Today's Gospel is fitting with the hurricane/tropical storm that has been battering our eastern coast. I prepare my homily for this Mass on Tuesday, so it does not allow me, then, the opportunity to know just how bad that storm will have been. I pray it will have spared human lives as it makes its way north. On this Thursday morning, I realize that as bad as it was, it could have been worse.
     I've only been on rough seas once. It was years ago, some 25-plus years, when I ventured out to the Skellig Islands off the County Kerry coast of Ireland. We had been warned, I and the other tourists, by the rather foul-mouthed captain that we would have only 30 minutes on the island where there are so many ancient ruins of monastic settlements that still survive. And by the tone of his voice, I knew he meant business, and I was not going to push my luck that day and end up there overnight because his boat was headed home: with or without us. Accompanying me that day was Fr. David Sizemore, who was then a seminarian. As always, he pushed his luck a bit and made it back with just seconds to go. That'll teach him, I thought, but it didn't. All the way back, the winds blew fiercely, and the waves washed over us as we rocked back and forth in the rear of that boat--some twenty of us. So I think I know how Peter and the apostles felt out there on the sea that day.
     A boat has long been the symbol of the Church in the world. Our own building here at St. Edward's reflects that image of the church, as we can look up to the ceiling and see the outlines of a boat's interior. And that design reminds us that Jesus--the Jesus of our Gospel--is in our boat too, because here too, Jesus comes to our boat--our church--that we might be indeed saved from the rocky seas of the COVID pandemic. In every storm that threatens our lifeboat, Jesus comes to call us to faith, to catch, as he did St. Peter before us. When we think we're drowning, to accompany us back to safety and bring calm to all the troubled seas of our lives.
     On my desk at home, I have before me a card that was sent to me when my brother Mark died with an expression of sympathy, and it also depicts those Skellig Islands surrounded by a stormy sea and wind-blown seabirds. But elsewhere in my rectory, I have those same islands captured on a beautiful sunny day. What a contrast. It reminds me, and I hope you too, that be the weather in our boats fair or foul, Jesus says to all of us--once again--he says, "Come," as we say to the Lord, "Lord, save us."
     And so, to all of you I say: with Jesus in the boat with us, there will be--whether we believe it or not right now--there will be more smooth sailing ahead.