Recently, my toddler boys renamed their outdoor fort their “pirate hideout”. My boys (my husband included!) have clocked serious hours building LEGO ships and pirate coves. Lately, ships have sparked a nautical interest in my young family. Including myself. 

As a way to invest in their passions, I’ve spent embarrassing amounts of hours looking for vintage ship paintings online, and cool ship-inspired paraphernalia at thrift stores.

I decided to do a quick Google search for ship symbolism and was pleasantly surprised at its rich contribution to Church history. In this article it says: “It is no coincidence that the part of every church where the people sit is called a nave. This word comes from the Latin navis, or ship, and was meant to portray the reality that the Church is a ship, protecting those inside it from the waves and buffets of the world.” In essence, the Church offers security and safety, comfort and protection.

I had to read the words again. Security? Protection? Although I’ve had relatively good experiences with the Church, ‘safe’ would not be the first word that I would associate with it. 

I’ve been in the Church my whole life and that has not protected me from harm.

I’ve struggled with anxiety for most of my adult life. It began when my mother received a terminal diagnosis in my late teens. For over a decade, fear shadowed my every move. I went about my life, but lurking somewhere nearby is that constant fear. Over various seasons in my life after my mom’s death, I’ve weathered some pretty terrible storms: family members battling cancer,  COVID, friends going through divorce, or having miscarriages.

In some ways, because I have had first-hand experience of how unsettling and disastrous a life-storm can be, I felt that I had license to be cynical about the disillusion of a secure,  joy-filled life onboard the Church as a ship. 

That’s hard to admit for a practicing Catholic, and even harder to admit for a mom daily teaching her kids about joy and peace, and the lasting promises of Jesus.

Yet somehow, I couldn’t shake the idea of a steady ship amidst fearful waves. A secure ship seemed so fitting with my overly fearful tendencies. I knew that God was addressing my misguided surrender to the knowledge that we live in a fallen world, and that not everything is as God had intended it to be. 

Trials and storms are a given for the life of a Christian, so doesn’t it make sense that my anxious heart is always anticipating suffering, always bracing for impact?

Scripture offered an answer when I needed it most: 

“I have told you these things, so that in me you may have peace. In this world you will have trouble. But take heart! I have overcome the world.” - John 16:33

Jesus urges us to live counter-culturally by pointing our eyes towards hope even as we face trials. We want life to be easy and predictable so we wouldn’t have to face the unknown. We yearn for recognition and satisfaction and struggle with being challenged to grow. Our tendency is to develop tunnel vision and only see things for what is currently there. We often forget how faithful God has been to us before, how present His Spirit is, now and how hope-filled our life can be with Him in eternity. 

John Eldredge addresses the danger of confusing our earthly journey with our heavenly destination:

"Something awful has happened, something terrible. Something worse, even, than the fall of man. For in that greatest of all tragedies, we merely lost Paradise—and with it, everything that made life worth living. What has happened since is unthinkable: we've gotten used to it. We're broken in to the idea that this is just the way things are. The people who walk in great darkness have adjusted their eyes.” 

The tragedy isn’t just that we’ve lost Paradise -- being in full communion with God Himself, enjoying His company face-to-face… it’s that we’ve been okay with losing it! We get so inundated with the world’s affairs that we forget that we’re made for another world. 

Consider this past year and a half for example.

We’ve been part of a collective life-storm with the repercussions of the pandemic. Many of us have been forced to assume a “braced-for-dear-life” position, hoping for the best and often assuming the worst. We’ve become driven and paralyzed by fear, making it easier for us to focus on the bad and pay little attention to the good. We’ve become more keenly aware of how quickly things can change. We can lose a lot in an instant: our job, our savings, our community, our family, even our breath. 

And this fear of losing health or status or freedom has changed our culture. 

Take our behaviour these past few years: hoarding, pitting communities against each other, comparing and rationalizing and acting in surprisingly unkind ways. There really is never a good excuse for bad behaviour, but I’d like to believe that many of us are not motivated by hate; rather, I think it’s because most of us have forgotten how to live with eternity in mind. 

It’s like we get caught viewing life in one of two ways: 

One way to go about life is to adjust our eyes into the darkness and forget the fact that our earthly life is temporary. 

We’ve become so primed to be fearful that we forget that everything we have is never ours to begin with. 

On the other hand, we can see our earthly life as a mere passageway into eternity. We must simply endure this life, passively accepting that it will be filled with sorrow and suffering, knowing that eternal joy awaits us on the other side. 

I know that I flip-flop back and forth between these two lenses of viewing the world.

We are called to be a fearless Church in a fearful world, so just what should our posture be? Jesus, who is bigger than our sadness and our fear of loss, addresses the situation clearly. John 16, again, says: “In this world you will have trouble. But take heart! I have overcome the world.” Trouble, *BUT* take heart!

What I am learning is this: nothing will compare to the deep joy we will experience when we finally meet our Creator. We will live in Heaven, where tears are no more, where peace abounds, and nothing can separate us from God. 

But here’s the thing: Our earthly joy may not be as perfect as it will be in Heaven, but that doesn’t mean our experience here will be devoid of it! 

Radiating with joy, and sharing it with others—especially in these dark times—are truly some of the best acts of charity we can offer the world. 

Accepting joy as a natural component of the Christian journey informs how we can live and act as a Church amidst this fearful world. We don’t need to muscle our way out of sorrow, or white-knuckle our way into joy. We are not alone in this journey. We can lean into our communities—at home and in our parishes—and share in each other’s joy and sorrow. No, it will not come easy all the time but it is there for our discovery. 

Through Christ, there will always be an overabundance of hope and as a Church we need to always be ready to offer hope to someone who needs it, or to lean on someone else when we sense our own hope is dwindling. 

And so I keep coming back to the image of the ship in my mind’s eye. Though the waves are crashing and I can’t seem to find my sea legs, I gaze towards the destination and also take a good look around at the immense beauty of the journey. I see a Good Father, delighting at every individual. I see Jesus at the wheel, expertly steering and navigating with us through the waves. And I see a cheerful Holy Spirit, fully present to our experience. 

“May you be made strong with all the strength that comes from his glorious power, and may you be prepared to endure everything with patience, while joyfully giving thanks to the Father, who has enabled you to share in the inheritance of the saints in the light.” (Colossians 1:11-12)