Come Fly With Me

This is a reflection for the Second Sunday in Ordinary Time (2/14).

I am sure many of you are familiar with the song “Come Fly With Me” by Frank Sinatra. For those of you that don’t know or remember the lyrics, here are a few verses: 

Come fly with me, let's fly, let's fly away 

If you can use some exotic booze

There's a bar in far Bombay

Come fly with me, let's fly, let's fly away

Come fly with me, let's float down to Peru

In llama-land there's a one-man band

And he'll toot his flute for you

Come fly with me, let's take off in the blue

One time I looked up the meaning of the song, to see if there was something beyond the seemingly simple message. And it turns out there really isn’t, it truly is a song about packing up and flying away. The article I found about the song explained “he is urging them to pack up and fly away with him.” And I was like wow, I guess that is how simple music was – the message of the song is in the four word title. And because of the fame of the song, it has been used in a ton of movies. In one of my favorites, “Come Fly with Me,” DeCaprio is posing as a pilot, surrounded by flight attendants, showing his success in mascarding a pilot to escape Tom Hanks. Truly the song is just about this need to get out of the ordinary, the routine, and fly away, adding a dream-like or fantastical nature to it. 

But that article does make this little analytical point about the song, something I don’t think I ever thought about: “To pack up and “fly” away with someone is not a choice made lightly and without truly romantic feelings” (cite). Although the message is abundantly clear, there is some beauty to it: to truly pack up and fly away, in a seemingly impromptu manner, requires complete love, in many ways, devotional love. And in a lot of ways, it requires radical love - the song itself is radical. Leave everything behind, the mundane world, and follow me.

This is how Jesus calls us. This is how Jesus called the Apostles. Jesus doesn’t give these subtle hints, and he definitely displays a radical sense of love, a radical sense of true, and complete love. This is how Jesus calls his apostles. He asks Peter to leave his fishing job to become a fisher of man, He asks Matthew to leave being a tax collector to become an Apostle. And in John’s account of the callings today, we get the same picture. Jesus says “Come, and you will see.” He doesn’t say anything but to follow Him. He requires a massive amount of trust and love. Peter and Andrew knew they could love Jesus. They knew they could trust. They simply followed the simple words of Jesus. The message is simple yet profound. Christ is telling the apostles clearly: leave everything, leave the routine and the mundane, and follow Him. But Christ’s message has a profound nature: it requires radical love. No one is just flying away, or leaving everything and following someone without true love and devotion. Just like Sinatra’s masterpiece, Christ calls us to love and trust in Him beyond all else, to trust in Him that He will give us joy that is dream-like, something a little better than far Bombay or Peru. 

There is a book by Blessed Fulton Sheen called The Priest Is Not His Own. The book is amazing, especially for one looking to understand more about the priesthood, or discern the priesthood. The book focuses, just like Sheen did often, on the sacrifice of the mass, that is the true presence of the sacrifice of calvary that occurred 2000 years ago. And part of this focuses on our involvement in the sacrifice. Sheen explains that priests must be both shepherds and lambs. They must guide the flock to Christ, serving in the place of Christ to bring people to the love of God. But priests must also be part of the sacrifice. Priests must offer themselves too on the altar, offering their souls to God with Christ. But it isn’t just priests, it is everyone in the mass that must make themselves open to the sacrifice. They too must go to the cross with Christ. They too must carry the cross of Christ upon their backs, and by doing so, they unite themselves with the sacrifice of Christ and can truly see the love Christ had for us. 

Sheen explains that we need to follow Him on His role to calvary. We need to follow the sacrifice and takepart in our own sacrifice, thereby allowing Him to truly change us, allowing Him to make His love known to the world through us. 

This is what Christ calls us to. His simple, yet profound callings call us to this sacrifice. Christ doesn’t tell Peter some elaborate part of his future or that He will be given earthy riches. Rather Jesus tells Him that he will be a fisher of men, meaning he will be the shepherd of humanity, meaning he will lead the world to Christ. He calls Him in a simple encounter to follow Him to the cross, and eventually Peter literally does, when he too is crucified. 

But Peter and the apostles aren’t the only ones who are given these simple and profound messages to go and fly away, to follow Christ out of the mundane way of our lives. We too receive these calls. We receive these calls in the mass, in Adoration of the Blessed Sacrament, through those we know and love. We receive calls from Christ in the same way Peter and Andrew did. Christ speaks to us in the Eucharist and tells us simply: Come, and you will see. That is the voice of God. It is simple yet profound. He calls us to leave the routine and love Him radically, just like He loves us radically. The message of Christ’s song is different from that of Sinatra’s. Although Bombay sounds nice and floating down to Peru sounds beautiful, Christ’s message is even more beautiful and even more profound, hence why the Apostles followed Him, and trusted in Him, despite knowing so little about Him. That is because the message of sacrificial and radical love is more beautiful than anything one could have on this earth. And it is because of the beauty, more than Sinatra’s dream vacation, that people followed Jesus with his simple calling “Come, and you will see.” 

But so often we don’t hear His voice, because of the distractions that exist in our society. Social media has created an endless loop of distraction for us, and it is most often that the distractions are anything but the voice of God, especially in the sexualized society that we live in. But even when we don’t hear it, the voice is still there, the call is still there. 

Christ is always calling us to leave everything behind and follow Him, to truly fly away from the distractions and embrace the radical love He has for us. Following Christ to the cross, following His calling for us, will give us ultimate joy in life, it will give us ultimate peace. As Christ Himself said:

“Come to me, all you who labor and are burdened,  and I will give you rest.”