Faith, The Big Apple and Mini McGregor
We spent some time visiting family in New York this week and hit all of our old haunts, among them the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
As my wife will attest, a trip to the Met is an indispensable part of returning to NYC for both of us.
If you're anything like me, inviting somebody to a museum is a special type of love language - it shouts rather than whispers "let's get REALLY real", bypassing the pleasantries of small talk and launching head first into the epistemological depths of Serious Conversation.
The last time we walked the Met we did so engaged, not yet blessed enough to know the joy of marrying your best friend nor privileged enough to be able to say the words "we're in town for our nephew's birthday party" unless as a jab against "reasons old people travel". Perhaps it's only surrounded by artifacts thousands of years old that we can truly internalize the degree to which our outer world is fundamentally a reflection of our inner. To summarize brutally: "Same thing here many years, meaning very different each time I here."
And so when I found myself forcibly halted by a painting that even a year ago would have failed to catch my notice, I knew something special was up.
"Christ on the Sea of Galilee" depicts a group of men with the distinct misfortune of rowing a questionable vessel across the stormy sea of Galilee. Among them, Christ is seen, apparently indifferent to the consternation of his disciples, taking a little nap.
My amusement was deepened further upon reading the notes: According to Mark 4:35-41 (NIV), Jesus' disciples, having conferred and decided it might be a good idea to alert their savior to their impending doom, wake him. Jesus is a little irritated about this, but obliges in rebuking the wind and waves and apparently bringing order out of chaos.
The disciples, filled now with the luxury of existential rather than mortal dread, ask themselves "Who is this? Even the wind and the waves obey him!"
As I stared at this painting, I thought about what it means to "take a leap of faith."
For a long time, the idea of taking a leap of faith suggested to me a passive orientation to life - "trust it'll all 'just work out'", I'd mock and gesticulate with quote marks. Rather than make the same mistake again, I decided to take a bit of a linguistic slant on the idiom.
Let's look at what the word "leap" means according to the Webster dictionary: "To spring free from or as if from the ground jump". Wow! There's nothing passive about this exercise at all. On the contrary, a "leap" is something requiring practice. It's something requiring dedication and consistency. I had the unmistakable feeling I had missed something important, a feeling confirmed only by the subsequent words: "Of faith". This was no easy pill to swallow, as the definition that stared back from Webster (fittingly my nickname as a child) read "Firm belief in something for which there is no proof"
Without taking you through the painstaking steps it took to get there, I realize the statement could also read as such: "Firm belief in something for which there is no (demonstrable) proof (YET)"
Tony Brophy came to work in February when he had the cold calling skills of (his words) "a turd". Yet in this young man from Dublin lay an understanding of "taking a leap of faith" that I'd never seen before. Tony is great, and The Universe has proven him right, revealing his proficiency on the phones bit by bit in proportion to this belief. We see here that proof is a lagging, rather than leading, indicator of the veracity of faith.
So it came to me as no surprise that on this fateful trip to New York my path should cross with his - a man who's left New York City at the intersection with another seeing it for the first time and hoping to make it home - ships in the night on adventures lying in wait and revealed in proportion to the traveler's faith. The seas may be rough, but one must take a leap of faith and embrace stormy seas in order to become a skilled sailor. And while the skilled sailor is far from guaranteed never to see a stormy sea again, what he has earned is the faith from having navigated it before to bring order out of chaos. Greatness is within us all, but only if we unlock it by embracing having "firm belief in something for which there is no (demonstrable) proof (YET)."
Bon voyage, Tony. We are all watching and cheering you on.