food that they provided and consumed? This puts me in mind of the “nets” we use to “catch” what it is we want or feel we “need?”  When we are driven blindly by gut reactions and unexamined motives, our desires and needs will most certainly include or many times exclude others.  We may blame others for our needs not being met.  And the more unrealistic the “needs” are in our minds, the more ferocious is our reactions when those needs are not met.  People get labeled, manipulated, enslaved, and eventually those with the “unmet needs” or “unfulfilled desires” push the “others” completely out of the picture.

In a way, we are all standing on a shore with abandoned boats, cleaning our “nets,” i.e., the mechanisms we have devised to obtain what it is we want or feel we need.  We cannot seem to catch anything, but we will not let these “nets” go.  So we spiritually starve ourselves in a consumer society, while literally “starving” those that seem to be the reason why we are not satisfied.  We fail to see that the “food” we seek cannot satisfy us.  The “junk food” of greed, individualism and consumerism are all that our flimsy “nets” can catch, and these cannot satisfy us.  Indeed this “junk food” can only spawn and “feed” other ideologies, behaviors, and attitudes that spiral downward in a violent maelstrom (racism, sexism, bigotry, misogyny, pornography, etc.)  We fearfully hold onto these “nets” and stand on the “shore” of our lives, blaming others for our own misguided desires and hopes.

“Put out into deep water and lower your nets for a catch.”

We refuse to hear Christ on the boat inviting us to “lower our nets,” and go deeper.  Many times we would rather just stand on the shore and plug our ears as we pretend to listen.  What could possibly happen if we did this?  What if we did drop our “nets” of familiarity and false comfort?  Could it be that the catch would be so great that we would, of all things, have to get into the other “abandoned boat” and help the fisherman haul the “great number of fish” that are being caught?

There are two boats waiting to be filled in this story.  And what these boats are filled with ultimately is the divine abundance of Christ.  This is the catch perhaps…the deepening of our awareness that the “nets” of consumerism, racism, and every other manifestation of human indignity just does not work!

Many of the people in Houston had to be rescued by boat from the flooding caused by Harvey!  Picture the boats on the shore in today’s Gospel as rescue boats.  In one boat, the compassion of Christ reveals the Divine Abundance that awaits us in the deep water of connection and solidarity.  In this depth, fear and hatred will drown as abundance surfaces.  But in order for this abundance to be collected for all to benefit, we have to get into the other boat and go help.  We have to give ourselves into the abundance that is ours to receive.  When we learn to live in and as the reality of abundance, the fear that accompanies the myth of scarcity is drowned in the depth of compassion.  In our connections, we can enliven and heal the most treacherous of calamities, for we have new “nets” that catch everyone and everything – real “food” – to give each other over and over again!

Peace,

Thomas