It’s been nearly two years since the pandemic started to have had an impact on our lives, on every level and in virtually every aspect of them. This fact, combined with the impression of now emerging from it all, has created a fertile ground for various surveys and studies. My perception is probably skewed by my addiction to rather old-fashioned radio and newspapers as a source of information, but it seems that most of the studies concentrate on social aspects of the pandemic. The results of those surveys range from grim through interesting to hilarious. Statistics seem to be the main tool of these studies, which is fine though this might be a bit inaccurate when applied to individual circumstances, for example, my dog and I statistically have 3 legs each. Anyway, the plethora of such studies and today’s gospel nudged me to look back on my pandemic. If you wonder what the gospel has to do with Covid, let me share with you my reading of it and subsequent reflection.
The story, though crowded at first glance, in fact, focuses on two main characters. One is an itinerant preacher, talking to a crowd on the lakeside; the other one is a fisherman, busy cleaning his nets nearby. The fisherman is tired after a long night shift in the rolling boat and frustrated because all his effort was for nothing. On top of that, we can throw in his likely worry about his family – no fish, no money. Certainly, he has no time for joining the crowd and listening to some religious nonsense; there are more important and urgent things he has to take care of. Suddenly he is approached by the preacher who wants to use his boat as a pulpit, just a few yards away from the shore. We have all been there: too polite to decline, the fisherman agrees, only to realise a couple of minutes later that he cannot continue his work because it’s near impossible to clean the nets in the confined space of the boat and because it would be rude. Stopped in his tracks, the fisherman is forced to listen to the preacher. Whatever he’s heard, that has changed him so much so that when the preacher tells him to ‘put out into deep water and pay out [his] nets for a catch’ he responds with trust: ‘we worked hard all night long and caught nothing, but if you say so, I will pay out the nets.’ The resulting catch overwhelms him, and he finally gets to understand that his life must be about something deeper (the pun is intended) than pulling fish out of the water and selling them in a local market. The preacher presents him with a much wider perspective: ‘from now on it is men you will catch.’ Like most significant changes, this is a scary prospect, so Jesus adds: ‘Do not be afraid.’
In a way that’s what the pandemic did to most of us; stopped us in our tracks and forced us to revise our lives. Such revision took different shapes and forms for different people. We had to find new ways and means of doing things, such as working and learning. Many had to familiarize themselves with that strange beast, the Internet. Even our ways of resting and relaxing had to find new forms. Some people waded into the shallow waters of relatively mindless entertainment, like binge-watching the entire Netflix library; others used the pandemic to learn new things or develop their skills. Most of us probably landed somewhere between those two extremes. But actually, I don’t want to talk about the past too much because it’s gone; we cannot do much about it except one thing: learn how to make use of the ‘here and now’ and thus forge our future. This is the only reason to look back: to learn from our own and others’ mistakes and build upon the positive things.
The pandemic was the widespread and overt iteration of various more personal and individual situations that stop us in our tracks and make us think. Such events can be part of a natural progression, like graduation or promotion; they can come upon us by surprise, sometimes pleasant, sometimes not so much. But the best way forward is to create such moments of reflection before they are forced upon us. Each one of us is called by Jesus to ‘put out into deep water‘ away from the hustle and bustle of everyday life, from the hollow existence of unproductive busyness and the terror of urgency. Paradoxically, when we ‘waste’ time on reflective, mindful prayer, reading the Bible and listening to the word of God, we can find more time for what is really important. Like Simon the fisherman who left the enormous catch behind, we can learn to see things for what they really are and take care of those that really matter. It might be challenging; it might be scary but ‘do not be afraid.’