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Wind and Waves

‘Be Calm’ by Sieger Köder

A monologue delivered by the wonderful Jim Allen yesterday as part of morning worship focussed around Luke 8:22-25. I originally wrote it for Jim as part of the New Irish Arts 10th Anniversary event in the Waterfront nearly 10 years ago... but he's been using it here and there since then, but I've never used it again myself... So it was nice to have it come "home" yesterday...

That night he said to us, "Come on… Let’s go over to the other side of the lake." Tell you the truth, we were glad to get into a boat and leave the crowds behind… They really got on your goat after a while... I do not know how he put up with it all the time… was it any wonder that he fell asleep as soon as we left the shore…  We needed four boats to get us all across, but there were enough of us who had been fishermen to skipper them all… I was in charge of the one Jesus was in, and I was proud in a strange sort of a way… but all my pride flew out the window when a furious storm blew up out of nowhere… It happens all the time, so some people have asked why we didn’t just take it in our stride… Why were we so afraid?… Typical land-lubber’s attitude… Because we make our living from the sea, we know how dangerous it can be… we have reason to be afraid…
This storm was as bad as any I had ever been out in… We quickly lost sight of the other boats and the waves were breaking over the boat so quickly and with such force that it was impossible to bale it out… The mainsail was ripped in two and was dancing on the yard-arm like a demon. The others were holding onto ropes, or the gunwales or anything they could grab hold of… They looked at me with terror in their eyes and shouted at me to do something. But I knew we were going down and there was nothing I could do about it… And yet Jesus slept through it all… When I saw that, I cracked… I did something I never thought I would do… And even today I can’t believe I did… But I reached down and shook him awake and said. "Rabbi, don't you care if we all drown?"  I don’t know what I expected him to do… I mean he was a carpenter, not a sailor.
But without answering me, he stirred himself, stood up and said to the wind and the waves in a quiet but authoritative voice "Quiet! Be still!" And the wind died down and it was completely calm.
Then, and only then did he turn to me, and the other disciples who were with me and said, "Why are you so afraid? Do you still have no faith?"
We were more terrified now than when we had been in the middle of the storm… Someone asked, under his breath, "Who is he? Even the wind and the waves obey him!"
And I thought to myself… He spoke to those waves as if he had done that before… And they responded as if they had known his voice for a long, long time…

Selah
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