To Those in Peril on the Sea

 On that day, as evening drew on, Jesus said to his disciples:
“Let us cross to the other side.”
Leaving the crowd, they took Jesus with them in the boat just as he was.
And other boats were with him.
A violent squall came up and waves were breaking over the boat,
so that it was already filling up.
Jesus was in the stern, asleep on a cushion.
They woke him and said to him,
“Teacher, do you not care that we are perishing?”
He woke up,
rebuked the wind, and said to the sea, “Quiet!  Be still!”
The wind ceased and there was great calm.
Then he asked them, “Why are you terrified?
Do you not yet have faith?”
They were filled with great awe and said to one another,
“Who then is this whom even wind and sea obey?”

This, the gospel reading at today’s mass, strikes me as uncannily resembling the traditional image of Vishnu asleep on the cosmic ocean. The universe we know is a dream he is having. Once every kalpa, every aeon, he awakens from the dream, and the universe ceases to be. Then after a time he goes back to sleep, and a new cosmos begins. The turbulent waters on which he sleeps are the stream of time, with its changes. 

Is the Bible story a borrowing from Hindu mythology? Possibly; or possibly the other way around.

Or perhaps this is evidence for Jung’s theory of the archetypes. Jung traced certain motifs and images, like this one, across world mythology, including cultures with little or no contact with each other, and then again in the dreams of his patients. He posited these represented structures in the mind, which he called archetypes. Ultimately, for the materialist Jung, these ended up expressing structures in the brain. Evolution has deposited them there somehow.

Jung’s disciple Marie-Louise Von Franz specialized in Jungian interpretations of fairy tales. Someone once challenged her with the question, “How do you know your archetypal psychology and development of the ego through individuation is the real story being expressed obliquely through these stories, and not just one more fairy tale like these others?”

Her answer was unsatisfactory: “It is the fairytale I believe.”

Are we left with no way to choose among fairy tales? Do we just arbitrarily decide to place our faith in Vishnu, or Jesus, or Jung, or Mother Goose?

Suppose, instead, that there is a God. This is not a stretch; it the fundamental premise of the text. As a philosophical proposition, monotheism has been proven seven ways to Sunday.

If there is a God, the repetition of this motif in unrelated texts is a proof of the reliability of those texts. God must have dropped it in there.

God must have created us for some purpose. He would have programmed us with a built-in user’s manual or operating system. He would have embedded in our psyches certain images, concepts and narratives expressing his plans. This, the sleeping God waking to calm time and change, can be assumed to be one of them.

God is God; he can do what he wants. He can implant the images in our consciousnesses, and then act them out in history to demonstrate that he is with us, and to clarify their full meaning. 

We are not to be troubled by the madness all around us. We are not to suppose that God is not in charge. Keep calm and carry on. Soon he will wake—or we will—and all will be as it should be.