Not too long ago, my eleven-year-old grandson Oliver insisted on using a decrepit old fishing lure he’d just found near our fishing spot on the Central Coast. We’d been fishing for over an hour or so but with no luck. It was time to go. I finally gave in and said, ‘OK, let’s try that old lure and then go!’
Within a couple of minutes, he was winding in the line, ‘I’ve got a fish!’ And he did – it was the biggest Flathead I have ever seen!
Others gathered as we netted the fish. Then a very seasoned (and not just from sun and salt) fisherman came to us, ‘What a great catch, ya know, ya could keep that fish it’s a beauty. But,’ he continued, talking to Oliver,’ it’s also a big female and she’ll be carrying eggs. So, you can choose to take it or put it back and she’ll produce more to catch later.’
Oliver looked at me, back at the fish, at the water and decided to put it back. It sat there a while and after two or three minutes, swam off. While he did not stop talking and laughing about this catch, he kept saying how he felt good about his decision.
If our COVID experience is teaching us anything it is that our self-denying decisions are helping others, helping community, nations and the whole ecology of life. As Irish poet Brother Richard* reflects: All over the world people are looking at their neighbours in a new way All over the world people are waking up to a new reality To how big we really are. To how little control we really have. To what really matters.
Daily choices in the light of what really matters. And at the heart of it we are finding a new sense of self, of who we are or want to be. As Brother Richard continues:
Yes there is even death. But there can always be a rebirth of love. Wake to the choices you make as to how to live now.
While we still celebrate Easter season, Wednesday’s Gospel readings anchor my reflections. The reading is John 3.16-21. We’ve read this a couple of times just prior to Holy Week. Well known among us that it reads: ‘God so loved the cosmos …For God sent the Son into the cosmos …the light has come into the cosmos’ (David Bentley Hart literal translation of the Greek). This is the resurrection perspective into which we now live and love.
Coming out of bush fires, hopefully bringing COVID to heal in Australia, there are many who still need support - nations and people without the wherewithal to fight pandemics, poverty, war.
We can choose to get behind those who work for an equitable society, or we can choose to hold onto the bounty we caught, bounty actually gifted to us. Will we choose the light, or to ‘love the darkness rather than the light’ (v.19).
On Saturday ANZAC Day is upon us. We remember, lest we forget the horrors of human war and injustice. And rightly so.
But can we broaden our remembrance, after ANZAC Day and choose to be people who continue ‘looking at their neighbours in a new way.’ *Shared by Julia Baird, The Sydney Morning Herald