Recently, I had the opportunity to reconnect with a friend I knew from Fiji. During our discussion, we spoke about a remarkable educator who travelled to Fiji to facilitate seminars focused on social analysis.
He usually began with a drawing of a reef connected to an island. Waves crashed over the reef, causing a boat inside the reef to be tossed around. The people inside the boat were the poor and oppressed, and the waves were the cause of their situation of poverty and oppression. He would then ask those attending the seminar to fill in the picture. You could have someone standing on the shore with a rope that could be used to haul the boat ashore. There could be someone on the hill who could see the extent of the reef as the cause of the waves. Anyway, it was a powerful tool by which people could be part of the learning process instead of just being empty vessels that take in uncritically whatever they are taught. As I read today’s gospel about Jesus’ talking about the dragnet being cast into the sea and dragging ashore fish of all kinds, I was thinking about our friend and teacher who used a picture that was very familiar to people of the Pacific Islands in order to begin the process by which people could learn how to analyse for themselves what were the root causes of poverty and oppression in the Pacific.
Through his parables, Jesus drew pictures based on the experience of fishing people when talking about the kingdom of heaven and how we will all find our way. How we are judged will be based on how we treat others and how we are just and caring towards others. This takes me back to the picture of our friend, the teacher, who drew the picture of the boat being tossed about and challenged us to look at how we can deal with the causes of poverty and oppression in our world in a way whereby we work together to bring about a more just and caring society.
In a sense Jesus wasn’t talking about the last days. He was talking about here and now. We sow the seeds of our judgment by the way we relate to and treat others in our world today. Don’t worry about the final judgement. Just do the best you can by treating others justly here and now.
Fr Tom Rouse, Regional Councillor of Oceania
Related links
- Read more from the current Columban eBulletin
