My family used to spend a week every summer at either Brigantine or Sea Isle City on the Jersey Shore when I was growing up. One summer my father took me out into the deep, or so it seemed to me at the time. I was maybe 7 years old or so, scrawny and didn’t know how to swim. My father was a good athlete with muscular arms developed from sculling for LaSalle during his college years and his time in the Navy during WWII. He loved the water, while I liked staying on the shoreline. He took me out into the deep, I held onto him as if my life depended on it. I trusted him but it didn’t make me any less afraid at the moment.
The fact was that once he got me to relax, he taught me about how to float, how to sink and push off bottom, how to swim, how to body surf including how to pick the perfect wave (still more art than science) and in general how to enjoy the ocean, that deep I was initially afraid of. That all started with learning to let go of my lifeline, my connection to the shore, the security of my father’s arms.
There are three stages of our spiritual life; childhood (purgative), adolescence (illuminative) and adulthood (unitive). The promptings of the Holy Spirit should drive us toward the unitive stage. A friend of mine, Peter Stur, uses an analogy of a beach, the shallow water, and the deep to describe those stages of our spiritual life.
The beach represents the secular life we were born into. We are comfortable there, it’s safe there. We’ve built our sandcastles there too (our work, our businesses, our friends and family). Spiritually this is the purgative stage wholly supported by the secular world we know. We have built our own kingdom on the sandy beach.
The shallows that we can wade into and body surf in represent us starting to know, beginning to love and serve God. It’s the illuminative stage. We are starting to become open to hearing His call. In life it’s shown when we participate in prayer groups or other faith-related affinity groups like Knights of Columbus, we attend Mass, we volunteer, we perform corporal works of mercy. We go out to the shallows periodically, but we always come back to the beach to our home, to what we were born into.
Then, we have the deep. The deep represents the deeper development of our interior life. What is our interior life? Initially, it’s that conversation we have with ourselves when we are alone. We talk about whatever we are preoccupied with and whatever we are preoccupied with is typically our god back on the beach. Going into the deep spiritually means eventually learning to exchange our thoughts about our to-do list for the day or other “things” we are pre-occupied with, with asking God instead “ Lord, here I am what do you want me to do?” When we work on and deepen our interior life, we start to discover God’s constant presence in our lives, His love, the true peace that only He can bring to us. We discover who we really are and our ultimate calling and purpose. God will also start to point to you elements of your life that you need to trim from it and the parts you need to work on and elevate as well.
It’s really no wonder spiritually going into the deep is scary. We often avoid the deep, because we are afraid of what God will ask of us when we really, really listen. Most of us would rather occasionally play in the shallows or stay back on shore, building more and larger sandcastles.
Contemplate this: Luke 5:4 “..he said to Simon, “Put out into the deep and let down your nets for a catch.” Peter was sitting on the shore cleaning his nets happily living in the purgative stage when Christ invited him off the shoreline and into the deep. He needed to spiritually go there in order to fulfill the mission given to him by God.
P.S. Happy birthday dad! (July 4th). Thanks for helping me push my comfort zone by taking me into the deep so many years ago. Thank you for being my biggest Attollo fan and supporter.
Love you, Paul
