The Shore Where It All Began

Sometimes the Risen Christ leads us back to the beginning, not to recover the life we had, but to discover the life that has been quietly forming within us.

“It is the Lord.”

— John 21:7

There is something mysterious about the return to Galilee.

After everything that has happened—the calling, the years of following, the miracles and arguments, the supper, Gethsemane, the Cross, the bewildering news of the empty tomb—the disciples find themselves again beside the sea.

Galilee.

The place where so much of it began.

There were the boats. The nets. The smell of the water. The familiar darkness before dawn. Peter says simply, “I am going fishing,” and the others go with him.

One might have expected the Resurrection to carry them immediately into something altogether new: Jerusalem, proclamation, mission, the ends of the earth. Instead, for a little while, they are brought back into the landscape of their beginning.

But perhaps this is one of the deepest mercies of God.

Sometimes before He sends us forward, He brings us back.

Not backward.

Back.

There is a difference.

We can spend much of our lives imagining that the spiritual path must always consist in movement away from what has been: greater clarity, greater accomplishment, greater certainty, some increasingly visible unfolding of vocation. Yet the Fathers understood that the deepest movement of the soul is often a return—a return to the heart, to compunction, to poverty of spirit, to the place where we first knew that we needed God.

The desert itself was such a return.

The monk went into the wilderness not because he had discovered something more complicated than the Gospel, but because he wanted to become simple enough to hear it again.

Again and again the elders lead us there: descend into the heart. Remain in your cell. Remember God. Call upon the Name. Become poor. Begin again.

The strange thing is that when we return after suffering, we discover that the beginning is no longer what it was.

The disciples return to the sea, but they are not the men who once left their nets there.

They have seen too much.

They have failed too deeply.

They have loved and betrayed, fled and wept. Their hopes have been shattered in ways they could never have imagined. They have stood before the incomprehensible silence of Holy Saturday. And now they have encountered something still more incomprehensible:

Christ is risen.

So they return to the old waters carrying within themselves a life they do not yet understand.

Perhaps there are moments when God does this with us.

After years of searching, building, speaking, laboring, discerning, and trying to understand what our lives are supposed to become, we find ourselves strangely returned to something very small.

A room.

A prayer rope.

A familiar Gospel.

The care of another person.

The silence before dawn.

The Name of Jesus whispered because there is nothing else left to say.

Things that might once have seemed merely preliminary suddenly reveal themselves as the heart of everything.

We thought we had gone far away.

And God has brought us home.

Yet even there, the disciples experience failure.

They fish through the night and catch nothing.

This too belongs to the mystery.

They know these waters. They know this work. Their hands remember how to cast the nets. Yet experience, effort, and familiarity produce nothing.

The night remains empty.

Perhaps there are emptinesses that God permits because only an empty net can teach us to recognize the voice from the shore.

“Have you caught anything, friends?”

“No.”

What a beautiful answer.

No explanation.

No defense.

No attempt to make the night appear fruitful.

No.

The whole spiritual life may eventually become simple enough for that word.

Lord, I have nothing.

Nothing to show You.

Nothing with which to justify myself.

Nothing that can force the future into being.

Nothing but this poverty.

And from the shore comes the voice.

Cast the net again.

The fathers of the desert knew this poverty intimately. So did St. Silouan, St. Sophrony, and the elders who learned that grace does not finally rest upon our ability to construct a successful spiritual life. There comes a moment when the soul must cease trying to possess even its own path to God.

The hands open.

The nets are empty.

And somewhere in the growing light, Someone is standing on the shore.

At first they do not recognize Him.

This may be one of the tenderest details in the Gospel.

Christ is already there.

Before recognition, He is there.

Before certainty, He is there.

Before they understand what their lives are becoming, He is there.

The dawn itself seems to disclose Him slowly.

And then the beloved disciple sees.

“It is the Lord.”

Everything gathers into those words.

Not: Now I understand.

Not: Now I know what will happen.

Not: Now the path is clear.

Only:

It is the Lord.

Perhaps this is the maturity toward which all desire is leading us.

There are seasons when we desperately want God to explain our lives. We want to know which road is His will, which identity must be preserved, which work must continue, which door will open, what must be relinquished and what will remain.

But there may come another kind of knowing.

Not the knowledge of the road.

The knowledge of the One standing upon it.

It is the Lord.

That is enough for Peter.

He does not wait for the boat.

He throws himself into the sea.

Love has recognized Love.

And when they reach the shore, they discover something astonishing.

Christ has already prepared breakfast.

There is a charcoal fire.

Fish.

Bread.

They have spent the night trying to find what He already possesses.

“Come and have breakfast.”

What tenderness there is in the risen Christ.

He does not greet these exhausted men with a program.

He feeds them.

Before Peter is questioned about love, before he is told anything about the road that lies ahead, before mission and martyrdom, there is bread beside a fire.

Perhaps we underestimate how often God works this way.

We think He must first resolve the great questions of our lives.

Instead He gives us the grace for this morning.

He gives bread.

He gives silence.

He gives another human being to love.

He gives the Jesus Prayer.

He gives enough light to recognize Him standing a little distance away.

And perhaps that is resurrection too.

Not the sudden resolution of everything, but the discovery that Christ has gone ahead of us into the very place where we thought we had merely returned.

Galilee is no longer simply Galilee.

The shore of the first calling has become the shore of resurrection.

The beginning has been transfigured.

This is why returning is not necessarily regression. Sometimes God brings us back to the deepest desire He placed within us long ago, before we complicated it with our plans and fears. We return to something we once knew but could not yet understand.

The desire for God alone.

The longing for silence.

The hunger for prayer.

The strange intuition that life is ultimately very simple:

Christ is here.

Love Him.

Remain with Him.

Do what love places before you.

The rest will be given.

Perhaps Providence sometimes strips away the many languages by which we have tried to explain ourselves until we rediscover the language the heart knew at the beginning.

Presence.

Silence.

Obedience.

Love.

The Name.

We may have imagined that we were wandering far from home when, mysteriously, God was teaching us how to recognize home for the first time.

And so there may come a morning when we find ourselves again beside familiar waters.

Much has disappeared.

Some nets are empty.

Certain dreams no longer possess us.

The future remains hidden.

Yet there is a strange peace in the poverty of it.

The night is ending.

A figure stands upon the shore.

And something within the heart recognizes Him before the mind can explain anything.

It is the Lord.

Perhaps nothing more needs to be known.

For the One who called us at the beginning is the One who waits for us after everything has been lost and found again. He has not brought us back in order to imprison us in what was. He has brought us back so that, standing in the place of first desire, we might finally understand what He was calling us toward all along.

Not a role.

Not an achievement.

Not even a particular form of life considered as something possessed.

Himself.

And there, beside the waters of our beginning, the Risen One feeds us with His own hands.

Soon enough there will be another road.

There will be words spoken to Peter that he could not have borne years before: another will gird you and lead you where you do not wish to go.

But not yet.

First, breakfast.

First, the fire.

First, the silence of friends who know without needing to ask.

First, bread received from the hands of Christ.

Perhaps this is how God prepares us for the life we cannot yet see.

He returns us to the beginning.

He empties the nets.

He waits upon the shore.

He feeds us.

And only then does He say once again:

Follow Me.