What were you doing when Jesus called you? I was teaching and writing a book. When Jesus called the fishermen and net menders and tax collectors, he didn’t call them to do something else, he called them to do what they were doing but in a new way. This is true of us too. Jesus wants us to remain who we are and bring that true self to the work of the Gospel.
Father Joe told about a feeling he had during the last election for leadership in his congregation. He told them he felt like the congregation was in a boat and the boat heading right for a huge waterfall and they were all going to die. He said, "We don’t need a Provincial, we need a Hospice Chaplain!" He wanted to jump out of the boat. He saw that many others had jumped out already and believed that took real courage to do, but then one of his friends helped him to realize that it also takes courage to stay. When you step out of the boat it rocks a little, but then it steadies again. If you stay in the boat and rock it gently, it will change course eventually. What would have happened if the apostles had all jumped out of the boat? They had a bigger waterfall to face than we have. So he decided to stay, and now they elected him Provincial. Blessings Father Joe!
Jesus comes to the apostles walking on the water when they are afraid they are about to die saying, “Take Courage. It is I. Do not be Afraid.” G. K. Chesterton wrote about courage. "Take the case of courage. No quality has ever so much addled the brains and tangled the definitions of merely rational sages. Courage is almost a contradiction in terms. It means a strong desire to live taking the form of a readiness to die. 'He that will lose his life, the same shall save it,' is not a piece of mysticism for saints and heroes. It is a piece of everyday advice for sailors or mountaineers. It might be printed in an Alpine guide or a drill book. This paradox is the whole principle of courage; even of quite earthly or brutal courage. A man cut off by the sea may save his life if we will risk it on the precipice.
He can only get away from death by continually stepping within an inch of it. A soldier surrounded by enemies, if he is to cut his way out, needs to combine a strong desire for living with a strange carelessness about dying. He must not merely cling to life, for then he will be a coward, and will not escape. He must not merely wait for death, for then he will be a suicide, and will not escape. He must seek his life in a spirit of furious indifference to it; he must desire life like water and yet drink death like wine. No philosopher, I fancy, has ever expressed this romantic riddle with adequate lucidity, and I certainly have not done so. But Christianity has done more: it has marked the limits of it in the awful graves of the suicide and the hero, showing the distance between him who dies for the sake of living and him who dies for the sake of dying."1
When you look into the cup at Eucharist, what do you see? Kathleen Norris writes that Americans love blood if it is in a horror film or a vampire movie, but when it comes to facing the real blood crying out to us from the ground, the blood of Christ on the cross, the precious blood in the cup, we don’t really want to see it. We avert our eyes and sip the cup without even taking a moment to ponder the bloodshed and bitterness it represents. For the precious blood to be transformational we need to remember the suffering of Christ, of humanity, of creation and be willing to drink of that cup. This sharing in the cup isn’t a promotion like the sons of Zebedee thought, it is a new covenant sealed in blood, human blood shed daily for justice, not the blood of animals. The mother of James and John may not have understood when she asked for a place at Christ's right and left hand for her sons, but she understood the reply when he said, “It shall not be that way with you.” She was there at the foot of the cross with Mary and Mary Magdalen and the beloved disciple. That is where we are reminded to be at the Eucharistic table. It is there, in that consciousness, we are transformed. Not in hocus pocus, but in the mindfulness of the martyrs and mystics.
1 Chesterton, G.K, Orthodoxy, p. 91-92.
