I have trouble with a story often told about early Celtic Christian Monks. Apparently, they were inclined to jump into little boats without an oar or rudder and trust God to take them to some place God wanted them to be.
While these guys were clearly optimistic, they were not stupid. They knew about currents and windstorms. They surely understood that many of the tiny rock islands they were about to encounter were nearly uninhabitable but their faith in God’s presence with them gave them courage. I think the monks were trying to leave their egos on the shore alongside all other tools useful to marine navigation. They trusted God’s guidance to appear in the flow of the water itself and they wanted to remove any barriers to God that were born in fear or self-promotion.
I personally think all of them were nuts but I have a different idea of how God is at work in this world. I think God is comfortable with human free will. I think God baked the ability to make choices into this beloved creation. We have to be able to to make our own choices if our relationship with God and each other is to be anything other than robotic programming. I think that one of the reason God is comfortable with letting us creatures make our own decisions is that God is always working to bend our choices toward the good. Nothing we say or do is beyond God’s ability to reclaim and heal and make new. Including the bad choices. The really bad choices.
Which isn’t to say we are protected from the consequences of our good and bad choices. We’re not. Bad things happen and you have your list and I have mine. More then one of those Celtic monks got into real trouble with the go-with-the-flow school of navigation.
I also don’t think that God is ever threatened by the improvements we’ve made in boat building and ocean navigation. Anything we can do to reduce suffering is in alignment with God’s loving desire for wholeness. We don’t have to surrender our creativity, imagination, nor intelligence in order to follow what is sometimes an apparently silent God.
We can seek God’s guidance and sometimes even feel that intuitive nudge one way over another. And when we feel nothing, we can make the best decision we know how to make trusting that God will be there, with us, in all the decisions that follow.
Even given all of that, there’s still no way I’d get into a tiny little boat, especially without an oar, and push off the shore and into trust alone. There are rocks out there. And currents that flow all the way to the other side of the ocean. And I’ve been to camp and have piloted a canoe in the middle of a lake on a breezy late afternoon. Oars are good.
Come now this beautiful but cold morning in Munich on the 25th of March in the year 2020 – the 9th day of whatever this is, I’ve been thinking about those monks and their tiny little boats. I’ve been thinking that maybe they were just shockingly honest about the nature of life in this world. Oars make us think we’re in charge. Oars make us think that we are captains of our own destiny at all times. Yet as hard as we try, we keep finding out that storms trump oars.
In a storm, even in large modern cargo ships, we find out how much we still live at the mercy of the weather, of choices made by other people and creatures. How much we still need to know who it is we travel with and that we really don’t transverse our lives in isolated little boats. I think the monks went to sea reciting a story we can find in three* of the four Gospels about Jesus. I give you a summary of the already short story that the Monks would probably have memorized: It is the end of the day and Jesus and the disciples are crossing a large lake in a small boat. Jesus falls asleep and stays asleep when a large storm blows in. Afraid, the disciples wake him. They need him to be fully present with them in the middle of the chaos. Jesus got up and spoke to the wind and then to the water which both became quiet. “Who is this guy,” they wondered while Jesus asked the disciples, “Why are you afraid, Have you still no faith?”
Faith? Is that what we need when we’re in the middle of a life threatening storm? Faith is nice but I’m still a fan of the best anti-capsizing gear on the market. Also very fond of life vests.
The monks had faith that God would guide their tiny little boats across the water safely. Perhaps they imagined Jesus, asleep in the bow, traveling with them. Perhaps they were also way too trusting, especially the ones traveling without an oar. Still they trusted and traveled, certain that God was at work among them, helping to guide all choices made toward good outcomes, including the ones where the boat crashes onto the rocks.
This morning, all over the world, people have found themselves on metaphorically small boats, bobbing across strange waters, and the apparent lack of navigational aids on board. Some of us stay home and some of us head out into the world to do our daily jobs. At the end of this we wonder, will we still have employment and homes? Will we even still be alive? How many of our loved ones will be taken prematurely and what is the damage done to the people who care for the sick and the dying?
It feels out of control. I have friends who weep with anxiety and grief over what is being lost or will be lost. I also feel all those feels. Yet at the same time I’ve been thinking about those crazy monks and their little boats.
The ancient tiny boat traveling monks were ready to trust God’s steady presence even if their entire world smashed up onto isolated rocks. They trusted God to remain with them all the way through to the end and even after that even though everything they had known was likely to get shredded into a thousand foam soaked bits.
What a day it is today. What a world we seem to be in. On this, the 24day of March, 2020 all our little boats are getting tossed around in a giant storm and it seriously feels like there is not an oar or rudder to be found.
Where is God in this?
With the monks and with us – I hope. No, I trust. But I still worry and fret. I don’t know how to sleep through a storm yet.
In any case I know this: All storms end
(And the ancient monks paddling or drifting over the horizon of my imagination are nodding their heads in agreement.)
I also know this: We belong to the one who calls the wind by name, the one who speaks to water, the one who knows how and when to sleep in faith and trust.
Here is a blessing from one of my seminary professors. It comes from a lovely and thoughtful book you may find helpful for not only these times but all times. Go ahead and find it when you are ready but in the meantime, please print this blessing out and take it with you. Think about memorizing it and call it up when you find yourself unable to sleep in the middle of your storms.
Blessing
As the moon traces its light across the surface of water
As star-fire pricks the blanket of night,
So may God’s love and light shine in your heart and in your dreaming.
Sam Hamilton-Poore, Earth Gospel: A Guide to Prayer for God’s Creation
p.s.
A poem for today: Gannets – Mary Oliver