Walking on water

Last week, while we were on the road beside the airport, I decided to fall behind the wife. With my cell phone camera I wanted to take three or four shots of the puddles that the rain had left.

Her departure being two hours away, the wife did not mind my wasting a little time, but she questioned the usefulness of my effort.  She found the light offered by an overcast sky too thin and the subject pedestrian, perhaps because, aside from the passing vehicles, there were people walking.

Actually, in some of the shots, I caught the feet of not a few travellers dragging their valises as they stepped into the puddles.  In my cell phone was a record of people walking on water.

One taxicab slowed down long enough for me to capture the reflection of the driver as he rolled down a window and leaned out a little. I began to wonder if he saw something on the puddle, and I looked at the water myself to check if I had missed anything. But there was just the gunmetal sky partly covered by the roof of the airport building.

The driver’s act of leaning out reminded me of a similar behavior that had tragic consequences. The Chinese poet Li Po, who lived in the first half of the eighth century, drowned when he fell from his boat after he tried to embrace the reflection of the moon on the Yangtze River.  But this was probably just a legend, although Li Po was not beyond such recklessness.  In China then, poets were associated with drinking. Li Po himself was a member of a group called “The Eight Immortals of the Wine Cup” and among his more famous poems was “Drinking Alone by Moonlight.”

The shots I took were hazy and deficient in light, except for one or two, which with some Photoshop editing may be salvaged. But somehow they summoned up a passage in Matthew in which the disciples saw Jesus walking on water.  Jesus had just fed over 5,000 people with  five loaves and two fish, and now he made the disciples get into a boat and travel ahead of him to the other side of the lake, after which he went up a mountain by himself to pray.

In the night, the boat found itself struggling against the wind and tossed about by the waves. Nearing daybreak, Jesus came walking on the sea toward the boat. The disciples thought that he was a ghost and were terrified. But Jesus said, “Take courage, it is I; do not be afraid.” Peter asked Jesus to let him approach and walk on the water too, and Jesus said yes. And so Peter got out of the boat and began to walk on the sea, but when he saw how strong the wind was and became frightened, he began to sink, and  cried out, “Lord, save me!” Jesus stretched out his hand to catch him, and said, “O you of little faith, why did you doubt?”

While I was writing this, a woman wanted to see me. She was of the sort that periodically makes the rounds of offices to sell all manner of things of all sorts of utility. Unwilling but putting in mind of St. Benedict’s admonition to receive everyone as Christ, I let her inside my office. Clearly, she was not about to sell me anything, because as soon as she was seated,  she began to cry. She let on that she had lost custody of her two little children, and just days before wanted to end her life by leaning out of the bridge and dropping herself into the channel, but her other children stopped her. She did not ask for advice. She merely wanted to unburden herself. Nonetheless, I told her to keep the faith and turn to God.

After an hour she stood up and told me that she was on her way to the airport. Curious, I asked her if she was catching a plane and where her destination was. She smiled. As it turned out, she had customers at the airport and in fact went there almost daily.

When she had left, I wondered if she was among those whose feet I took shots of with my cell phone camera, if she, too, was walking on water.