God of the Everyday

By Allison Rieff, IPS Student, M.Div.

It is easy enough to imagine yourself in this story with all its physical details, salt water and a charcoal fire and bread and fish.  Perhaps you are one of the disciples.  They all go out fishing with Peter; I think this is less an abandonment of Jesus’ message than a way to get through one more night without Jesus, and to do it together.

Then a man appears on the shore and speaks to them.  Perhaps I should not say “appears,” since we have no record that there seemed to be anything supernatural about this visit at all.  Jesus stood on the shore and called out to them, but they did not recognize that it was Jesus.  He told them to try throwing out their net again, and it came back with an abundance of fish.  “It is the Lord,” one of the disciples told Peter, and Peter pulled his clothes back on and swam back to the shore as quickly as he could.

So here is this man waiting on the shore, next to a charcoal fire with bread and some fish.  You can imagine the disciples hanging back, likely frightened, certainly intimidated.  At the very least, whoever this man is, he seems to be someone who has died and then returned from the dead.  No one else has ever done anything like this before.  Is he now some sort of transcendent being, and will he remember them?  What will he say?

All of our exalted titles for him – Dayspring on High, Prince of Peace, and so on – would never indicate what happens next.  “Come and have breakfast,” is what he says.  And, I think we can safely assume, that is exactly what they did.  They ate breakfast together, the disciples and the Son of God.

What can we possibly make of this very strange story?  Karl Rahner often wrote of God as a God of everyday life, of “everyday mysticism,” and this is one of the best examples I know from the Gospels.  One of my priests once noted that Jesus does not seem at all angry with the disciples for returning to something so unspiritual as fishing, or for doing it poorly.  “Try it again,” he instead says in effect, “now that I am with you.”  They do try, and the result is extraordinary abundance.

Karl Rahner insists that God is no more present in a mystical experience than in washing the dishes, or, rather, that washing the dishes can be just as much a mystical experience as visiting a mountaintop or spending time in church, if we have the senses to experience it.  I keep a prayer on my bulletin board that reads, “Loving God, you are not a hidden God, but your nearness is a mystery to us.  Grant us eyes to see, ears to hear, and hearts to wait upon your coming, today and every day of our lives.”  If we have those eyes, ears, and hearts, Rahner says, we will recognize that all experience is graced experience, embraced in God’s self-communication, which for Rahner is exactly the same thing as grace.  Rahner writes, “Every object of our conscious mind which we encounter in our social world and environment, as it announces itself, as it were, of itself, is merely a stage, a constantly new starting point in this movement which continues into the everlasting and unnamed ‘before-us’” (Rahner, “The Holy Spirit…” p. 368).

St. Paul said he was convinced that nothing, absolutely nothing, could separate us from the love of God, and Rahner shows that to be true in his theology: he understands how boring or absurd the everyday stuff of our lives often (perhaps usually) is, and how that, even more than any major traumatic event, can cause us to doubt God’s presence and care.  Yet Rahner insists on the truth of this theology.  Grace is always already present, he says, and all experience can show forth God’s presence.  He writes, “…this kind of self-communication by God to a creature must necessarily be understood as an act of God’s highest personal freedom, as an act of opening himself in ultimate intimacy and in free and absolute love.  Christian theology understands this self-communication as absolutely gratuitous, that is, as ‘unmerited…’” (Foundations, p. 123).

The disciples fishing on the Sea of Galilee experienced a God who appeared on the shore but would not stay there.  When they came to see him, he already had a fire burning for them and a meal he wanted to share with them.  They ate bread and fish together.  It is hard to imagine anything more “everyday,” more mundane, than this, and yet here it is in our sacred scriptures.  As the writer Nora Gallagher says, our God is not too good to eat bread and fish with his disciples, nor is our God too good to spend time with a tired, frazzled woman like me.  God is not too good for anything.