Night Visions

The Distance between offering Eucharist and Becoming Eucharist

(This is one of the stories, rather a diary note that I wrote a few years back. This treats subjects that I have not written in the blog any time before)
It was when I spent sometime with a friend in Allepy beach that the following meditation happened. His house name is interestingly “At the foot of the Cross, Kurisum moottil. While we were sharing our experiences of the priesthood he asked me to find the distance between offering the Eucharist and becoming the Eucharist. You are beginning to become a Eucharist he would comment. Then he left me there alone. I was carelessly watching the boats that were returning after the day’s fishing. Then I spotted the mast of a larger ship in the backdrop of the setting Sun. I was taken slowly to a story I read from Tolstoy or Wilbur Smith? I do not know. I do not know when I became a part of this story.

The boy was scaling up the mast of the tossing ship. The fallen national flag has to be hoisted again. The tempestuous sea below was determined to break up the ship. Yet there was just one fire inside - somehow reach the top of the mast. There were quite a few on the deck. Some discouraged, some prayed, some encouraged, and some prepared to throw the next casualty of the storm overboard. But he never heard any of the commotion. His hands and legs had been bruised by the whipping loose ends of the ropes. The sails that rebelled to hold the whirl wind which refused to propose its direction also slapped on his face and bare back. Reach he did braving the salty water that lashed on him even at forty feet above the deck. With a conqueror’s pride he looked down to the deck. His vision blurred. In the tempestuous sea below, the ship was being tossed like a ball. His foot holds slipped beneath the unsteady footing. He couldn’t come down. His father shouted above the roaring winds, my son look above your head. “Look at the sky that is calm now.” The boy looked above and steadied his steps to reach the excruciating climb down.

I felt a fear that was similar to the boy on the top of the mast. My foot holds were slipping too. A voice inside told me to look out to the sky, was it the same man who told his would be disciples to cast the net into the deep?
He took me to the bottom of the ship to the depth of the hull.
I recognized, I had hit the bottom. There were no more steps down ward.
He left me there. Alone.

I wasn’t used to such silence for a long time. I was amidst people who considered the highest pitched sound would be heeded best. There everything was calm. The silence was deafening. I screamed, fretted and fumed against this unjust man who dragged me like a fisher man his catch in the net. I felt the pangs of the fish that was clinging to the last drop of water in the gills to hold on to the dear life. I silenced the rebellion within even as I rebelled the silence around, reconciling to my fate that, I thought was a discarded blue print of some one better He had planned to create.

I was oscillating between spiritual consciousness and delirium. A spiritual schizophrenia. The nightmares that haunted me slowly gave way to clarity of vision. The man who left me alone came back once again. He said “where you are, is the result of a choice that you made.” He left me there asking a final question, “Are you not free?” The question took me back to a procession of events that went through my life and the significance of the choices I made. At the end of the thought I was back on the deck looking at the calm sea in the back drop of the bloodshot Sun, slowly rising in the eastern Horizon.

My friend tapped on my shoulders and asked me do you now understand the meaning of being “at the foot of the cross.” Some are by birth, others choose to be there. I am glad that I chose to be tied at the foot of the cross.