Fish Stories On the River and In Church

“Fishing is a delusion entirely surrounded by liars in old clothes”  Don Marques

I notice when I go fishing with friends or guides and we split up and then come back to talk about how well we did things can get distorted rather quickly. There is pressure to make sure one looks as good as the other guys. So, two fish becomes 5 fish, a fish of 16 inches becomes  20 inches, fish momentarily hooked become landed fish, and the one that got away was at least 2 feet long,  And so on. I think we have all done this and told fish stories or at least told exaggerations of the truth. Maybe such exaggerations are harmless and just a part of the fishing experience. However, at the very least we have to acknowledge the distortion of reality that takes place as we are left wondering what each person truly caught and experienced. In essence, we don’t know the truth.

Human nature being what it is, I have become convinced that a similar phenomenon can occur in the Christian church as individuals claim to stories of experiencing the divine. There is pressure to look as spiritual as everyone else. So, if someone tells a story about how God answered a prayer or about how God caused something to happen, then there is a natural reaction in the listeners to try to match the story. And if those listening don’t really have a story that measures up then the exaggerations begin. I think there can be enough pressure to cause people to flat out make up things or at least distort things. When Christians get caught up in giving “testimony” it seems that no one is ever supposed to question the validity of the claims made. Discernment is not allowed otherwise one might be perceived as being “negative” or not being “spiritual”.  This is unfortunate because the discerning individual rather than being judged as being cynical and lacking faith can actually be the person of great faith and one who is holding onto an authentic image of the divine.     

I am no longer shocked or appalled by the possibility of Christians distorting the truth and losing discernment. It happened at the early church of Corinth. Each member was trying to ‘out do’ the other and things ended up rather chaotic and immature. My guess is that this sort of thing still goes on in many church fellowship groups just as men will commonly tell fish stories on rivers.   

A big part of the problem is that I think we have a limited understanding of how God can be experienced.   We hope that God is there with us every step of the way, always speaking to us and taking care of us, comforting us and making us aware of his presence in our lives. There is nothing wrong with this desire. The problems occur when we demand to experience God according to our own agenda and terms and we try to match our experience to fit in with the group. And then when God does not conform to our ways or the agenda of the group, then the pressure to measure up causes people to misinterpret their experiences.  We can then distort reality. We try to make something out of nothing or misinterpret the nothingness experienced.

 It is precisely here where many of us have not been taught properly about how to experience the absence and silence of God.  This is a misunderstanding of how God uses emptiness and silence (basically, the “experience” of NOT experiencing God) to teach us true faith. This misunderstanding not only causes Christians to distort and exaggerate but it can also cause the Christian church to rely on old worn out clichés that have lost their vitality. Somehow, we think the old clichés will clothe our nakedness and keep us looking and feeling spiritual when in reality we may feel an aloneness and emptiness that is beyond words (Ironically, the fact that the emptiness and silence of God are beyond words is the clearest indication that such an experience might be genuinely divine)  The clichés comfort us and keep us at the same level with those who are also using the clichés but at the cost of authenticity.  

In a sense, these clichés used to try to express the experience of the divine can have about as much credibility as the fish stories told by men in old clothes. They no longer mean what they were intended to mean and they only prop up individuals and keep others from viewing them as inferior. It is easy to hide behind the clichés and use the clichés as masks. It becomes very difficult to come out from behind these masks and to be honest and authentic in such circles. How could an individual dare say ?  “Lately I feel only God’s silence and absence in my life” when so much spiritual drama is being shared. It would be like a fisherman admitting, “I caught nothing”, while his buddies reported all kinds of fish stories.   

I think Christians fall back to using clichés in Christian circles similar to how fisherman use old fish stories to make sure they measure up. Phrases such as “God spoke to me”,  “God is really leading me to….”,  “God is really convicting me”….”God is calling me to” , “I just know God wanted me to”… and many other similar phrases, have become almost meaningless and in some cases offensive. And sadly God gets “blamed” for doing many things that I doubt he had anything to do with.   

Some how it is assumed that we know what someone is talking about when someone says “God spoke to me” or “God did such and such in my life” .  Do we really know what this means?  If we are honest, we have to admit that when we use these clichés we often  don’t know what we are truly talking about and neither do our listeners for the ways of God are a mystery and remain hidden. (see I Cor 2:7 and Romans 11:33 )

I strongly believe that Christians need to develop a new sensitivity and a new language in communicating about the divine experience. There comes a time when our Christian language (the “lingo”) needs to be redeemed. Divine experiences should be communicated with the deepest humility, reverence and honesty, otherwise it can  not only be offensive, but it causes  things to get distorted in the same way that fish stories distort how good the fishing really was on a given day.

 If we continue to merely use old worn out clichés the same way fishermen continue to wear old clothes then our fellowships becomes very similar to how fishing can be merely  a “delusion surrounded by liars in old clothing”. And what should bind us, only alienates us and keeps us deluded.

And then no one knows how the divine is truly experienced or how truth is distorted.  

Thousands of Casts

Martha Graham spoke of the long time it took to learn the art of dancing. She said of the dancer Nijinsky that there were “thousands of leaps before the memorable one”.

I often think about those words while fly fishing and how long it takes to learn this art. Often on a fishing trip, especially to some new water, it may take thousands of casts before I hook a fish. Or, while guiding a beginner, I try to encourage the client that there may need to be thousands of casts before the ‘memorable one’ and a fish is hooked.

Perhaps a parallel can be made in our spiritual lives. Thousands of prayers, hopes and dreams and thousands of days waiting before something memorable happens. And then and only then, after all the waiting, we might be given a glimpse of the divine. Both in fly fishing and in our spiritual lives we have to do a lot of waiting. It is a discipline and it is rare for us to be met with immediate gratification.  

Unfortunately, our culture does not like to wait. We want it all now!  And sadly this need for immediate gratification can creep in to the Christian church. I don’t think the art of fly fishing or the genuine disciplined spiritual life were meant to be so easy. As Norman Maclean quotes his father in “A River Runs Through it”; “All good things-trout as well as eternal salvation- comes by grace and grace comes by art and art does not come easy.”  All too often in the church we get the feeling that we will easily experience the presence of the Divine, moment by moment, day by day, and that this rich divine experience  is the norm.    

I have concern for this easy shallow experiential form of Christianity. We live in an age of easy “religion”. We have such easy access to books and cd’s, and prayer groups and Bible study groups and meditation groups and fly fishing web sites and fly fishing classes.  We tend to think we can walk up to a river and not only catch all the fish but also easily experience the divine.

I may be a bit cynical but I have learned to be a bit more discerning in regard to what I might credit as being an experience of the divine and what I might call art.  If it were so easy, where would the need for genuine faith be?  Where would the discipline of waiting be?  Where would be the discipline of all the work and practice that goes into truly learning an art?  We are told to ‘test the spirits’ and likewise, we should test the waters with thousands of casts and also test the claims made by others both on and off the water. But most importantly, we need to test and examine ourselves. As Dante said, “Far worse than in vain is he who leaves the shore and fishes for the truth but has not the art”. If we want to be authentic we have to be truthful and we have to learn the art of waiting. And when we learn to wait we learn that the experience of the divine is to be found in the waiting. But “far worse than in vain is he who fishes for the truth and has not the art”.

So while I fish  I often  pray,  Yes, it is my hope that I might get a sense of the divine in the beauty around me. And after ‘thousands of casts’, there is also ‘the hope that a fish might rise’.  In the end, all we can do is keep casting and to have hope and then a fish caught and the divine experience will truly and genuinely be memorable.

Perhaps There Remains

In looking back over 40 plus years of fly fishing I have tried to draw parallels between the spiritual life and fly fishing. Looking for spiritual meaning in our lives and the activities we find ourselves engaged in is a difficult task and “tricky”. One must wade in these waters carefully.

I have no intention of writing about lofty, divine, spiritual experiences while fly fishing. I have not been so fortunate to be able to make any such claims. Nor do I easily experience the beauty of God’s creation while fly fishing. But I have experienced “something” that perhaps we could call spiritual and I will try to communicate this experience.  

I look to the existential poet Rainer Maria Rilke for help in understanding this experience. In his most significant work, a set of poems called the Duino Elegies, Rilke opens the series of poems with the question; “Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the angel’s hierarchies”?  In these poems, Rilke asks the tough questions about life. Are we alone? Why is life so fleeting? Where do we belong?   Rilke poetically tries to answer these deep questions but in a way that may surprise us.

Rilke’s poems suggest that he finds some spiritual comfort to these big questions, as I have, in performing some simple task over and over in a familiar place. He writes, “Oh gently, gently, performing with love some confident daily task,”  and,  “Perhaps there remains for us some tree on a hillside, which every day we take into our vision; there remains for us yesterdays street and the loyalty of a habit so much at ease that when it entered in it never left.” In some sense I almost have to laugh at Rilke’s “revelation”. Is this it? Some tree on a hillside? Some familiar street?  Is this your answer to the great existential questions of life?  What spiritual comfort can be derived from this?

Yet, while fly fishing, I find some truth in Rilke’s prose.  I realize that the most significant aspect of my own fly fishing experience (that I might dare call divine) is to be found in the simple tasks and places that every day, while I fished, I took into my vision.  And those experiences remain with me. These are the images that will never leave me. They comfort me.  There is the memory of a street I walked over and over as a young boy to get to a little pond where I taught myself to first fly fish. It was there casting rhythmically for hours, days, years, that I learned the art of fly casting.  Those memories as well as countless other images of specific places on the South Platte River I have internalized and will stay with me for ever.

For Norman Maclean in “A River Runs Through It” , the depth of his  fly fishing experience also  seems to have been developed from being in  a specific place accomplishing a simple task over and over. These were the memories that never left him. As an old man in the end of his novel, he is casting alone in the Blackfoot River and he writes, “Then in the arctic half light of the canyon all existence fades to a being with my soul and memories and the sounds of the Big Blackfoot River and a four count Rhythm and the hope that a fish will rise”. It is here in “his” river that he has fished for decades all alone, where he experiences the Logos, the ‘Word’ that sustains all things, is the basis of all things, and is under everything. He ‘hears’ from listening so carefully his whole life that, “under the rocks (and under everything) are the words”.  

Perhaps for us there also can be something divine about fly fishing the same places over and over.  The repetition of familiar simple rhythms in familiar places become “loyal habits” that keep us, “at ease” and when they enter in us, they never leave us.  Perhaps, in time, we too, when we lay quiet our anxieties, begin to hear the ‘word’ that sustains us and will never leave.

I find it is a bit of a paradox that something so powerful can be almost hidden,so non-dramatic and yet  found in such simple things.  But, then I remember that Jesus spoke of the kingdom of God being like treasure that is hidden in a field. Perhaps, the kingdom of God remains hidden in the simple places and tasks such as to be found in certain rivers while fly fishing.  Perhaps.