Our Lord is a calming and peacemaking influence in our lives, and he wants us to live in joy and in peace which his presence brings.  Right after the multiplication of loaves and fishes, which the Church recalled last Sunday, Christ goes off for a while to pray, and his disciples go out on a boat.  The disciples had just seen Christ work the incredible miracle of feeding 5000 people with just a few scraps of food: despite that, they still don’t trust that God is watching out for them.  And so they panic.  How often we are tempted to react in the same way in the face of our own struggles: even though we’ve had experiences of God’s love in our lives, we too are tempted to forget about God, to panic, to give in to the chaos that’s around us.  But this image and this story have something very powerful to say to us.  Our life can be filled with chaos and disorder.  The last 5 months are certainly proof of that.  Sometimes we feel overwhelmed by it all, and we might not see how God is at work.  This story tells us though, that God can and does help us, although we often don’t recognize his presence at first.  The disciples didn’t see Christ for who he was when he walked toward them on the water.  They thought they were seeing a ghost.  Peter had to make Jesus prove that he was who he said he was.  We should always remember that just as Christ calms the storm for the disciples, we will also get through the chaos we face in this life; but we have to start to recognize God walking toward us amid the chaos. 

The image of the boat is a beautiful symbol of our journey through life: we travel across seas that are often choppy, but we take refuge in the great vessel of Christ’s loving embrace which shelters us and provides us the safety and nourishment we need to make it safely through our journey.  In our own lives, we should also remember Peter.  Despite failing, despite doubting, he did walk on the water.  He did overcome and even thrive amid the chaos which threatened his very life.  With God’s help we too can walk over the chaos, but we have to trust.  We can’t become distracted by the storm.  Peter had a lot of faith, and he gave up the security of the boat because of his confidence in Christ.  He began to walk on the water: these were moments of great trust and love.  But then Peter stopped looking at Jesus and began to notice all the difficulties around him.  Seeing that the wind was very strong, his fear returned.  He forgot for just a moment that there was a strength holding him up on the water, a strength holding him in safety above the chaos.  That this strength did not depend upon the circumstances around him, but on the will of the Lord who rules all heaven and earth, life and death, nature, all things.  Peter began to sink, but not because of the waves.  He began to sink because his confidence in the one who can do all things, began to waver.  But, he cried out to the Lord: Lord, save me!  Christ immediately extends his hand and lifts him out of his fear, out of his danger. 

In our own moments of weakness or fatigue, when we see ourselves sinking, when we pay more attention to the storms than to the good things in our lives, at those times we should look to Jesus’ firm but gentle hand to steady us.  In our prayer we can cry out to him, “Lord, save me.”  We can keep our eyes focused on the Lord who invites us, as he invited St. Peter.  To stay afloat Peter only needed to hold on to the strong but gentle hand of the Lord, the strong but gentle hand of his friend and his God.  St. Peter, the disciple, had to contribute his share: his share was to show up, to reach to Christ and to cling to him; his share was the goodwill and openness that God asks of all of us.  Even though we all experience storms: some we share together, some are unique to ourselves, the means of clinging to Christ are the same for all of us, in every time and place: to increase, intensify, and deepen our prayer; to ask God to heal us of those things which separate us from him by making a sincere and complete confession regularly; to run away from those dangerous situations in our lives which threaten to separate us from God.  Above all, we should trust in the Lord and see his desire to heal us, so that when we cry out to him amid our trials, “Lord, save me!” we will be able to spot him walking toward us on the water, spot him powerfully but quietly at work in our lives.