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.