When Reality Hits
Michiel Peeters - As always, let’s try to empathize with the disciples. After a day full of preaching at the shore of the lake, Jesus had said them: let’s take the boat and sail to the other side. He himself settles down in the stern seat where there is a pillow—and immediately falls asleep. Then a fierce squall blows in. The waves begin to slam over the boat, so that it is already filling up.
In short, reality hits them. What happens when reality hits us? Our humanity wakes up. Our humanity, made of profound needs and questions, and capable to recognize what answers to those needs, should such answer emerge.
When our humanity wakes up, we can try to go against it, suspend it, suppress it, numb it, ridicule it, anesthetize it, overrule it with actions, distract ourselves. But we only succeed in doing so if reality touches us “a bit” while we have already “learned” to live numbly. When reality hits hard, then there is no stopping it, then our humanity irrevocably awakens in all its scope.
Then all we can do is either say a dreadful no or “wield” our humanity to see if there is something at its level. The disciples may not have been the best of people, but at least they were simple, simply human. When their boat begins to fill up, they get scared. Fear is always a “secondary reaction”: we fear to lose something we are attached to, something we desire, perhaps unconsciously; thus, our fear of dying shows our desire to live.
When reality’s impact awakens the disciples’ humanity—which we see in their fear, expression of their strong desire to live—then they can grasp with precision what could help them in their need: in fact, they cry out to Jesus. When the impact of reality has awakened our questions, we easily intercept what is at their level. Just as Job, in the Old Testament, in his misery cries out to God.
In his suffering, he senses unmistakably that only the Mystery itself can be his appropriate interlocutor at the level of his experience. Recently I heard someone saying to a friend in a complicated situation: you must find a solution or a culprit, else you’ll get angry with God! As if that were inadmissible, even unthinkable. But the God Jesus reveals to us does not fear our anger (cf. Luke 15:28), nor our demands (cf. Luke 15:12), nor even our noes (cf. Matt 21:28–32).
Rather, He challenges us through the circumstances so that our hearts would wake up, so that we would turn to Him instead of to something lesser! When we experience life as unjust, let us please cry out to that “You” whom our hearts intercept as the right interlocutor! Then, once cried out to Him, it is also right that we should listen to what He answers, as He did to Job: “Where were you when I founded the earth? … Have you ever … commanded the morning and shown the dawn its place…? Have the gates of death been shown to you…? Have you comprehended the breadth of the earth? Tell me, if you know it all” (Jb 38:4–18). Or Jesus’s answer: “Why are you terrified? Do you not yet have faith?” Have you not yet learned, recognized, through all that you have experienced with me, who it is that you have met?
Through the circumstances, we are called to discover the Mystery, the present Mystery, as our true interlocutor. This discovery liberates, as we are invited to verify in experience. Christ is the great “facilitator” of this dialogue, which he himself constantly lives. When we begin to experience it, with the freedom it entails, we get “insanely” grateful and attached to Christ, so much so that we follow him wherever he goes, even in giving his life, as we see with Paul: “The love of Christ impels us, once we have come to the conviction that one died for all [that He gave his life so that we could live]…. He indeed died for all, so that those who live might no longer live for themselves but for him who for their sake died and was raised.”
Now we will receive our friend Henry into the Catholic Church. When we experience Christ as the great teacher of the dialogue with God—that liberates us within the circumstances—then we can also accept the Church as the “place” of Christ, in which he continues to educate us through his word and sacraments, and the witness of the others. May Christ continue to educate Henry and each of us to that true and liberating dialogue, even if it means going through storms at times.
Unrevised notes by the Author. Tilburg University - Homily.
