I once experienced the strangest but most beautiful sensation of being rolled out to sea one dusky, Eastertide evening. The Cantor’s voice was singing the Alleluia in wave after wave of Gregorian gentleness, rising and falling like tides. I felt them lap up against my soul and slowly, quietly lift it off the mundane worries of this world and slip it out to a wide open peace. I was sailing with Christ.
The Risen Christ. I found myself rolling gently up and down in wave after wave of His mercy. I let it take me far out to the very edge where I suddenly remembered, as if returning to my childhood, noble Reepicheep’s eager joy in sailing into the land of newly Risen Light. The whole Mass rose and fell like waves rocking the barque of the Church in which I knelt. Love permeated everything.
I tasted the air of Heaven. I was sailing, but I was not alone. This was the tranquil sea of Easter’s first forty days. Those forty days when twelve bemused apostles roamed the world with a glorified Jesus. What did He look like? Was He shining?
Did they stare at the healed, but evident, holes in his hands as He did simple tasks like cook their fish, start a fire, tie a rope to a dock? Did they wonder and weep quietly into their hands for their part in the inflicting of those wounds? Did He take them out on the lake, just them?
Did they simply sail for the sheer joy of it — not fishing, not journeying, not working in any way. Just sailing and rolling on His mercy and basking in His gaze. That gaze they thought would never be again, so lost was it in the darkness of those three frightening