Confession: I’m scrambling to get this column to IT and make a deadline for a presentation I’m to give at the Communicators for Women Religious Conference in Chicago next week, so I’m double-dipping.
The conference theme is “Navigating the Winds of Change.” Months ago, I had to give the organizers a title. Hastily, without much thought, I sent them “An Anchor of Hope for the Life of the World.”
Now, up against a deadline, I’m prisoner to this choice – which I’m trying not to regret!
The most obvious support for the theme is Hebrews 6: 18-19, which some take as the origin of the use of an anchor as a metaphor for the virtue of hope: “…we who have taken refuge might be strongly encouraged to hold fast to the hope that lies before us. This we have as an anchor of the soul sure and firm …”
I made the mistake of investigating that anchor symbol further, which has complicated my thinking. It turns out biblical archeologists don’t think the Hebrews passage is at all related to the prolific anchor art found in multiple first-and-second-century Roman Christian burial sites.
Instead, they posit the anchor as word play, not metaphor. Its use is proved not by Hebrews 6 but by the Christian belief that through baptism we both live and die in the Lord Jesus Christ.
In the Greek-speaking world of first and second century Rome, that phrase, “in the Lord” is written en kurio – an obvious pun for anchor. So this seems to be the message on the tombs in the Roman catacombs: the one buried here lived and died en kurio – in the Lord.
By the end of the third century, Latin was ascendant, so the anchor disappeared from Christian tombs since it no longer worked as a pun in the new language: In Domino.
Have I lost a good metaphor? Is there anything here I can salvage to anchor (pun intended) my presentation next week?
Yes, I think so! Because what I learned tells me that our hope lies not only in God’s promise of eternal life-after-death (yes, that) but also in our belief that through baptism, as we are told in Romans 14, “whether we live or die, we are the Lord’s.”
The cultural hook I want to use for my presentation is True Spirit, a movie about a 16-year-old Australian girl named Jessica Watson who became the youngest person to circumnavigate the globe solo, unassisted and nonstop. While poking around in this idea for my presentation, I learned about drouges.
A drogue, sometimes called a sea anchor, is something like a parachute. On a boat, its purpose is to aid sailors in bad storms. I’m taking the internet at its word when it tells me that drogues are deployed off the stern of a boat in rough weather to keep the boat stable and pointed in the right direction weather.
But a drogue isn’t really an anchor, is it? It doesn’t stop the boat dead but keeps it stable by slowing the forward movement and assisting the navigator with maintaining proper direction. Sounds like a good thing, doesn’t it?
Except for this: There is a scene in the movie, taking place toward the end of Jessica’s 210-day journey, when she is on the phone with her family and her mentor Ben discussing her limited options for surviving a massive storm which threatens her safety. The sensible thing would be to put into port to avoid the storm. That would, of course, mean an end to her quest for a world-record sail.
Her parents and Ben urge her to put-in and wait out the storm – record be damned. But Jessica has another plan: She wants to travel with the storm – and not use the drogue.
She reminds Ben of a previous experience when the drogue slowed the boat, giving that storm more time to batter and damage her craft. “You’ve always said we shouldn’t fight mother nature,” she reminds Ben. “So let’s work with her.”
Ben tells her to do what she thinks best “as long as you understand the consequences,” he solemnly warns. In what I could only construe as a kind of cinematic baptismal assent, Jessica utters her final words to her loved ones: I do.
So, what about us, battered by the world’s chaos? Do we need an anchor to keep our boat from moving? A drogue that might keep us stable but leave us battered and weakened? Or do we anchor our hope instead to the assurance of our baptismal faith: We live and die en kurio. Our truest anchor may not be a literal or figurative anchor at all – but the very life-force of the Holy Spirit.
Only we know what our life requires at any given moment of danger, challenge, or chaos. An anchor? A drogue? The support of our faith and our loved ones when the chaos threatens to overwhelm? We choose. As long as we understand the consequences and consent with our solemn “I do.”
Sister Beth Murphy, OP, is communication director for the Dominican Sisters of Springfield.
This article appears in Finding a way forward.
