Reach out!

The mind of a dog, at any given time, is only seconds away from chaos. From the silliest bison friche to the scariest rotweiller, from the ugliest mutt to the cutest shiba inu,  the dividing line between well-behaved man’s best friend and a barking yapping snapping dribbling biting maniac is   but cigarette-paper thin.

Miso, a small Shiba inu you may have met, does a passable if grudging imitation of obedient charm, the sort of canine attribute that must have first encouraged proto-humans to give those early wolf-like creatures a few left overs and let them closer to the fire. Most of the time he’s impressibly chilled. This illusion of animal nobility is sadly fragile enough to be broken by such apparently random phenomena as a ringing doorbell, a butterfly gliding past the window or a hedgehog rambling across the garden. Any are, apparently, sufficient to trigger a barking yapping snapping dribbling mad half hour and turn cute pooch into a temporarily uncontrollable nutter. And let’s not mention the treats tin.

Humans, happily, do not go in for the barking and dribbling bit— I’m sure the neighbours are relieved (the Rector’s coming: quick! hide the hedgehog)— but there are certain states of mind that we can slip into as quickly as a dog into derangement, and one of these is panic. If the dog is only ever seconds away from bedlam, so humans are rarely more than a hairs breadth away from hysterical anxiety.  All it takes is an unfamiliar situation, a situation which we can misread or most effective of all, someone else panicking, and like the flick of a light switch calm is gone.

Though we will react with dog-like obedience to the sound of a commanding voice even in the most dire and testing of situations, we are otherwise prone to let our anxieties muscle out common sense: I mean, if something awful can happen then it will won’t it? Actually, probably not, but try telling someone in the throws of an anxiety frenzy that.

Just to compound matters, we live in an age of anxieties. When I was at school, at least one of my classmates specialised in eating anything from worms and soil to privet leaves- known to all of course to be a lethal poison though not apparently to Philip Arbuckle (not of course his real name). His playground piece de resistance however, was the consumption of anything that had passed successfully through the digestive tract of a dog. I’m sparing your stomachs with fancy words, but you know what I mean. Gross I know. This was Leeds in the 1970s: entertainment was hard to come by.  When, as is inevitable, it was discovered, this extravagantly omnivorous behaviour earned young Master Arbuckle a telling off and an injunction not to do it again. As far as I know he didn’t and is a reformed character now no doubt obsessively downing a bland diet of boil in the bag cod and instant mash. Were a child discovered investigating this eccentric diet in 2026 however, everyone would panic: the parents in case little Philip developed toxicoplasmosis, the teachers in case they were sued for negligence, other parents in case their offspring got any culinary ideas, children ever absorbent of the moods of adults: all caught up in the general anxiety. 

I’m not suggesting for one moment that the Arbuckle answer to the Atkins diet is a good thing and please do not imagine that I am indulging here in that favourite English occupation of ‘everything was much better when I were a lad’. Panics were smaller-scale  back then: you needed to do a little more than look at a peanut to send your parents into a panic: but panic happened nonetheless. Perhaps it is a necessary species survival trait. It was clearly quite useful for our ancestors if presented with a large cat that doesn’t want a saucer of milk but wants to eat you, not to smile indulgently and continue napping but to become a headless chicken with a difference- the difference being a direction. Whatever the origins, the tendency to panic certainly has a long pedigree.

Let us leave the eccentrics of old England and travel east some two thousand miles, let us skitter back some two thousand years and drifting into view, we see a small boat out on a large lake. The wind has risen, the waves are swelling ominously, those in the boat have been driven from the shore; all they can realistically do is keep the boat afloat and wait for the weather to improve. A nerve-wracking time.  And then just to make those superstitious sailors really edgy, just to shave an extra micron off that hair’s breadth, somebody is out there walking towards them. On the water. Not even getting his feet wet. This can only mean one thing: a ghost come to take them to their watery resting place. 

Well they got that one wrong. Against all logic, even that daft anti-logic that imagines ghosts,  against all sense, the phantasmic visitor turns out to be Jesus. And so ebullient, so emboldened by this is Peter that he decides to go walkies himself. Peter, out of the boat, like the Son of God, walking on the water. Brilliant! What a buzz! …And then Peter notices just how strongly that wind is blowing, he remembers that he is human,  that according to the laws of physics, laws that even uneducated Galilean fishermen know instinctively, according to those laws humans don’t stay standing on water for long, and Peter panics. Surprise, surprise, in kicks physics and Peter starts to sink. Happily, help is, quite literally, at hand; Jesus reaches out and saves his fretting friend. 

Nothing in our gospels is ever without several layers of meaning, the scriptures are written on onion skins. Here at one level is a story of power and miracle, an uncharacteristic lapse into cosmic showing-off.  At another level, here is a tale of hubris, as proud Peter Water-Walker suddenly turns into petrified Peter Sink-like-a-Rock. And here is a story about faith and distraction and the return to faith.

How like Peter we are! How ready to jump out of the boat when our Lord says ‘Come!’ ; and how quick to panic. How many of us meet Jesus, feel that great surge of excitement, feel the  ‘I can tiptoe on the waves’ spiritual adrenaline surging through our veins, and then notice that, despite our faith, the winds are still blowing, in fact they are blowing stronger. How quickly we can panic when we realise that that faith that has been giving us the boost– that most of what we believe in fact– is as improbable as somebody walking on water.

Let us not  dwell overlong on that wobbly panicky I’m-not-floating part of the story. Do that and we may well miss one of the most interesting  and telling parts of this tale. The point of this gospel vignette is not so much that Peter was distracted and started to sink, essential to the story as that may be and gripping drama to boot. What matters most to the experience of faith, to us here today, is that when it all went very quickly pear-shaped Peter called out to Jesus. 

No Christian since that Galilee night long, long ago has done the walking on the water bit, or virtually no Christian, as there’s possibly some show-off saint who made the wet-sole sandals his speciality. We will not walk on water, but we will, we can say with granite certainty, sink Far more important to us then, than the deed of might power that allowed Peter to walk on water, is that Jesus  reached out to save him when he failed. 

When disaster strikes, when the ground under our feet suddenly takes on a treacherously liquid consistency, when that feeling of certainty of faith fails, the reflex is to panic, to turn our backs on the one who we thought had called us out onto the lake, to think that we were daft ever to listen and believe we could do the improbable, to lurch for the shore and any likely looking straw. 

That’s because we’re panicking.

In any crisis of faith— and they come to us all— what we rarely do is the one guaranteed to be effective: call out to Jesus. 

We should, we must.

Because those nail-holed hands are always there, ready to catch us when we fall, ready to pull us back up when we fail, steadying us when our faith falters. Strong hands of power,  my Lord and my God, yes; but yet more certainly  the sure, loving hands of the God who calls us his friends.