Get Your hands in the blood
I was
probably thirteen or fourteen years old when I heard this story. It was in the
tavern next to the Commonwealth Ship Supply on Northern Avenue in Boston, across from the fish pier. In the
Nineteen Fifties the fish pier still had some of the look that you see in sepia
pictures of the nineteenth century. There were electric trucks that looked like
oversize model T Fords on steroids, and baskets of fish swinging from the decks
to the pier. The tavern was even older because of the men it served. If I was
not in school, I would often go to Boston
to meet my father when he came in. We always ended up in the Fish Pier Tavern.
That was where he cashed his check, paid his union dues, and usually sat for
hours, talking and remembering other oceans, other ships, and a far different
world than the color coordinated kitchens of suburban Massachusetts of 1953. It was a place of old men drinking their beer and Four Roses
Rye whiskey, and a young boy drinking soda, and listening to stories of storms, shipwrecks,
rum running during prohibition, and life in a world of tall ships that was
fading into history even as they were living it. That is where I really began
to understand that history was much more than words packaged in textbooks. It’s
the river that we live in, and you can’t package courage between the worn
covers of an Eighth Grade history book.
My father was in his early sixties then, and going cook. The cook on a trawler was many things but he was always “the doctor.” And when there was blood on the deck the doctor was usually beside the one bleeding, trying to stop the blood, and waiting for the coast guard helicopter. In the “old days” there was a jar of cobwebs in the galley to stop bleeding (I wonder who discovered that use for cobwebs and how they discovered it) and certainly a bottle of dark rum for the relief of pain.
A few months earlier there had been an accident, still not uncommon in the world of commercial fishing. A cable had snapped and a man was almost cut in two. Someone asked: “Ranald, ….. how could you do it? How could you handle it? He was near cut in two.” The answer was simple: “Get your hands in the blood.” I didn’t understand what that meant then, maybe a little, but it took a while to really know what it meant. I hadn’t seen enough blood.
As Christians we talk much of “the blood of Christ” and rightly so. But if we accept the strange, Christian idea, of the Incarnation, there is much more. Christ entered the world. He lived and died serving not just the world, but all of the world. He shed his blood for us and he also lived His life for us. Before He shed His blood on the Cross, he was deep in the blood and pain of the world, and if we claim to follow Him, that’s part of the path we must walk to follow Him. Francis did that. William Booth did that. Tens of thousands of Christians have done that. We are called to follow Jesus. We are called to follow God Himself, in spite of all of our weakness. We were told quite simply that following Jesus means loving Samaritans. It means embracing lepers, kneeling in the dirt to share our very selves with blind beggars, sitting quietly beside the bed of a dying AIDS patient, or stopping in a filthy street and asking a man lying in a pool of urine: ”Do you need help?
As I reread this, I found myself thinking that it shifted from essay to sermon. I may expand it someday and preach it so I’ll end with a benediction.
May the Grace of God, the Love of Jesus, and the Fire of the Holy Spirit be with us all. Now let us go in peace, strengthened and protected, so that we may touch the blood of a suffering world to serve, comfort, and heal..
My father was in his early sixties then, and going cook. The cook on a trawler was many things but he was always “the doctor.” And when there was blood on the deck the doctor was usually beside the one bleeding, trying to stop the blood, and waiting for the coast guard helicopter. In the “old days” there was a jar of cobwebs in the galley to stop bleeding (I wonder who discovered that use for cobwebs and how they discovered it) and certainly a bottle of dark rum for the relief of pain.
A few months earlier there had been an accident, still not uncommon in the world of commercial fishing. A cable had snapped and a man was almost cut in two. Someone asked: “Ranald, ….. how could you do it? How could you handle it? He was near cut in two.” The answer was simple: “Get your hands in the blood.” I didn’t understand what that meant then, maybe a little, but it took a while to really know what it meant. I hadn’t seen enough blood.
As Christians we talk much of “the blood of Christ” and rightly so. But if we accept the strange, Christian idea, of the Incarnation, there is much more. Christ entered the world. He lived and died serving not just the world, but all of the world. He shed his blood for us and he also lived His life for us. Before He shed His blood on the Cross, he was deep in the blood and pain of the world, and if we claim to follow Him, that’s part of the path we must walk to follow Him. Francis did that. William Booth did that. Tens of thousands of Christians have done that. We are called to follow Jesus. We are called to follow God Himself, in spite of all of our weakness. We were told quite simply that following Jesus means loving Samaritans. It means embracing lepers, kneeling in the dirt to share our very selves with blind beggars, sitting quietly beside the bed of a dying AIDS patient, or stopping in a filthy street and asking a man lying in a pool of urine: ”Do you need help?
As I reread this, I found myself thinking that it shifted from essay to sermon. I may expand it someday and preach it so I’ll end with a benediction.
May the Grace of God, the Love of Jesus, and the Fire of the Holy Spirit be with us all. Now let us go in peace, strengthened and protected, so that we may touch the blood of a suffering world to serve, comfort, and heal..