It was a Sunday night in October, 1983. Steady rain pinged our mobile home's roof, sang off the gutter courses, and pooled near the carport where my '68 Mustang waited to transport me early Monday to work at a Jantzen sewing factory across Washington's highway 14 from the Columbia River. The day before, Tim's '66 Falcon had driven us to the southern Oregon coast and back, pulling a rental trailer, into which we'd loaded my worldly goods. Now they lay stacked around me on our living room floor. A motley assortment: high school yearbooks and college papers, music and my student flute, birthday cards and vinyl records and summer outfits and lots of books and notebooks and just plain stuff, the leavings and findings of my 23 years.
Wearily I unpacked and sorted. Then the phone rang. It was Mom, giving me newsy updates, including one about a friend I'd known in our church's youth group, a fellow flute player and good student, though we attended different high schools. Mom had seen her parents in Tacoma and had learned that this friend now lived in Los Angeles and worked in a lawyer's office or some similar impressive venue, after having graduated college with highest honors. She had always been amazing so no surprise. She hadn't bothered getting married yet; that would come later, if it suited her upscale lifestyle.
I remember hanging up the phone and staring at a box of yarn animals. Sinking to the carpet, I crumpled into tears.
If I had set my mind to it, I could have been like my friend, a successful college grad leading the good life. Yet here I sat. A nobody. No degree, no future. All I'd done was destroy my youthful marriage to Tim. And then I had returned to it, to the rubble, the slow-going, achingly difficult rebuild. This moment I had nothing to show for this effort, or for any other. I was a total failure.
I guess the reason I'm sharing this memory is that on a recent October Sunday nearing the drippiest season in the Pacific Northwest, I pondered our priest's morning homily regarding a passage in Luke about the apostle Peter. In this story, Peter takes on an obligation to Jesus (the one Peter's brother Andrew says is the Christ), who recently has healed Peter's wife's sick mother. Peter has been working all night at his fishing job, with zero results. Jesus asks him to row him away from shore in the empty boat so Jesus can speak to crowds of people. Peter complies.
He keeps the boat steady by rowing while Jesus speaks. Another slog after the sleepless night. Afterward, Jesus tells him to go out into deeper water and let down his nets. This is, by Peter's common sense knowledge, a stupid idea. During the day the fish in that region hide deep, beneath the rocks, wary and able to see any nets approaching.
Due to the recent good thing Jesus seemingly accomplished in his married life, Peter again obliges. I imagine him watching the net sink and perhaps enduring an endless moment. Low, weary. And then the net is filling. Soon it's breaking. His fellow fishermen in the next boat scoop up an extraordinarily full net, too. This is overwhelming. As our priest mentioned that Sunday morning, Peter is elated, and then he is struck. Life sort of capsizes. He is undone.
First opportunity, Peter bows before Jesus and utters the name "Lord," something he has not called this man previously. In the Greek it's an awestruck exclamation. Peter also tells this Lord Jesus to leave him alone: Peter is sinful, with no right to have had this happen. But Jesus takes this moment to call Peter to a life of fishing for humanity. Of forsaking the goals he sought previously or maybe wishes he would have gone after. Whatever has been the case, now he is offered the choice to forsake it all. To leave the nets and fishes and "follow me."
As I kept a rain-accompanied vigil that recent Sunday night, I recognized Peter's awestruck moment. This was not a one-time thing. Repeatedly he was graced to behold the ways of God -- so far above his ways. So deep, so real for every human being, every creature God took pains to create and to invite into the fellowship of re-creation.
My moment on the carpet long ago occurred amid a seemingly endless slog of obligation. I had willingly taken it on. Having done so, I'd narrowed my options and had nowhere else to go. Weary moments would accompany my life, but so would those choice few of bright elation, such as on the day I learned I was pregnant (both times), as well as, many years later, the day I left all, in a sense, to become an Orthodox Christian.
Wearily I unpacked and sorted. Then the phone rang. It was Mom, giving me newsy updates, including one about a friend I'd known in our church's youth group, a fellow flute player and good student, though we attended different high schools. Mom had seen her parents in Tacoma and had learned that this friend now lived in Los Angeles and worked in a lawyer's office or some similar impressive venue, after having graduated college with highest honors. She had always been amazing so no surprise. She hadn't bothered getting married yet; that would come later, if it suited her upscale lifestyle.
I remember hanging up the phone and staring at a box of yarn animals. Sinking to the carpet, I crumpled into tears.
If I had set my mind to it, I could have been like my friend, a successful college grad leading the good life. Yet here I sat. A nobody. No degree, no future. All I'd done was destroy my youthful marriage to Tim. And then I had returned to it, to the rubble, the slow-going, achingly difficult rebuild. This moment I had nothing to show for this effort, or for any other. I was a total failure.
I guess the reason I'm sharing this memory is that on a recent October Sunday nearing the drippiest season in the Pacific Northwest, I pondered our priest's morning homily regarding a passage in Luke about the apostle Peter. In this story, Peter takes on an obligation to Jesus (the one Peter's brother Andrew says is the Christ), who recently has healed Peter's wife's sick mother. Peter has been working all night at his fishing job, with zero results. Jesus asks him to row him away from shore in the empty boat so Jesus can speak to crowds of people. Peter complies.
He keeps the boat steady by rowing while Jesus speaks. Another slog after the sleepless night. Afterward, Jesus tells him to go out into deeper water and let down his nets. This is, by Peter's common sense knowledge, a stupid idea. During the day the fish in that region hide deep, beneath the rocks, wary and able to see any nets approaching.
Due to the recent good thing Jesus seemingly accomplished in his married life, Peter again obliges. I imagine him watching the net sink and perhaps enduring an endless moment. Low, weary. And then the net is filling. Soon it's breaking. His fellow fishermen in the next boat scoop up an extraordinarily full net, too. This is overwhelming. As our priest mentioned that Sunday morning, Peter is elated, and then he is struck. Life sort of capsizes. He is undone.
First opportunity, Peter bows before Jesus and utters the name "Lord," something he has not called this man previously. In the Greek it's an awestruck exclamation. Peter also tells this Lord Jesus to leave him alone: Peter is sinful, with no right to have had this happen. But Jesus takes this moment to call Peter to a life of fishing for humanity. Of forsaking the goals he sought previously or maybe wishes he would have gone after. Whatever has been the case, now he is offered the choice to forsake it all. To leave the nets and fishes and "follow me."
As I kept a rain-accompanied vigil that recent Sunday night, I recognized Peter's awestruck moment. This was not a one-time thing. Repeatedly he was graced to behold the ways of God -- so far above his ways. So deep, so real for every human being, every creature God took pains to create and to invite into the fellowship of re-creation.
My moment on the carpet long ago occurred amid a seemingly endless slog of obligation. I had willingly taken it on. Having done so, I'd narrowed my options and had nowhere else to go. Weary moments would accompany my life, but so would those choice few of bright elation, such as on the day I learned I was pregnant (both times), as well as, many years later, the day I left all, in a sense, to become an Orthodox Christian.
2 comments:
Dear Deanna, it seems to me that life for all of us is made up of these moments of deep awareness; moments in which the Oneness that dwells in the deep center of ourselves swells and oozes and courses throughout our bodies and into our hearts and minds, spirits and souls and we know suddenly the Ground of Unknowing. We are grounded in it. And so you have been; and so you will be again. As have I and as I will be. We are caught in Moment, Presence, Timelessness. All of us. We can rejoice in that and hope that all of us can leave behind for a few moments the reality of dailiness and rejoice in those moments when we are Totally Other and yet Totally Ourselves.
I am so happy for you that you discovered the mystery and history and inwardness of the Greek Orthodox tradition. Peace.
Thank you, Dee, for sharing your keen perceptions. I have come to believe that timelessness is a larger aspect of Reality, and we just can't see it, or partake of it yet, but as you say we are each granted moments in which we catch a glimpse.
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