NCNYUMC.ORG | On Walking on Water

One of the things that make it difficult to understand the population in Jesus' time - whether in Galilee or Jerusalem - is that superstition reigned over everything. One must remember that Jesus' time was pre-Albert Einstein; an ages-old vision of the structure of the Universe was in every mind and shadow. Heaven above; hell below. Not that superstition doesn't still exist in our modern times; given the range of fundamentalists and evangelicals in America, it is more than clear that somewhere around half our nation is still superstitious.

So when I came upon Jesus' miracle stories in the New Testament many years ago, I immediately collided with that knowledge, and found my spirit a-wandering around the stories, sensitized to try to hear or see other possibilities than just the surface story. Or, in the event, to understand what the purpose of the surface story was: to draw one more deeply into the experience, groping one's way to unexpected expressions of grace.

One thing that triggered the unleashing of my spirit in the Walking On Water episode is that the site of the experience is well known. We visited it many years ago. Indeed, there is a tiny chapel on the shore of the Sea Of Galilee in remembrance of the story.

A cadre of fishermen now show one traditional manner of netting fish there in Jesus' time. Just south of the site, a boat was anchored. The man in the boat would pound an oar against the side of the boat, which startled the fish to flee north smack into the nets laid out by another boat. The fish, incidentally, are known as "St. Peter's Fish." A variety of bass, as it turned out, and a delicious fish.

For the walking on water scenario, I made a startling discovery: the shoreline of the lake at the site is very shallow. One can walk sixty to seventy feet into the lake, and not have the water come up to one's ankles. And given the recent drought in Israel, the level of the lake's water had dropped a full two feet - an experience that has happened many times there over the years.

Watching people walk that distance from the shore, it was very easy for me to see how folks in Jesus' time - especially those not from that area, and/or knew nothing about how the world works from the scientific perspective, could easily conclude that a Jesus or whoever was walking on the water. Add to this a morning or evening fog, and the illusion is further heightened. Add to all this a superstitious mindset, and one has…a miracle. Or rather, part of a miracle.

Please find below my very first published poem, from the cover of the Sunday morning bulletin of a Congregational Church in Amherst, Massachusetts, ca. 1962.

The literal minds must swallow
Jesus' pedestrian aquatics to
Prove their right to salvation's
Clique; but we
Stroll on sidewalks of fog
Without a second thought.

The nature of the poem feeds off the nature of the walking on water story. Rather than pooh-poohing such a story (a process not alien to too many scientific folks), the poem seems to me to raise the ante in the stakes of hope in bitter times, and produces a variant of miracle that is for the most part unexamined or inexperienced by our own peasantry in 2005.

That is, one is always walking, driving, flying, boating, running on "sidewalks" of fog without really being aware of it. The discovery of the sidewalks was a breathtaking experience - to me, certainly - and it was one of those many instances in my life when the poem simply wrote itself. My favorite image of this is that the poem fell out of my head. I claim no credit for it save that I was the instrument of the writing. The pen, if you will.

Another way of saying this is that walking on water is a tentative experience in the beginning, water being ever ready to part and get you wet. One wit suggests that one walks on water only by stepping smartly along. I like the word "tentative" here because so much of life is just that, from one moment to the next. Tentative, but also very stubborn, life is. In fact, to my mind, the tentativeness is the doorway through which stubbornness enters one's soul.

It's like washing the eyes clean and seeing what is there to see for the first time. The appreciation is so deep that life takes on a different character altogether. So much so, that the stubbornness of appreciation simply takes its place at the table of one's soul, and stays for one's life span.

The next breath is a step on the sidewalks of fog; the next airplane rising from the runway is another. The next death on the operating table, pushed away by the awareness of the tentativeness and including the stubbornness of the spirit required to walk the sidewalks of fog, is defeated. Or accepted.

I want here to switch a metaphor for a moment to illustrate in another instance the power buried deeply in these stories of Jesus, from water walking to a Lazarus in the tomb. Lazarus will get his moment in another sequence in this series, but I would like the reader to appreciate Lazarus in the tomb, seeing him as not physically dead, but defeated almost to the last ounce of his old self, discovering for the first time in his life just how tentative life can be. Spiritually dead, - to himself, and hence to others, and then and only then, for the first time coming alive (Resurrecting? Born again? Born for the first time? You name it), walking with sensitive, tentative steps and spirit on his own, his personal sidewalks of fog. In stubbornness.

As my friend Jim Evans of Ithaca puts it as a paraphrase of what Jesus said to Lazarus, so eloquently: "Lazarus! Gitcher (rear end) out of that (particular) tomb of the spirit. You're hurting the people who love you." The reader may remember that Jesus is portrayed as "hollering" into the tomb. The tomb is a veritable echo chamber; it is still there in Bethany, two thousand years after the event.

One of the joys of my later life has been an involvement in the uproars in the Roman Catholic Church as concerns the priestly child abuses, and the attempts at the cover up of such sordid and grisly behavior by the bishops and cardinals of that church. Almost unanimous coverups in the American nation.

The joy is that some of my writing has been accepted by the rebels involved in trying to get their Cardinal (Boston's Cardinal Law) fired from his post. They succeeded, and the action opened up a lot of other questions as well for these people.

One poem of mine in particular caught the eye of these folks. I include it at the end of this section. Here, as an opening, is part of the letter sent me:

"How I appreciate your words. As we continue on our whirlwind journey (is it just 4 months since the maelstrom started?) I realize more and more that it is in the stillness that we will hear the voice of God, that we need to slow down, that we need to pray, that we need to listen. It is a very difficult thing to do when our culture demands instant gratification and the media drives the message. We have planned a retreat day on June 9 th to discern the movement of the Spirit and how we can be channels for the Word. Now that there have been opportunities for many people to express their anger and sense of betrayal, I can detect a very slow move toward mercy for all, as well as the reality that any change has to begin in our own hearts first.

"Your poems are prayers, and this one is particularly beautiful. I plan to use it as a closing for one of our working sessions. So you will continue to be very much part of this work."

"Here for your immediate appreciation is a poem which occurred at 3:00 AM this morning because my mind refused to go to sleep until I got up and wrote the thing.

"I was brooding about the immensity, not only of your struggle, but also of the entire church's struggle worldwide. Below, you will find a quote that might be helpful. It's from a novel by P.D. James, "Death In The Holy Orders" (paperback), that looks at the demise of a supposedly elite Church of England seminary. Which does die, in the end. P.D. James is a woman novelist from England, and is much respected in her field.

The quote: 'Oh, they believe all right. It's just that what they believe has become irrelevant. I don't mean the moral teaching: the Judeao-Christian heritage has created Western civilization and we should be grateful for it. But the Church they serve is dying. When I look at Doom (a fifteenth century painting of the End Of It All, with the Last Judgement being enacted) I try to have some understanding of what it meant to fifteenth-century men and women. If life is hard and short and full of pain, you need the hope of heaven; if there is no effective law, you need the deterrent of hell. The Church gave them comfort and light and pictures and stories and the hope of everlasting life. The twenty-first century has other compensations. Football (soccer) for one. There you have ritual, colour, drama, the sense of belonging: football has its high priests, even its martyrs. And then there's shopping, art and music, travel, alcohol, drugs. We all have our own resources for staving off those two horrors of human life, boredom and the knowledge that we die. And now - God help us - there's the Internet. Pornography at the touch of a few keys. If you want to find a pedophile ring or discover how to make a bomb to blow up people you disagree with, it's all there for you. Plus, of course, a bottomless mine of other information, some of it even accurate.' (End quote: p.281)

"What now seems to be happening is that the death of God (the emptying of the language of the church) has shifted from the mover and shaker thinkers in our communions and is now taking place in the pews and pulpits. What I think is going to emerge out of this is the discard, or at least, minimizing, of everything about heaven and all that, and focus on where we should be - living in love with one another as nations and peoples. Now there's a challenge. Keep us busy for another two or three centuries, I'm sure, until we can get some of the kinks ironed out.

"If you want to have some fun in this regard, check out the Jesus Seminar of the Westar Institute.

"I have a very funny and moving true story about the struggle that may be helpful to your own. You may remember when Vatican II issued the directive that the Mass would be said in the vernacular (that is, the local language) from that point on. I happened to be on a state-church study tour at that very time when the directive was implemented worldwide. Our second stop was in Cuernavaca, Mexico, in a motel called The Yellow Canaries.

"Right across from the motel was a small peasant church; just down the road was a tourist church. We woke on a Sunday morning listening to the strangest sound: it was the bell of the peasant church, but instead of ringing out true and bold, it merely said, 'Clunk, clunk.'

We laughed until we came to understand what was happening. The bell was made of lead, all the peasant church could afford.

"The tourist church bell down the road went 'BONG!' over and over, of course. It was the first Sunday of the new language of the Mass. The peasants did not like to hear the mass in Spanish because they could understand every word, so they left their little church and went down the road to the tourist church, where the Mass was being conducted in English, which they didn't understand. They were thus comforted, as they had been previously by the use of Latin in the Mass before the change was mandated. They didn't understand Latin either; for them it was part of the mysterium of the whole thing.

"My points are two: 1) It is going to take several centuries before familiarity with the theology of the vernacular language used in the Mass works changes in outlooks and language. This is to say nothing of the visceral stubbornness of the Vatican, which is ever trying to put the procedural toothpaste back into the tube, let alone the individual grapplings that must happen in order for a new language to flourish in the souls of those who are committed to the Christian ethos.

"And 2) Since things will be at the point of bouncing back and forth between Clunk! And Bong! for quite some time to come, what I think are needed beyond the steps that you're taking now to get rid of a moral failure of a Cardinal, are quiet study and prayer groups which are slowly groping their ways to deeper appreciations of what Jesus Christ had to offer in His teachings, including, of course, being steeped in the traditions of the intensities and fruits of a disciplined prayer life.

"Or as one priest of my knowledge had to say in a rather offhand way back in the days of Vatican II, 'Well, boys - I guess it's back to the Bible!'" (This was reference to the loss of authority of what is known as "magesterium" at the center of the church. The word means that the church's interpretation is the one that stands, even if it disagrees with the Bible.)

"I do not want to get ahead of my commitment to you folks; as I understand what I'm trying to do in your company is to share some of my discoveries that are registered in poetic form. Happily. But beyond this effort, and yours, are the deeper wells of the Spirit just waiting to be plumbed. And to me, at the end of a long and exciting life in the ministry of Jesus Christ, that is breathtaking - that we should learn and share.

"In the patience of the Spirit, I am a Fellow in your efforts…"

Taking Thy Presence so for granted that we ignore Thy spirit;
Losing our sense of commitment to Thy purposes;
Being pompous when humbleness is needed;
Refusing to tell those who hate us that we love them;
Closing our eyes and ears to suffering;
Thinking we're superior to Christians not of our persuasion;
Thinking we're superior to those who are not Christian;
Not trying to change our fears into courage;
Living sloppy prayer lives;
Being selfish.

So here is Jesus, exhausted and spent emotionally and physically, on the way back from a day of speaking to people. Ask any preacher about that exhaustion. "Emotionally drained" is a better phrase. It is part of the reason why Mondays are such a down time for preachers who try to work with integrity at the arts of preaching.

The boat in which Jesus and His friends were returning from a "preaching" day was a typical Galilean fishing boat, which was surprisingly large - one such relic was recently discovered and recovered from the Galilean lake when a two year old drought lowered the water level. It is now in a museum there. The boat is 26 feet long, about the length of a contemporary O'Day sailboat owned by two of my very dear friends.

Jesus is asleep in the forepart of the boat. A storm suddenly happens. I was on one of the tour boats there years ago and experienced the swiftness of the storm breaking. Cold air descends from the Golan Heights and rouses the lake to ferocious dimensions in just a few moments.

Our tour boat was tossed about like a runaway wine bottle cork. The sound system of the boat was torn off the stanchions and went crashing down or overboard. Chairs and benches were on the loose, menacing everyone. Gradually, we corralled most of them, tying them down, or sitting on them. And waited for the storm to subside. We finally made it to port.

The crew of Jesus' boat lost their control of themselves in a similar circumstance, except that their boat had only a sail and rudder to try to control it. It's here that the story gets murky - it says that Jesus brought the waters under control. What I think happened was that Jesus, rudely awakened by the storm, and the panic of the crew, turned to the crew, and calmed the "stormy waters" in their minds and spirits.

A sailing crew in panic is in more danger to survival than any storm could create. Put the two together, and you have a lethal situation.

I've seen that work hundreds of times over my years. People out of control; you stand there in their midst and start working to help them help themselves to calm down. The Vietnam War riots and demonstrations were cases in point during my decade at Syracuse University (1966-1975), to say the least. I have more stories to tell about that time than I have the time to tell them.

There's only so much to do in stormy waters - head into the wind, throw out a sea anchor so you will stay headed into the wind, and the boat will maintain a steady "place" in the waters. That's the word: "steadiness." A steady Jesus, a steady crew.

I'm trying to imagine the event. I'm left with the feeling that the crew were not regular fishermen, but friends; maybe some were disciples of Jesus. Apparently, some were what we call "sunshine sailors", people who are OK when the weather's OK, but lose it when the weather changes for the worse. "Inexperienced" is another word that seems appropriate. On top of that, the boat was probably borrowed…yet another reason for concern.

The miracle of Jesus in this story is that He understood what the real problem was and addressed it forthrightly. I don't know how to translate the phrase into Aramaic, Jesus' language of birth and kin, but I can almost hear Him saying something to his boat crew like, "Get a grip."

May the blessings of God be upon the reader.

Frank Halse
fhalse@twcny.rr.com
1-315-963-8401
15 Kimberly Lane
Apt. # A2D
Mexico , New York
13114