6th Sunday in Ordinary Time – Word of God Sunday and Lunar New Year – 6 February 2022
Every now and then you come across someone expressing an idea that says it exactly the way you see it yourself. This happened to me reading an interview with a young Australian champion surfer. When asked whether he was a spiritual person, he replied, “I don’t particularly like the word spiritual. I prefer to see myself as a spirited person. I try to live my life with awareness and deliberation.”
Given that I had written about spirituality in a similar way I thought that this was a good description of what it really means to lead a spiritual life. Being authentically spiritual is to be attentive to life – especially to the awakening moments that occur in our life. These are the moments which, by their nature, draw us into a new way of seeing life. The awakening moments are experienced positively or negatively. They come at times of great joy, such as when we fall in love or delight in the growth of our children, at the time of a personal success or achievement, or they come at a time of great sadness, such as at the loss of someone we love, a profound failure, or a difficult prognosis in our health.
Our culture also gives us such moments of awakening. There are what one writer would call ‘trigger moments’ in each culture that are distinct to itself. A Vietnamese person is awakened through their culture in a different way, for example, than a person from Uganda. Our culture makes us sensitive to particular moments or experiences or patterns of relationship that awaken us to something more.
Undoubtedly, lunar new year is one of those moments. It is celebrated in different ways in the various cultures of Asia. But for all who do celebrate it, lunar new year is an time of fresh beginnings, new opportunity informed by the zodiac sign of the year – this year being the sign of the tiger. The tiger tends to be powerful, rebellious, dynamic, adventurous, fiery, impulsive, and unpredictable. It seems that we are in for quite the year ahead! Yet are these not the very qualities that we require as we continue to negotiate the pandemic and as, hopefully, we forge new ways from out of the pandemic?
In each awakening moment there is an invitation.
When we are able to truly hear the invitation that is given to us in the awakening moments of our life then we do as Peter does in today’s gospel: we are casting our nets into the deep. We are casting our nets into the unexpected places, discovering there far more than we ever imagined. Our discipleship of Jesus calls us to live in this way – not simply to put the best spin on things or fill our life with positive thinking – but carefully and deliberately to listen to the invitation that constantly awaits us in all that happens in our life, especially the exhilarating highs and the devastating lows. Discipleship of Jesus leads us into a pattern of life in which we constantly “caste into the deep.” Our discipleship gives us the courage to do this even when it might seem pointless.
As we do so, we place ourselves therefore before a Word that come to us from outside of ourselves. It is this Word that calls us beyond ourself and to discover ourselves in relationship to it. It is by that relationship that we might truly understand ourselves, that acts as the corrective to the unreliability of our feelings which are too fluid, too malleable to be the source of what is true. Jesus is the Word that comes to us, beyond our own closed circles, to call us into a whole new perspective about ourselves, about life, about God. The Word comes to us to slice through our own complacency. It calls us to conversion, if we can look beyond what we feel, to how we might act.
This is why we come to Mass each week. We come to hear a Word. It is not a Word that is simply an extension of our own feelings, of the projections of either our own pessimism or optimism. It comes to us from outside of ourselves. We have to find ourselves in front of its confronting strangeness and allow it to call us beyond ourselves so that we might discover ourselves in all together new way. The Spirit is in each of our cultures, working through our culture, to stir us from our complacency, to goad us into possiblity. That same Spirit is especially present in the Word proclaimed to us. As we hear that Word in the language of each of our cultures may we recognise the possibility that is being offered us. However, may we also act. This year let us put out into the deep in the unique and personal
