Sunday 2/7/16

In the Gospel today, Luke recounts Christ's miracle of the fishing boat where countless fish are retrieved after a day a failed fishing by several fishermen. The fishermen are so impressed they give up their work and follow Christ. Mark emphasizes the call, not the miracle, but their is something wonderful about Christ's interfering with the mundane. Fishing, no raising from the dead or sight to the blind here. There is an element of life itself as miraculous. And people. People, after all, are the eventual mediators of Christ's New Testament.
In Seamus Heaney’s long, meditative poem Lightenings, there is a section (number VIII) which relates a strange occurrence at the Irish monastery of Clonmacnoise. The monastery, founded in 544 by Saint Ciaran,  fell into decline during the twelfth century. It was one of the greatest in medieval Ireland, visited by scholars from far abroad because of its reputation for piety and the promotion of learning (the annals – which we only have a 17^th Century copy of now – mentioned by Heaney in the poem recorded Ireland’s history from its earliest times right up to 1408).

The annals say: when the monks of Clonmacnoise

Were all at prayer inside the oratory

A ship appeared above them in the air.

The anchor dragged along behind so deep

It hooked itself into the altar rails

And then, as the big hull rocked to a standstill,

A crewman shinned and grappled down the rope

And struggled to release it. But in vain.

“This man can’t bear our life here and will drown,”

The abbot said, “unless we help him.” So

They did, the freed ship sailed, and the man climbed

back

Out of the marvellous as he had known it.