dual personalities

But honestly, is it even Friday if I’ve been off of work for two weeks? Who is to say? Anyway, I thought I’d share this little bit from a commencement address given by Frederick Buechner at Princeton, on the 250th anniversary of the university’s founding. It feels apropos for the new year.

“‘What are you going to do now?’ was his question, and it is the question still, and it is also the question implicit in the Gospel reading for this first Sunday in June. Jesus has apparently spent the day teaching by the Sea of Galilee with the usual crowd gathered to hear him, but then evening comes and a kind of lull descends and with it the question of what they were going to do next.

Start for home maybe? Find a place to lie down and get some rest, sign off for the day, because God knows the day has been long and hard and nobody can keep going forever? But that is not what Jesus says though there can’t have been any of them readier to call it a day than he was, the star of the show. He is standing at the water’s edge with his tired fisherman friends, and what he says to them is, ‘Let us go across to the other side.’ His answer to the question of what to do next, what to do with the rest of their lives, is simply stated. What he says to them is Go.

…

Keep going, Jesus says, beacsue to keep going is to keep living and to stop going is to stop living in any way that much matters. ‘Let us go across to the other side,’ he says, though who knows how far the other side is or what awaits us when we get there, if anything awaits us at all. And go bravely because if we are the boat and the storm and the fishermen in their helplessness, we are also, we have in us also, the holy one asleep in the stern with a pillow under his head whose presence gives us hope and courage.”

A new year awaits!