By MMSGR. THOMAS J. MCSWEENEY
Religion Columnist

About halfway through the blockbuster movie The Perfect Storm, I broke out in a cold sweat that sent “shivers up me timbers.” Instinctively my heart and stomach bonded with the screen characters being helplessly thrashed by the unforgiving sea. In effect, each waterlogged scene stirred up a flashback to my own terror-filled memories of sailing Lake Erie.

From time to time most of us are bitten by the “travel bug,” and usually the bite is not without its pain, especially for those who put out to sea. For sailors and boaters, it is a rare trip on which nothing goes wrong. They understand why the English word “travel” comes from the French word meaning “to suffer.”

My hometown is Pennsylvania’s port city to the Great Lake of the same name—Erie. During the summers, we natives get the chance to give in to the travel bug by sailing across the lake’s borderless wide expanse to visit the shores of Canada. It can be both exhilarating and hazardous.

Exhilarating because on a day when the wind direction and speed are just right, you can trim your sails to reach Long Point, Ontario, within 5 hours of shoving off from Erie’s shores. It’s just another 20 miles to the always friendly and inviting port of Dover where Canadians really express the Good Neighbor Policy.

Lake Erie is hazardous because it is the most shallow of all the Great Lakes. You might recall Herman Melville’s mention of Erie in Moby Dick as an example of how the highest waves are produced by the shallowest waters. In a few seconds, the wind can stir up a nearly placid lake into 12-foot swells.

I recall vividly a cloudless afternoon when the lake was absolute glass. Just as I disconnected the halyard, a line attached to the mainsail, a sudden gust of wind churned up frothy whitecaps that hurled the boat into roller coaster bobs. The halyard snapped from my hand whiplike and flew perpendicular to the mast like a taut clothesline.

My sailing mate, reaching for the line with a pole, lost his balance, slid to the side of the boat, flipped over the lifeline, and plunged headfirst overboard. If it weren’t for the pole he took with him, I don’t know how I would have retrieved him. Holding it high enough for me to grab as he bodysurfed back to the boat, I was able to hoist him to the side.

Such are the days when everything seems to conspire against you: fog so thick you can’t read the compass, an atmospheric charge that electrifies the mast so that a green spark (“St. Elmo’s fire”) shoots clean down to the keel, water spouts that threaten to rip your sails into tatters. A journey can be difficult, even life-threatening, yet it is part of our nature to believe that risks are ultimately outweighed by potential benefits.

There are many times in life when we keep going purely out of faith and hope. But we have good reason. We proceed, not on our own, but as followers of Jesus who has both laid out the course and followed it. Our ability to recover from setbacks, our power to make the right choices, our stamina to travel through rough weather ñ all derive from Him. If Jesus could calm a storm at sea with the words, “Peace! Be still!” (Mark 4:30), surely He can calm our troubled souls and guide us home.

For a free copy of The Christopher News Note, DEFINING MOMENTS—CLEAR THINKING IN A CHAOTIC WORLD, write to The Christophers,12 East 48th Street, New York, NY 10017.

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