Casting our nets

The message at the weekly Pacific School of Religion’s worship service yesterday was based on the Biblical story of Jesus on the banks of Gennesaret. There he asked fisherman Simon to cast his boat off of the shores and preached to the people gathered there. He then asked Simon to cast his nets deep and wide. It was morning and Simon and his fellow fishermen had been fishing all night and had caught nothing. Certain that it would be useless, Simon agreed. Instead of coming up with nothing, the nets were filled to bursting with fish to harvest.

The lectionary encouraged us to take that story as impetuous to move beyond our comfort zone, to cast our nets deep and wide, in an effort to fulfill the calling of our true selves. She encouraged us to seek beyond what we know and push ourselves beyond what is comfortable.

Letting go of what is comfortable in search of greater truth is a basis of faith. It asks that we trust our instincts, our talents and the fundamental beliefs that we hold about our self-competence and worth. It presumes that we have great things to offer the world.

And while some of us might be tentative about trusting our fundamental competence, in today’s world there is nothing else more important to do.

Howard Thurman, a minister whose guidance provided Martin Luther King Jr. with his faith in non-violence, urges us all to be responsible for ourselves. That, he says, was the original tradeoff for knowledge. Casting our nets deep and wide is the actualization of that responsibility to ourselves and to our troubled world, which needs us to be as authentic as possible.