By Gary Topping–
“And when he had ceased speaking, he said to Simon, ‘Put out into the deep and let down your nets for a catch.’” Luke 5:4 RSV
We all know the story: Simon protested that he and his buddies had fished there all night and caught nothing, but when he reluctantly obeyed Jesus, they got such a haul of fish that their nets almost broke and their boats almost sank. When they came to shore, they abandoned their boats and followed Jesus to become fishers of men.
“Put out into the deep.” Of course Jesus meant that literally, but I think we can also interpret it metaphorically for our Christian lives. Catholicism offers us an infinite ocean of cultural, intellectual and spiritual resources and invites us to sail around on them to our heart’s content. If we choose to stay in the three-foot end of the pool, so to speak, we are selling ourselves and our Christian heritage short.
Let’s keep that in mind when we make our New Years resolutions for 2018. Typically, we might resolve to go on a diet or start an exercise program. There’s nothing wrong with those (and I should make those resolutions for myself!), but statistically most of those resolutions fade away before the end of January. Instead, I offer some suggestions by which we can really put out into the deep and perhaps change our lives in big ways. Maybe one or more of these are things we can truly sustain.
How about learning to play a musical instrument? I grew up in a musical family: my dad and my brother and I all played professionally. But my mother was left out. As things turned out, she died young, but during the last couple of years of her shortened life, she resolved to teach herself to play the piano. We already had an instrument, so she went out and bought the John W. Thompson beginner books and started going through them. She never had any lessons, other than asking one of us to clarify some musical notation or term. She was embarrassed to play in front of us (she shouldn’t have been; we all remembered what it was like to be a beginner) and practiced instead during the day when we were all gone. I’m sure my mother never became a Van Cliburn, but she practiced hard and it enriched her life tremendously. She was out into the deep.
How about learning a new language? I’ve studied several languages, and while I’ve never achieved any real fluency in any of them, nothing in my education broadened and deepened my life more. Language teaching is light years ahead of where it was when I was in college; nowadays there are all kinds of software programs, study groups and community education programs that really propel an eager student toward fluency. Or just plunge in and do it on your own, as I did with Latin. Get out into the deep.
For myself, I think I’m going to start a long-term reading program. I’ve enjoyed “Dickensian,” the PBS program on Thursday evenings which takes characters from various works by Charles Dickens and puts them into situations that Dickens might have imagined, but never did. I’ve only read three or four Dickens novels, and I thought when I started the series that my ignorance was going to put me at a disadvantage. It hasn’t, because each episode is pretty self-explanatory even if you’ve never encountered the characters before. But it has whetted my appetite to crack open those famous novels I’ve long been aware of but haven’t read. They are all huge in size (they were the TV series of the Victorian era), but they tempt you out of the three-foot end of the pool.
“Put out into the deep.” I hope that by this time next year you can come to me with all kinds of stories of nets almost breaking and boats almost sinking.
