I can almost hear the stillness and the silence that hangs in the air on the shore, with the fire, the fish, and the bread. Here, mere footsteps from where they fed the five thousand with the scraps and leftovers they had on hand, the apostles share an uncountable bounty with the Risen Christ.
***
When I was a kid, we would spend at least some late summer weekend at my great-grandparents’ farm. These family reunions were strewn with slipskin grapes and endless cousins; it felt as though every year I discovered that my family was even larger, and stranger, than I knew. Grownups talked in corners about things we kids weren’t supposed to know about, and we, in turn, did the same.
Just a little south of the east-west farmtrack that divided the corn from the endless outbuildings and the cattle barn, there was a little clearing which held the thing which truly brought us all together, and united the family far more effectively than blood: the pit for the bonfire.
In retrospect, I have some questions about the year that someone threw a bunch of rotten batts of insulation into the flames, and we should probably not talk about the year where it wasn’t lit because I accidentally set a care ablaze elsewhere on the property.
That fire — the intentional fire — was the heart of our gatherings, and to me, as a kid, it far exceeded listening to my great-grandfather talk about the moral crises facing the world, or even climbing to the top of the stacked bales of hay. The first flames were a time to get to know some relative who was fascinating and so enticingly different. I remember all of us working together to figure out how to get it burning properly, and then to prepare pitchforks for skewering food by letting them heat red hot in the flames.
It’s somewhere on the other side of the evening, though, that it truly becomes an enchanted site. The sun is setting and the sky is just barely blue, the first stars begin to show themselves, and the embers glow and glow. Massive flames and occasional plumes of smoke give way to the quiet crackle of radiant heat, and the occasional shower of sparks.
There, there is a little, smoky sort of quietness that my heart longs for. There is nothing beyond that moment, and there doesn’t need to be. You exist, and you know it, without word or thought.
***
You can live a whole life filled with going to raucous bonfires and all-night parties in search of the moments of still silence and presence that just might follow in their wake. People travel to the ends of the earth in search of a peace that lingers in the air, feeling deeply connected to being itself, with only the occasional crackle, the odd spark, to distract you from the oceanic sense of calm and connection that comes on the right kind of day: around a sunset, around a sunrise.
Maybe you find that place at the far side of a backcountry hike, or a hard night at work. I’ve found it on nights where I was watching and waiting for a loved one to die. I’ve known it pressing the last few apples into cider a little after midnight. Once, a sunrise over Vancouver, being awake and unhurried at some oddly early hour.
Perhaps you have known it in the first quiet moments after the birth of a child. I’m sure it can follow a fruitless night and a bountiful morning of fishing on the Sea of Galilee. Maybe you even find that place just after the death of a parent or a friend, when there is nothing to be done.
***
Jesus calls them to breakfast, there, and they linger in each other’s presence around the charcoal, the fish, the bread. Peter just wants Jesus to know how much he loves him. Christ invites Peter to see a little farther, to look a little deeper, and to not let that be as far as his love can go.
I think of the First Letter of John, and how it challenges us to take our love a little further, a little closer, a little deeper. It’s easy to love God, who seems so far away, so untouchably perfect, unmarred by the ugliness and irritation that emanates from the people we can actually see and touch and hold. To love God, though, is to love everything, everyone. Nothing is left out from God, and there is nothing outside of Creation that we can see as clearly as the people before us.
There are so many opportunities to love God well, not by performing some duty to be charitable, nor engaging in some good work to earn the favour of an unseen parent who watches. The chance to love someone, right here and now, is a chance to take part in the loving of everything, the very force by which God moves through everything and everyone. All love wends its way to God, and we do not have to go very far in any kind of relationship to end up back with the Holy.
***
What we do here today is a chance to take part in love, and to practice this way of being which we would extend beyond the confines of the universe itself. The Eucharist is an act of love, tinged with the same offering-smoke that rose up on the shores near Tabgha, just a little south of Capernaum, on the western shores of the Sea of Galilee. This is how we love one another.
We love one another, too, in the ways we treat the stranger, in the food we share with the hungry. We love one another in how we vote, and in how we drive alongside people who are vulnerable. We love one another in how we garden, and by the fires we light, the dusks and dawns we share.
Every moment broods with this potential to become a site of real encounter with the Holy in this very place, with these very people. The whole world is an altar, and our whole existence is a bonfire, crackling and sparking beneath the noctilucent clouds of some late summer nights.
***
Here, if we will have it, Christ commissions us as Peter. If we would love God, then let that be something we can really do, and feel, and know, by what we make of our lives. Love of God is not some abstract, and neither is it absolute. To love the Holy is to blunder into the messiness of relationship, and to tend it, to feed it, and to let ourselves be tended and fed, too.
May you find some peace which nourishes you, which surprises you, and which changes you. May your heart be filled with the boundless love that God has for you, and may you be overcome with the love of God for all the world. May you listen in the still, small moments of your life for the stirrings of the one who made you, who even now is with you, and even here is alive. May the Risen Christ be known among us all.