Leaving home happens in physical and metaphysical ways. The leaf turns loose of the branch. The newborn bird flies her nest. The young Rabbi does the same.* Predictable familiarity gives way to the wild call to step out into the world.
Having just left my teenage years, I was given the chance to study in London. I had barely been out of the south, much less the country. With
anxious exhilaration, I climbed out onto the roof of my flat near Paddington Station to look out over this new world. So great and vast this landscape, with those ancient dark buildings and spires reaching up silently into the gray sky. The fall winds were blowing earlier than I had ever felt. I was so far from home. A strange alchemy of thrilled and scared, like being out at
sea with no shore in sight.
I wrote my mom a letter that night, detailing what I had seen and felt. She responded with the sweet familiar stories of home: what the cat was doing, what she had done that day, who had just come by the house, a story about my dad, and so on. I swear I could smell what she was cooking. My heart hurt. Written in her beautiful cursive, words braided like an unbroken chain, I came undone as I read the last line: “Honey, I’m sorry that you’re scared. But that’s the price you pay for freedom! ENJOY!” I must’ve read that letter a hundred times. A new courage rose up in me then that travels with me still.
With an irresistible resonance in his voice, and a light within to eclipse the darkness, Jesus called out to the fishermen, busy mending their nets, “Come follow me.” And they did. It must’ve been a deep and abiding trust that bloomed within them, like hearing the soothing sound of a sweet parent, or an ocean roaring from far away. Profound and vast. The work of the gospel always comes with a familiar and yet unfathomable intimacy. In their hands, these newly mended nets they’ve forever casted, hold now a promise to catch the whole world.
The Myth of Indra’s Net, in Buddhist cosmology, tells the story of how Indra spread a great net across the heavens, hung in such a manner that it stretches out infinitely in all directions, with a single glittering jewel in each “eye” of the net. And since the net itself is infinite in dimension, the jewels are infinite in number. Like stars, they are a beautiful sight to behold. If one jewel is closely looked at, we discover in its’ polished surface the reflection of all the other jewels in the net. When you tug one strand of the net, all the jewels shake and shine. The great, wild call is to have the courage to see how we’re all caught and woven together, and to tell the story of how it’s always been so.
–Jim Marsh, Jr., Bread of Life Church
