(I had the great pleasure of presiding and preaching and St. Anne's Parish in Barrington, IL today, where Rory Cooney is musician and liturgist, an overnight guest of him and Terry Donahoo. It was so great to be with them again. Here's my homily.)
There’s something a friend of mine pointed out to me when he and I went to see the film “Ordinary People” with Donald Sutherland, Mary Tyler Moore, Judd Hersh and Timothy Hutton, in his breakout role––forty years ago! (It’s poignant that the great actor Donald Sutherland just died this past week.) There is a scene just before the climax of the story when Donald Sutherland, who plays the father of a family, is walking along the shore of Lake Michigan with a friend of his discussing the major trauma that has taken place in the life of the family. And my companion pointed out to me how often at a turning point in a script, when someone needs is facing a big decision or a turning point in their life, characters are shone walking by a body of water, as if water itself were a cinematic symbol for the mind or a device to represent the unconscious.
Ever since then, whenever I read scenes of Jesus by or on a body of water, walking on the water, for example, or today, sleeping in the boat in the middle of a storm (Mk 4:35-41), I mentally translate it as a symbol of Jesus calming the raging, troubled waters of the unconscious.
There’s a phrase from India, the second aphorism of the Yoga Sutras, that means a great deal to me: “stilling the thought waves of the mind.” Now, what would be the purpose of that––stilling the thoughts waves of the mind? Modern teachers of meditation or mindfulness in the secular realm will sometimes point out that it’s for better concentration, for calming anxiety, or greater performance. All of that’s fine, but a little too utilitarian for me. We believers want to still the thoughts waves of our minds for something else, for another reason: to be available to the voice of God, the call of the Spirit that often comes to us in “still small voice.” Unfortunately, often that still small voice gets drowned out by all the clamor around us and, even worse, by all the clamor within us.
Now I have practiced meditation––and I emphasize the word practice––for decades, and I have tried to teach or lead others in the art of contemplative prayer as well. So I guarantee I know that it’s a very difficult thing to do––to still the mind. And why is that? Why is it so hard to still our troubled minds?
Well, at least one reason is this: because we don’t trust. Or as Jesus says in today’s gospel, we still have no faith. We do not trust Jesus’ words from the Sermon on the Mount, telling us not to be anxious about our life, what we will eat or what we will drink, nor about our body, what to put on. We don’t have faith in Jesus’ message that we should not be anxious about tomorrow, for tomorrow will be anxious for itself (Mt 6:25-34.). We do not have minds still enough to listen to the voice of God because as soon as we have a moment of quiet we start re-hashing old arguments and fighting past battles in our head that we think are still a clear and present danger. Or else we’re planning the future because we do not trust that the universe and its God are benevolent and that it’s all going somewhere good. We do not have still minds because we think we can change people around us and make the world what we want it to be. We cannot still our minds because we think we are in charge. We do not have still minds because we think we can manipulate God into doing what we think should be done and because we cannot really say to God “Thy will be done” and actually mean it.
It is poignant that alongside this gospel today we hear the beginning of God’s long response to Job (Job 38:1, 8-11). I imagine it was chosen mainly for its reference to waves (‘Thus far shall you come, and no farther, and here shall your proud waves be stopped’), but there’s something more going on too. Basically what God is saying throughout this whole long section––it goes on for four chapters!––is “You do not know the whole story. You do not have perspective to see where this ends. You do not yet believe that this all, and history itself, is heading toward the day when God will be all in all. You still do not have enough faith.” This is what we sometimes call the holy darkness of God.
The late famous Vietnamese Buddhist monk and teacher Thich Nhat Hahn used to talk often about the boat people who would leave Vietnam crossing the Gulf of Siam. Often the boats would get caught in rough seas or storms, and the people would start to panic and boats would start to sink. But, he said, if even one person aboard could remain calm and lucid, knowing what to do and what not to do, that person could help the boat survive. Their expression, their face and voice communicated clarity and calmness, and people would trust them and listen to what he or she said. In that way one person could save the lives of many others. In his book Being Peace he writes that
The world is something like a small boat. Compared with the cosmos, our planet is a very small boat. We are about to panic because our situation is no better than the situation of the small boat in the sea. … we have [thousands of] nuclear weapons. Humankind has become a very dangerous species. We need people who can sit still and be able to smile, who can walk peacefully. We need people like that in order to save us.
Then, of course he adds, “… you are that person … each of you is that person.”
The prophetic voice of the followers of Jesus, or at least a good part of it, beside our advocating for justice and caring for the least in our society, is to be those who––in spite of all around us seeming to going to hell in a handbasket, in spite of deforestation and global warming, in spite of ever-increasing gun violence across our own country, in spite of the chaos of the political arena in our country in this election cycle, and the real threat of political violence, in spite of there seeming to be no global moral authority able to stop the tyrants and bullies––the prophetic voice of the followers of Jesus, or at least a good part of it, could be that we are the ones who convey trust in the benevolence of God and God’s plan. Not that those problems aren’t serious and certainly not to deny that they need to be addressed, even urgently, but we are the ones who could and should face them and address them lucidly, with calmness and clarity, as one of my confreres says, to be “reflective rather than reactive,” knowing what to do and what not to do and when to do it. We could be the people who know how and when to sit still, the people who are able to smile and walk peacefully, because we have faith.
The world needs people like that in order to save it. We could be, are called to be, those persons.
And that’s what I see in Jesus modeling in today’s gospel. In the midst of the storm saying to his frightened disciples, ‘Take courage, it is I; do not be afraid.’ How many times does he say this in the gospels, ‘Do not be afraid’? How many times does Jesus calm the troubled waters of people’s minds and hearts? How many times is he the only self-possessed peaceful one in the room––including even when he faced the Sanhedrin and Pontius Pilate before his death?
When someone like that says, ‘Take courage! Be not afraid!’ we should sit up and take notice.
After we’ve done all we can do and said all we can say––and maybe even before we’ve done all we can do and said all we can say––let’s remember to ask God, through Jesus, to still the troubled waters of our minds. That’s what the world needs from us right now. Let’s do it, in the name of Jesus.
