Weathering the storm: Tony D’Souza’s Thought for the week
‘We are all in the boat with the fishermen.’
You couldn’t call it a big boat – about twenty-five feet long – but it was perfectly designed for fishing on an inland lake. It was nimble and easy to sail. But when a storm broke out without warning, it was suddenly in great danger.
The fishermen hurriedly took down the mainsail. They could see the waves mounting, pounding against the boat. Unbelievably, the man called the Nazarene had slept through it all. Even the crashing thunder and lightning hadn’t roused him. The men became desperate, and woke him saying, ‘Teacher, our boat is sinking in this storm. Don’t you care that we are all going to die?’
He looked at them and saw the terror etched on every face. He stood up, stretched out his arms and said to the sea, ‘Peace! Be still!’
At that moment, the wind stopped howling and the waves subsided. In less than a minute, the sea was flat and serene. He turned to them and said, ‘Why are you so full of fear? How can it be that you have so little faith?’
The fishermen were filled with awe, and talked among themselves saying, ‘Who is this man? Who can he be that even the wind and the sea obey him!’
This story from the Gospels is about faith and fear, and we are all in the boat with the fishermen. The great question of our time is: ‘How can we keep faith in a time when the world is in such turmoil?’
In the Bible, faith is defined as, ‘the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.’ But for George Fox it was much more than that. He proclaimed ‘that every man was enlightened by the divine light of Christ’. Moreover, he saw that ‘there was an ocean of darkness and death; but an infinite ocean of light and love, which flowed over the ocean of darkness’.
It is this inner light that allows us to live with faith, but it is nothing if we do not practice it. Fox says, ‘when we dwell in the light, there is no occasion at all for stumbling, for all things are discovered in the light’. For ‘all things to be discovered in the light’ we can employ the simple practice of taking our stand in the light and looking at our thoughts. ‘Stand still in that which is pure, after ye see yourselves; and then mercy comes in. After thou seest thy thoughts, and the temptations, do not think, but submit; and then power comes. Stand still in that which shows and discovers; and then doth strength immediately come. And stand still in the Light, and submit to it, and the other will be hushed and gone; and then content comes.’
If we stand still in the light and look at our thoughts, we find a solid foundation that is not shaken by the storm. As Edward Burrough said, ‘All that dwell in the light, their habitation is in God, and they know a hiding place in the day of storm; and those who dwell in the light, are built upon the rock, and cannot be moved.’
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