When I first started to take my faith seriously in college, I would say the Church’s night prayer with friends who my dear friend and mentor, Msgr. Richard Liddy, gathered. He would bake us all cookies and host night prayer around ten o’clock Monday through Thursday in his apartment, which was located in our dorm. These informal meetings were always great fun and, of course, we were too young and stupid to realize how formative those few minutes each evening were—how foundational to us. Don’t get me wrong, like in our Second Reading today, there was plenty of heated debate like that described between the followers of Paul and Apollos in First Corinthians.
I’m thinking of the night prayer crew because our Gospel reading, the calling of Peter and Andrew, Christ’s first Apostles, was where we took our nickname. We often were called The Cast, as in “Cast your nets.” I’m not sure why we claimed such an evangelical title, we never really went out and preached—we were just a community of kids on the seventh floor who stole a half hour away from the world and prayed. But maybe that is a perfect title. We were casting our intellectual and emotional nets into the world. We opened our hearts and our minds and just like Peter and Andrew found us completely and inexplicably drawn to Jesus. Jesus is asking us, like he told Peter and Andrew, Cast your nets into the world. Baptize the culture, don’t retreat from it! Go into the world! What a calling! Let us pray that we continue to have the bravery to say ‘yes.’ Happy fishing.
I’ll be seeing you,
Elliot