Today's gospel offers a genuine challenge to all of us. Jesus' words to the disciples made clear that being a follower would not be easy. Many times following him would mean going against the current.
I recall often a most wonderful small book, First You Have To Row A Little Boat. Author Richard Bode is a great lover of sailing out off of Long Island, NY, as I remember some of the details of the book. He uses sailing as a metaphor to teach his children and his readers about the tides of life.
One review of the writing notes that Bode is attempting to teach lead his children to understand the importance of mastering the simple things of life before ever setting sail into the more complicated aspects of life (Kirkus Reviews).
The book ultimately recounts some of his own times, good and bad, alone out on the waters. He is teaching how strong one must be; how aware of one's own strengths and self-knowledge one must be while sailing. But at the very outset he teaches that to be a good sailor, requires the advice of another person -- in this case an older gentleman who operates a marina.
As a young boy he so wanted to sail. He would go down to a marina when he visited his grandparents. There he encountered a great teacher. Young Bode wanted to buy a sailboat. Like any 12 year old, he thought he had a lot of money! The wise marina owner told him he had to learn to row a boat first. Once in a little dingy, Bode was instructed to row back and forth across the inlet that came into the marina. "Piece of cake" he thought. In very short time he learned how much he didn't know!
The words Jesus is using with his disciples in today's gospel is so reminiscent of the Bode experience. To navigate through the waters of life's journey is no simple task. In sailing it's the use of winds and currents at the same time without any sense of gravity beneath the boat. What Jesus is teaching is that we have to learn to manage the world on which we sail. We have to learn those forces that can lead our boat to rough seas or into a pea-soup fog. We have to be more powerful than the ways of the world.
Jesus has chosen you to be in the world but not of the world. He has called you to know what it means to sail. He is teaching us that first things come first -- learning the spiritual life.
