What I Saw In The Holy Land, 10
Lake Galilee by any other name (and it has several, as the post title indicates) would look as blue. Although the morning started miserably with drenching rain in Cana, after lunch in Taghba (where we ate what the locals call "Peter's fish"), the sky cleared and we went to the Church of Peter's Primacy, which is really just a little chapel built over a big rock where it's thought that Christ prepared breakfast for the disciples after the Resurrection. The "Peter's primacy" refers to Christ's thrice asking Peter: "Do you love me? Feed my sheep." (Photo courtesy of Holy Land Photos.)
The sea, as I've mentioned, is quiet, and as the aforementioned is possibly my favorite passage in all of scripture, I took the opportunity to break apart from our group and simply walk along the lakeshore a little, looking at nothing except the view, and trying to envision the scene. I was really just a few feet from the steps of the chapel you see at left here, looking off into the distance.
Hmm. Will I tell you a cool experience I had in prayer? Telling risks cheapening; then again, I don't think you take a trip like this just to keep it to yourself. What to do? Well, I'll give it a shot. There is always "delete" if I think better of it.
Anyway, I was right on the beach to the left in the above picture. I started to pray over and over again, "Lord, let me see you. I need to see you." I was not asking for any mystical experience, understand, but just some help for my imagination so that I could preserve the scene in memory because the shore was lovely and I wanted to take it with me so to speak. Well, as can happen when you're contemplating a Gospel scene, I found myself repeating that phrase, "Lord, let me see you" periodically, almost as a mantra. Again, I meant this simply, not literally.
After a few minutes we got the high sign to head back for the bus and I turned and walked a few steps until I was at the entrance to the chapel, where another group was celebrating mass (I don't recall having noticed them when we arrived). And they were precisely at the moment of the major elevation during the consecration. So here I'd been praying let me see you, and. . . .there he was. So I knelt, and I could sense Jesus telling me: Here I am. Peter went fishing and found me here and you are here because your heart is fishing. Just as I was for Peter, so for you. And don't forget this moment when you are home. It is always me-- just as real there as here. Find me in the Eucharist.
Some things you learn are not new, but they penetrate your heart more deeply all of a sudden, and the grace for me of that moment was to fall in love all over again with the beauty of the Eucharist, which is what brought me into the Catholic Church in the first place. How beautiful to encounter a Christ who is not just long ago or some day to come, but right now: faithful to his promise to be with us always, even to the end of time.
