Put Out Into The Deep
Lilias Trotter, Baby Moon At Sunset, c. 1900
Someone encouraged me recently to read a contemporary poet I had not read before. I was intrigued enough to order the latest of his books. About halfway through I found myself searching for reasons why this writing was so unsatisfying. I found the poetry flat and lifeless, no depth, little resonance. Something was missing. There was brilliance of observation, but that skill seemed to draw attention only to itself. This was a closed world.
I got to thinking this is like so many things in our world: movies, music, news, many of the books we encounter, even so much of our conversation. Reading this new poet became a kind of emblem for what is missing in our lives. There is not much depth.
Charles Taylor has observed that we all feel there is a fullness out there, but the secular narrative under which we live, closes us off from that fullness. We just know there is something more, deeper, richer, more satisfying, more like it should be, but we can’t seem to enter that world. C. S. Lewis says much the same thing about beauty. We keep longing to connect with it, but somehow we can never quite reach it. We persist in living on the surface.
Why is that? From fear of losing control? From a sense of inadequacy? Have our schools and universities let us down by offering no training or modeling on these deeper matters in our lives? Is it that the dominate narrative in our culture is so suspicious of wonder and mystery, robbing us of any spiritual depth for our lives? Reading holy Scriptures, as I have been teaching of late, will always introduce us to wonder and mystery and depth, but we’ve stopped reading the Scriptures in our society.
Some of you may have heard me talk about a late-in-life conversion I experienced on an airplane one night as I headed back to Seattle from D. C. In my cozy little corner of the plane, a little weary from engaging the culture, I read that night an extraordinary story that changed my life. Jesus approaches his soon-to-be disciples on the seashore of Lake Gennesaret. “How’s the fishing, boys,” he asked? “Lousy,” they responded. “We’ve been out all night and haven’t caught a thing.”
And then comes the big line that flipped my world upside down. Jesus encourages these weary fishermen to “’put out into deep water and let down your nets for a catch.” When they did, they “made such a huge catch of fish that their nets began to split.” Luke 5:4-6 Since that moment, I’ve thought long and hard about what this means to “put out into the deep water.” I’ve decided that’s where I want to fish. That’s what I want to write about and read about and talk about. That’s where the real catch lies.
I began to see I was fishing in the shallows much of the time. What was I going to do about it?
There are so many ways we limit ourselves to the surface. We are basically philosophically materialists. We are told in so many ways there is nothing beneath or beyond the surface. We also limit ourselves when we think everything is about politics. We limit ourselves because we have shattered any possibility of common life together. We’re split beyond belief by political and ideological and cultural differences. We’ve lost the ability to wonder.
It's going to take putting our nets out on the other side of the boat, each morning, each day, every step of the way. It’s going to take personal conversion, seeing the world with a different set of glasses. It's going to take devotion to spiritual practices, reading the Scriptures, praying in silence and solitude. And then, maybe the most challenging of all, it’s going to take talking to others about things that matter, across our differences, telling our own stories, asking others, really asking, about their stories.
This is how we can recover the fullness for which we are made, that something deeper, something richer, something like the abundant life God intended for each one of us. This is what it means to put out into the deep.
When that huge catch begins to split my nets, as it has, as it will, I can step back and rejoice. Maybe I can even sit with Jesus out on the beach and have some breakfast with him and my friends and talk all morning if that’s what it takes.