Saturated Waters

One of the most difficult kinds of fly fishers to guide is the one who knows just enough to not know that he does not know. This is the fly fisher who has spent some time dining in the saturated theoretical informational waters of fly fishing.  This is the fly fisher who has read various fly fishing texts,  books, on line blogs and taken fly casting lessons and perhaps various other classes ranging from “Entomology” to, ‘How to read the water’, and, of course has seen, “A River Runs Through It”. But often this fly fisher can be one who has lacked time alone on the river to figure out things for himself. He only does what he has “been told”. In this essay I am going try  to draw a parallel between the fly fisher who lives in the saturated waters of having easy access to all kinds of fly fishing information and the Christian who lives in the supersaturated culture of ‘easy religion’ and also has access to all kinds of information about the divine and the Christian life. .  

Ironically, I think one of the biggest obstacles to genuine spiritual growth in the modern Christian church is that we live in saturated spiritual waters. We have such easy access to Church services (both live and on the “big screen”), Bible studies, fellowship groups, prayer groups,  CD’s, books, programs, and on-line Christian blogs, facebook, emails, that a person can easily over saturate their lives with “spirituality” and all kinds of teachings  and yet miss out on true spiritual “meat” that causes real growth. In essence, this is the Christian who is never alone, “naked” before the divine.

In such a culture of saturated spiritual waters, it is very easy to NEVER be alone to think and feel for oneself. It is very easy to never have to deal with one’s own true thirst and hunger because it is so easy to be over saturated and falsely satisfied.  It is easy to just become part of the “mass culture”,  even the “Christian” culture; something Jesus never did because the spirit of Christ was abundantly counter cultural. The spirit of Christ is still countercultural today but often we are not aware, because we have become a part of the mass Christian culture ourselves. We can’t see because we are too close to it.  

What do you do if you are a believer who lives in these saturated waters and who partakes in these various Christian activities and yet most of the time you find yourself bored, unmoved, unfed, and thirsty. Or worse still, what do you do if you find so much of the rhetoric to simply not be true or at the very least irrelevant to the deeper issues in your own heart.  In such super saturated waters it is difficult to discern what is good for your soul and to know what is true. I advocate that perhaps the best thing one can do is pull oneself away from it all and go sit alone to pray and ponder things.  

When we live in such saturated waters it is difficult to even be alone to pray. I have become convinced that until the Christian church learns to be quiet in prayer, alone, and to empty oneself of all the “teachings” about God  that we have conformed to that we will remain  spiritual immature. How often have I heard in church such lofty prayers (sometimes they are like a grand performance) filled with so many words. And as church members we often are expected to just adopt this prayer as our own and how this person views God and how God works. We almost have to conform to it.

 Jesus had some different things to say about prayer.  Jesus specifically said that when you pray to not pray in public but to go in one’s room and pray in secret. He said we should not go on and on and babble to be heard by men.  He also said that when we pray to be heard by men that we have received our reward in full. In other words, whatever we get out of praying these lofty prayers in public that…that is our reward. That’s it!  That is all we get!  This is a legal phrase and means that we have received our reward in full.  It is a done deal in the same way that when a court awards compensation to one party, that no more compensation shall be given in the future.   

I think the Christian church is at a time and place where if we are going find something authentic in prayer we will have to “unsaturate” ourselves of much of what we have been taught and test what remains.  In the midst of prayer, we will have to empty ourselves. We will have to empty ourselves of all the thoughts, concepts, metaphors we have about who we think God is and who we want God to be and all the things we have read and heard.  We have to pull back our projections. We have to acknowledge the limits of language. We have to be silent. We have to be still.  We have to let go of the idols we have collected in our supersaturated Christian culture. The most deceptive and difficult idols to let go of are the ones that are highly valued in the mainstream Christian culture. These are the most deceptive idols to let go of. Rilke the poet describes our images of the divine this way, “We heap our images of You upon you until they stand around you like a thousand walls”.

It is well known that one of the most misused scriptures in the Bible that is taken out of context is found in Revelations chapter three verse 20. “I stand at the door of your heart and knock. If anyone hears my voice and opens the door, I will come in to him and will dine with him and He with me”.  This verse has often been used in “alter calls” to those who do not believe and yet the verse is actually written to a church of believers. What could this mean to us who live in supersaturated Christian culture? The answer might be found in the verses just preceding this verse. “Because you say, ‘I am rich and have become wealthy and have need of nothing, you do not know that you are wretched and miserable and poor and blind and naked”. Could these verses not be applied to our modern Christian churches? Maybe this is what happens when without discretion we dine in a supersaturated Christian culture. Perhaps it like eating nothing but cotton candy; all fluff but no substance and we remain immature parroting the “party line”. Perhaps this verse is a call for believers to use discretion and heed the call to feed on true spiritual meat. Perhaps it is a call to empty our selves of our “wealth”; to empty ourselves of all we have acquired in terms of concept and thought about God. Perhaps we need to remember and know that when we let go of our Christian idols and all our clichés about God, that we then realize how “wretched and miserable and poor and blind and naked”, we really are. (V.17)

And then, perhaps we need to sit alone and feel our nakedness and poverty and start all over. This is exactly what I have to sometimes do when I teach others how to fly fish. I just have to start all over and undo what has been done.  

If you would like to dialogue with me about this essay please email me at suragea1@aol.com

Waiting Without Hope

 

The inexperienced fly fisher in his eagerness, wishful thinking and determination to catch a fish may misinterpret events.  I have seen fly fishers “fight a snag” thinking it was a fish and then when the hook finally pulls free of the rock, he still might persist with his belief saying, “Ah, he got away”.  An impatient fly fisher while nymphing may set the hook at false strikes and mess up the natural drift for a “real” fish that may have been considering taking the fly.  Or when dry fly fishing he may see a fish rise and he wrongly assumes the fish was rising to his fly and he sets the hook only to spook the other fish that may have been looking at his artificial fly.  Each time he may yell, “Ah, I missed it”, when in reality there was no fish on his fly. Or, worse yet, he might set the hook with so much  enthusiasm  that he breaks the leader or the whole leader flies out of the river and wraps around the rod resulting in a ‘birds nest’ mess.  Such mistakes are common to the inexperienced. When I guide such folks, I have to love their enthusiasm and even their ignorance. ‘Ignorance is bliss’ even if it is a bit delusional and they often make a mess of things.

In contrast, mature, experienced fly fishers have the patience and art to allow the fly to drift naturally without false striking.  They are less prone to having false hopes. They know how to discern between snags and fish. They are able to stay attune to the drift of the fly, patiently waiting it out, waiting for that precise moment when a fish truly takes the fly. They have poise. They try not to allow “the wrong thing” distract them or give them false hope. They are not easily fooled. The mature angler knows how to read the signs and distinguish false signs. They do not overly react. They react perfectly. In essence, they know the discipline and art of fly fishing and have learned to wait with authentic hope.   

Perhaps a parallel can be made between the tendencies of beginner fly fishers and immature Christians of the church.  They both have impatience and have a tendency to misinterpret events. They both tend to want drama to the real thing. Being an enthusiastic, impatient, wishful thinker and even a bit delusional in fly fishing is one thing but when it comes to our spiritual lives such wishful thinking can  keep the individual (and church communities)  in a state of spiritual immaturity.  And instead of just ending up with spooked fish and a mess of tangled leader we have Christians making a mess of how they try to communicate their “divine experience” to a skeptical world.  The writer to the book of Hebrews states, “Spiritual meat is for the mature who through practice have their senses trained to discern good from evil”. The mature Christian as well as the mature fly fisher has discernment and this discernment marks their maturity.

Both immature groups, the inexperienced fly fisher and the immature Christian, do not have the art. And as Dante said, “Far worse than in vain is he who leaves the shore and fishes for the truth but has not the art”. In essence, such a person who does not have the art does not do this merely in vain. In other words, the result is not just some useless thing. It is far worse. He makes a mess of things both in fly fishing and in his spiritual life. The immature would be better off not ‘leaving the shore.’ He would be better off learning to wait…..and to wait… and to wait.  Do nothing but wait. But the immature are not good at waiting, both in the church or on the river.  

The human ego, greedy for experience, both in the physical realm (in this case, fly fishing), and the spiritual realm (the immature Christian demanding to experience the divine)  has a tendency to impatiently grab at false hopes and grab for the wrong thing. The fly fisher wants so badly to feel a fish pull and the Christian wants so badly to feel the divine. The words grabbing or snatching seem appropriate to describe this tendency accurately. In both cases, it takes the mature authentic individual who can wait in hopelessness and learns to value the waiting in and of it self. The mature individual knows there are no guarantees of either experience. The fly fisher learns to remain focused on the natural drift of the fly and disciplines himself to not allow anything to disturb that focus. He waits and waits for the right moment and only the right moment.  The mature Christian in prayer like wise remains in silence and focused on the flow of things; the flow of all thoughts, expectations, and anxieties down the river as he empties himself,  waiting for the divine moment;  the narrow gate where God might enter.  

T.S. Eliot had something to say about waiting and not being deceived or distracted by the “wrong thing”. He said, “I said to my soul, be still and wait, wait without hope for hope would be hope of the wrong thing. I said wait without love for love would be love of the wrong thing. Wait without love for love would be love of the wrong thing; Yet there is faith but the faith, the hope and the love are all in the waiting.”

It seems to me that both the immature fly fisher and immature Christian can impatiently hope for the wrong thing. And yet they do not know it is the wrong thing. They have not learned,  (because they have not been taught) the art of waiting. Waiting in both cases is a holding out for the real thing, In a sense, the mature is one who refuses to settle for anything but the truth. He waits for an authentic experience even if that experience is felt as silence and nothingness. He delights in only a pure event. As Donald Nicholl said, “Delight in the truth. Truth tastes better with each illusion that evaporates.”  This process of negation is an old tradition called the via negativa. It holds to the idea that God can perhaps be known, only by first learning to discern about what He is not.  The individual engaged in this process in a sense says, “No, this is not it, No, this is not it,” again and again. He waits and he waits. He has discretion and he is anything but negative. On the contrary, he is of  a “honest and pure heart”.

In this silence of waiting all wishful thinking fades. Only a true faith persistently remains in spite of what is not experienced.   And sometimes out of seemingly no where, a fish takes the fly.

If you would like to dialogue with me on the contents of this essay or any other essay on this blog you can write me at  suragea1@aol.com