On the Fourth Sunday after Pentecost, the old Mass teaches Catholics how to hope when the world is restless, the Church is battered, and Peter’s net strains under the weight of crisis.
The old fisherman had worked through the dark.
His hands were cracked from rope. His tunic smelled of the lake. The nets lay limp at his feet, heavy with water and empty of fish. He had done everything a fisherman knew to do. He had watched the wind. He had read the water. He had labored at the right hour, with the right tools, in the place where years of experience told him fish should be found.
Nothing.
Then Our Lord stepped into his boat.
There are few sentences more consoling to the Catholic soul than that. Christ stepped into the boat of a tired man who had failed.
He did not wait for Simon Peter to be impressive. He entered an empty boat, then began to teach from it.
That is the beginning of this Sunday’s Gospel. It is also a picture of the Church in every age of humiliation.
The boat looks poor. The nets seem useless. The laborers are exhausted. The crowds press in, hungry for the word of God, while the men appointed to fish look as if they have nothing left to offer.
Then Christ speaks.
“Put out into the deep, and lower your nets for a catch.”
Continue reading at Hiraeth in Exile