Today’s readings put me in mind of a story, about a priest I knew once, and he wasn’t from around here, so don’t bother trying to figure out who he was. He was a very, very sincere person. Very sincere. So sincere, sometimes it’s fair to say that it was a little difficult to process, if you know what I mean. And it happened that one night I wound up sitting next to him at a table at a parish supper and I asked what I thought was an innocent question. He’d been away for a couple of weeks, and I said, “How was your trip?” And he looked me straight in the eye, grasped my forearm, and slowly said, with passion in his eyes: “It changed my life.”
Now you’re probably nicer people than I am. Your first reaction might be different than mine was. Mine was: Why did I decide to sit here? Of course, I then heard the story. He had traveled for a few weeks in a country of great poverty, and he had thought long and hard about what he saw around him, and when he got back home, he decided that he needed to transfer out of the rather wealthy New York City parish where I knew him, and he asked to take a parish in the Bronx, where could be around people he felt Jesus wanted him to be around. He said he never got a message more clearly than he had on that trip.
So after the “Why did I sit here?” reaction, maybe a little or a lot of cynicism, maybe what sinks in with all of us after stories like this is: “Why not me?” We feel a little colorless by comparison with someone with a story like this to tell.
The fact is, we’d love to have a defining moment like this to make sense of our lives, something that we could sit down and tell people and explain to them why we’ve done the things we’ve done.
The scriptures suggest to us that stories like this aren’t out of the question. Today’s readings are all about calls like this, even more spectacular, every one of them could be a movie. There’s the prophet Isaiah, waiting in the temple, and suddenly feeling himself appointed to be a prophet, his lips cleansed with a hot coal burning away every impurity. There’s St. Peter, falling to his knees after seeing the miracle of the fishes, begging to be left alone and knowing that he won’t be. Even St. Paul in this letter, and in every letter, exudes this sense that he’s been called — at times of course it’s a bit hard to take, you’d probably duck his table at the parish supper too — but behind the attitude you see clearly a man whose every thought stems from the fact that he got a call out of nowhere, that he didn’t deserve, and whose message was as clear to him as anything.
So of course, the question is, so where is our story already? And I wonder if we really want it so much as that.
The fact is, I think our story is waiting to happen all around us, and our problem is that we take ourselves out of the story, or we’re not even watching for the story that’s for us, because the story that’s for us doesn’t look that appealing.
Resisting the story that is supposed to have us in it is part of every story. After all, that’s the other most striking feature of these scripture stories not just the spectacular nature of the miracle — the hot coal, the fish from nowhere — but the urge to run away from it. The first response is not: “Yes, finally you’ve come for me, I’m ready.” Woe is me, says Isaiah, I am doomed. Leave me, Lord, I am not worthy, says Peter.
They didn’t want the invitation they got, and yet they overcame that sense of unworthiness. That feeling of unworthiness to do good work, more than anything else, can cloud our hearing of the messages we get because the messages are there.
Sometimes the messages are not as spectacular as these stories, or maybe they are. All around us, we see people we admire and would like to follow, except that we think we couldn’t possibly emulate them. And we see friends in need, or strangers in poverty, and we know they are calling out for our help, except of course that problem’s too big for us to tackle. The fear that we will fail, or be frustrated, or look foolish, means that we have not only not responded, but stopped waiting for the story.
I think it happens far more often that we miss the message or the person meant for us — or we decide we are too small for the task — than that God simply isn’t looking for us like it seems he is in these readings.
And so the message as always in the gospel is: Keep your eyes open, think every night about who you met and what you saw during the day. Keep your eyes fixed and waiting for the message, like the prophet Isaiah, who was waiting a long time staring at that tabernacle in the temple until he saw the vision of the angel. And when you see the message, remember to say you are unworthy to do anything, but then stand up, and get into the boat like St. Peter, and row out to deep water, like you’ve been told to.