Dear Friends,
I think about the ocean and boats a lot. Though I actually can’t remember the last time I was on a boat – it must be several years now – I often explain my feelings about lengthy commutes via the ferry that would carry me to internships, medical appointments, and just about anything actually worth doing when I was growing up in New York. It would be impossible to calculate the hours I spent on the Staten Island Ferry, or even its social importance; there’s a reason it’s considered one of the best places in the city to cry.
The thing about my love of boats, their centrality to my personal stories, is that boats are not terribly important to most people in the United State today unless you’re from one of a small handful of places – Martha’s Vineyard, Mackinac Island, Seattle, Galveston.
Though minor players for so many people today, in others areas and other times, boats carry a different importance, more like the centrality they’ve always had for me. It makes me wonder how the endless boat array of boat stories in the Bible might have seemed to me growing up if I didn’t know people who traveled by boat every day. All these boats and fishermen, all these people for whom daily life was intertwined with the sea.
What Are Fish Like, Anyway?
This week’s RCL passages include both a piece of Jonah’s summons to Nineveh and the well-rehearsed “fishers of men” story, about Jesus calling Simon, Andrew, James, & John away from their nets to be his disciples. Boats were essential to all the people in these stories, even as far apart in time (about 700-800 years) and space (approximately 500 miles) as they are set.
If you don’t live near water, if it’s quite possible the children in your life have never been on a boat, what do they make of these lives? What do they know about fishing? Once, as a young child, I slept in the small carpeted hold of a fishing boat while my father and his friend fished on the deck; a few years later I would cast my own line into the canal in my uncle’s backyard.
Fish fight against being drawn in. We rarely think of this when we talk about the disciples being fishers of men. How much more would people, willful as we are, fight against this firm summons? To say that the disciples would be fishers of men, has a lot more in common with the resistance that Jonah expects (and kind of hopes) to face in Nineveh. It’s not so gentle a calling in as it might seem.
Fishing and fishing boats – they may not seem like the most unusual things about any Bible story. We still have them, lots of us have at least a little experience with them, and perhaps more to the point, they are not so clearly unknowable as those bigger things – the nature of the Trinity, what the Ascension looked like, how it felt to be present at the first Pentecost. It’s just a boat, just fish – or maybe not.
Forward To February
While I’m really still operating one day at a time following spine surgery less than a week ago, I’m also back in my inboxes preparing for the many February activities in the life of the Church. So, what’s on the calendar?
St. Brigid’s Day (February 1): St. Brigid is one of my very favorite saints; I even dressed up as her for a folklore class one Halloween in college. For those of you who have been fighting through the seasonal darkness, this one is good news – Brigid is a symbol of the coming Spring, associated with ancient “quarter days” or “cross quarter days”. Others overlap this seasonal day, St. Brigid’s, Imbolc, and Candlemas (the following day). Do as you will with that.
You can celebrate St. Brigid Day by folding this unique style of cross with straw (or pipe cleaners), donating to food pantries (St. Brigid is remembered for distributing butter, a food symbolizing prosperity, to the poor), or exploring some of the classic folktales about her, like Brigid’s Cloak by Bryce Milligan and Helen Cann.Candlemas/Feast of the Presentation (February 2): While it may be under-recognized in many of our churches, Candlemas is one of those special days on the Church calendar that’s about as traditional as it gets, as it marks the presentation of the infant Jesus by his parents in the temple. We’ve even got actual scripture about this story!
Traditionally on Candlemas, both churches and individual households had the opportunity to bless the candles that would be used in the following year – and you almost certainly have a candle or two around. While there’s nothing stopping you from asking blessings on other days of the year, remembering Candlemas (or the closest service to it) is a good way of being intentional about creating sacred space at home.
BuildingFaith has previously written about a special tradition involving crepes and gold coins for Candlemas, which sounds good to me. Consider is a practice run for pancakes on Shrove Tuesday! Conversely, if you pulled the baby out of the King Cake on Epiphany, you’re going to be making the Candlemas tamales, according to tradition in many Latin American communities.Shrove Tuesday/Mardi Gras (February 13): There are countless descriptions of how you can celebrate Shrove Tuesday/Mardi Gras with your community or household online, and most people are more festive than I am about this sort of thing.
That being said, it seems to me that better than some of the general celebrations held today (which lose some of their power given how different our lives are from those of Christians hundreds of years ago - we aren’t emptying our homes of all the sugar and fat originally associated with those pancake feasts, for example), is to go “big” in other ways. One year, for example, you might read as many storybooks prominently featuring pancakes as you can find, while in another year you might visit a sugarhouse to see how syrup is made if you live somewhere that makes that possible. There are so many ways to get more in touch with the contents of this celebration, rather than just letting them be superficially festive.
We’ll pick up with Ash Wednesday/Lent prep next week! For now, though, I continue to ask your prayers for my recovery and I hope you’re all staying warm as the winter wears on.
Peace,
Bird