In the book I just finished reading on Shackelton=s exploration of the Antarctic it=s an interesting situation. The ship arrives in the area of the Antarctic in about January. It=s really about the end of summer for that area and the ship gets frozen in the ice. It was coagulated from the shore so they were about three hundred miles short of the continent. They tried to ram the ice pack, which the ship was made to do, but they couldn=t, it didn=t work. They backed off and thought they would wait for the morning to see if the temperature changes. It happened that the temperature dropped 10 degrees and the ice from the open water began to form on the opposite side of the ship and behind it.

        They were totally blocked in. They stayed in the ship and everything was fine until they began to realize that there was pressure building from being blocked in and it began to crack up the ship. They decided to get out and camp on the ice pack, which they did. For a while it was nice but as time went on the pressure of the flow of ice was really breaking the ship up so they knew they could no longer rely on the ship. There was ice camp on the ice pack and they could play football and run their dogs, etc. But then when spring came the ice pack began to crack up, so they had made a decision to go to the nearest island, which was anywhere from 100 to maybe 60 miles away. They got in their life boats and started out. Now the southern Atlantic is a notorious ocean, it=s very seldom calm. They ran into all kinds of bad weather but they managed to get into Elephant Island.

        The island was uninhabited and as the first two boats landed, Shackelton was in the third boat still coming toward the shore, he looked up and all the men are dancing! He started wondering what=s going on? Then he realized that it was five months that they were on ice flows in which you never knew how solid the ground was. All of a sudden they knew that they were well grounded so they were so happy they were dancing.

        It=s a good image of the spiritual life. What exactly is your ground? Oh, it=s easy to say God but is it really true? In today=s Gospel we see that Jesus certainly has a ground. Do you remember last week when Jesus deliberately went into the desert after John the Baptist was beheaded seeking solititude? People came so he didn=t get the solititude he was after.

        Today=s Gospel reminds us that Jesus sent his disciples in a boat to the other shore deliberately and gets rid of the crowd and he goes and prays. So Jesus has a ground. Of course he must be teaching the Apostles that they too need a ground because he waits until the fourth hour of night to come. At the darkest part of the night, before the dawn breaks, the winds are blowing against them and they=re struggling for their life. They are already in a state of fear. Then they see Jesus coming across the water and they think he=s a ghost, because who sees people walking across the water, secondly, lit up? So it must have been scary. Then Peter asks to walk on the water and he courageously does. He must be close enough to Jesus because when he does start to sink, Jesus reaches out and grabs him.

        Peter had to learn the lesson that God is really his ground. He learns it by seeing that he has no other place to find that in. But he also has a positive experience, once he is embraced by Jesus, once he is Aclasped@, he=s strong and the Gospel says the waves and the winds are still going wild. So he=s got strength now, in Jesus, and he walks toward the boat. In that strength and Jesus is with him. They hop in the boat and the text says: Aand the wind died down.@

        So our efforts to make God the ground of our life is not just personal. To the degree that we really make Jesus the ground of our life we bring him with us and we bring peace to others. So this is an apostolic dimension of the personal spiritual life. We really must reflect on what exactly is the ground of my life and how really am I rooted in Jesus?

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