The Paradox of Faith in Fly Fishing: Believing and Not Believing

Over the last 25 years, there have been numerous people I have guided in fly fishing who were trying it for the first time. Some of them had never fished before in any form. But, by the end of the day, after managing to catch some trout, they often will tell me the same story that goes something like this; “Anthony, I never really thought I was going to catch anything today. I was happy to just be here and try it and learn, so the fish I caught were an extra bonus.”  Appreciative clients are wonderful people to fish with. They are truly grateful for the fly fishing experience and I admire their humility and strangely, I even respect their lack of faith.

Such a scenario brings to mind a deeper spiritual issue that I have thought about for decades. It is the idea that when a person states he does not believe he may actually be very close to believing (or deep down he may actually believe). This reflects a strange paradox of faith, in that by not believing we may actually be believing. I know for me personally, there have been times when it seemed I believed the least, it was then that some thing unbelievable happened. There have also been times when I have been most disappointed and angry and I could only cry out, “Where are you God, I don’t believe in anything anymore”, and somehow at that precise moment of not believing I actually believed ( at least a tiny bit). And ironically, sometimes, the more intense the not believing was the more intense was the conviction that I believed or was about to believe. I also am reminded of the story of Abraham and Sarah who when at a 100 years old were told they were going to have a son they laughed in disbelief. Or was it belief?  

Chesterton said, “Christianity is a superhuman paradox where by two opposite passions may blaze beside each other”. Could believing and not believing be two opposing passions that blaze beside each other? 

Faith is a mysterious paradox.  Perhaps this paradox is no more mysterious than when Jesus spoke about the faith of a mustard seed which could grow into a huge tree or be potent enough to cast a mountain into the sea and how it would be those who were poor in spirit who would have the kingdom of God and those who would mourn would be comforted and how the first shall be last and the last shall be first and how Peter’s doubting faith allowed him to walk on water (at least, for a little while), and how a man cried out to Jesus, “help my unbelief”, and Jesus healed his sick daughter. And I think of the thief on the cross next to Jesus, who in his last hour of life probably did not believe in much of anything is told by Jesus he would be with him in paradise that very day.

So even while fishing and engaged in the rather silly task of trying to catch fish  I wonder what really goes on in the heart and mind of the fisherman. I wonder to what degree,  hope and faith are possessed. I tend to think the first time fly fisherman often may have only a tiny bit of faith (such as a mustard seed), but often it is enough. And maybe even in those situations where the client concluded beforehand that he was not going to catch anything, I wonder if he may have actually believed. Or maybe “behind” his expressed unbelief was the tiniest hope, the mustard seed Jesus spoke of.  Or still yet, maybe the moment a person says, I do not believe, grace is present and so is faith.

There are also those situations where I find myself trying however feebly to share my faith with others. I may make a statement or two and get no response or sometimes I get the angry response of , “How can you believe in anything? Look at the mess the world is in. Look at how hypocritical the church has become. And look at my life. Do you have any idea what I am going through?  I don’t believe there is a God.”  Even in such situations, where the exact polar opposite of believing is expressed, I still wonder, deep down, what a person might truly believe. All it takes is a mustard seed size amount of faith. Who knows?

I cannot formulate these experiences or ideas into any kind of a formula or principle to follow that would dictate the success of fishing or draw parallels to faith and the spiritual life.  It would be folly for me to suggest anything along those lines because real life has provided too many contradictions.  In my years of guiding I have fished with people who expressed “great” faith hardly catch anything or those who seemingly expressed no faith make great catches. I have seen the arrogant get skunked but also at times make great catches.

Added to this complexity and paradox is the fact that it remains very difficult for anyone to know with certainty what someone deep down truly believes. Can faith exist “under” a person’s statements to the contrary?  Maybe even as the atheist utters the words, “I do not believe there is a God”, there is grace and perhaps belief, or, if not belief then belief that is about to be born?   Could even in these situations there still be a mustard seed of faith “underneath” statements uttered?  

So, I ponder these issues with out reaching any conclusions. I do not claim to understand this paradox. I remain rather ignorant. Nor do I understand as a guide how my own faith, big or small, affects the success of the fly fisher I am teaching. I might only dare to say that when I meet someone and that person tells me of the great faith he possesses in regard to anything,  I tend to feel a bit skeptical and yet, when some one tells me of how little they might believe I tend to trust their belief or “unbelief” more. This is probably just due to personal preference.

In the end, my best guess is that all I can do is hope and hold on to a mustard seed of faith through out my life, and for others and hopefully that will be enough.

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Secret places on the River and of the Heart: Spiritual Insights from Colorado Christian Fly Fishing Guide

Fly fishers have “secret holes” on the rivers they fish. We can be quite hush-hush about these places. Likewise, we often have secrets of the heart that we keep deep inside and tell no one.

As Christians, it is sad that we often try to hide who we are. We harbor our secrets. We remain on a stage performing and afraid to reveal what we are really thinking and feeling. We think we need to always smile parroting religious clichés.  Yet the sharing of our secrets is our “humanness”, part of our life story, and can be a place of deep connection among believers. Our deep inner secrets, or more so, the “general” secret of who we really are can bond us together on a level that the pretending will never achieve. Maybe this is the secret, that what we present to others is always somewhat different from what we truly know about ourselves.  

It seems that even when I try to tell people who I really am they will often disagree. I am not sure why it is this way.  “Oh no, you are not like that”, they will say. Perhaps my outward persona is quite “effective” in fooling people and it keeps people from being close to me.

For me, a big secret is my general sadness with much of life. Therapists might call this depression and perhaps they are at least in part correct. Perhaps melancholy is simply my natural disposition and a part of the human condition; “I know the earth and I am sad” said the poet Pablo Neruda.  In addition, no doubt part of my sadness simply stems from   my own shortcomings and at times, my own ungratefulness. But, all these reasons aside,  I think at least  some of my sadness has to do with a great spiritual truth.  And that truth is simply that Jesus was a “man of sorrows and acquainted with grief”, and as Christians, this man of sorrows lives with in us. Somehow I think if we really believe in the life of Jesus then in some very real way we all share in that sadness and brokenness and somehow that is part of the secret that we all share in together but we don’t want to reveal because we think we have to always appear “together” and happy.

Being unable to share this secret of our sadness is perhaps what keeps us from being as close and connected as we could be and perhaps what even limits us from understanding the heart of God. It is a paradox in that deep down we want to be accepted for who we really are but we are also scared to death if we show our true selves to each other and even to God that we will be rejected.

Frederick Buechner says it this way, “What we hunger for perhaps more than anything else is to be known in our full humanness, and yet that is often just what we also fear more than anything else. It is important to tell at least from time to time the secret of who we truly and fully are-even if we tell it only to ourselves –because otherwise we run the risk of losing track of who we truly and fully are and little by little come to accept instead the highly edited version which we put forth in hope that the world will find more acceptable than the real thing.”

I personally have grown weary of the edited version of myself and I have grown bored of the edited versions of others. Maybe, (and I need to start with myself), we can learn to share the secrets of our hearts with one another and that might somehow make our own lives and our relationships with others a bit more authentic. And then we would all share in a similar knowing in the same way that when we reveal our secret fishing holes we would find out that everyone already  knew. It was not a secret after all.

Bad Habits On the River and in the Spiritual Life

              There is a fascinating tale called “Skeletal Woman” where a fisherman snags into what he believes is a huge fish that will feed him and his family for quite some time. With great excitement he reaches for his net only to discover that he has hooked into a skeleton from which he cannot escape. This is a tale that teaches us about life/death cycles that are a part of our being, a part of nature, and a part of the spiritual life (Clarissa Pinkola Estes has an insightful commentary on this story).   

 Fly fishing (with its intimate experience of the cycles of nature), and the Christian spiritual life can both teach us that all things occur in cycles. There are seasons to fly fishing. There is a time to match the hatch to a specific mayfly. There is a time for the lizard to shed its skin. There is a time for us to shed our skin to find new life. There is a time to let go, a time to let things die for new growth to occur.  Jesus said, “He who keeps his life shall lose it and he who loses his life shall find it” and, “Unless a grain of wheat falls to the ground and dies it will bear no fruit”. But, it is difficult to allow our old ways to die. When Jesus spoke of his death the disciples wanted to hear nothing about it. Neither do we.            

           While guiding some times my client will catch a fish on the first cast before I can teach the proper technique and then the bad technique becomes ingrained because it is reinforced by the catch.  This most likely happens after the drift is over and the fly fisher swings the fly to cast again and then the fish strikes. So, in essence the fish strikes when the fly is not dead drifting and the fly fisher just got ‘lucky’.  This bad technique of not properly drifting the fly can then become a habit and it is hard for me as the guide to talk the client out of what he is doing because it just “worked”.  The fly fisher will keep simply swinging the flies in all day long instead of concentrating on good drifts.  Any bad habit that “works” is difficult to break, whether on the river or in life.

           Likewise, in our personal lives we can develop strategies that make life “work” but are not necessarily developed from the right motive. By “work” I am referring to the development of a life strategy that leads to acceptance and a way to impact others. In essence the life strategy helps us find our niche or place in the world.  Often, these strategies developed when we were young to avoid pain and they gave us a sense of power and control. The strategy adopted usually involves our strengths and even our spiritual gifts.  These strategies can continue into adulthood with out us even being aware and without questioning.   

            So, why question it? Is this not how life is supposed to work especially since we are not talking about a “bad” life style? Here is where I think we must be willing to be honest about how we might use such a strategy (no matter how good it looks on the outside) for the wrong motive of trying to be independent of God. At the deepest level such a strategy can merely be a defense mechanism to protect us from being vulnerable to God and others. Often it is not necessarily the behaviors that we need to let go of but it is the “rational” for the strategy that must be transformed.  Larry Crabb, a Christian counselor has written in depth about how when we find a place where we are loved and impact others, life “works” but he questions the deeper motives of the heart by which we developed these strategies. He speaks of a “deep repentance” of these strategies because the strategy itself can be of our own creation, some thing the individual devised independent of God.  It is this “independence” that can be in conflict with the authentic spiritual life even though on the outside we look pretty good, our lives “work” and we feel pretty good about ourselves.  As is often the case, the spiritual problem is an issue of the heart.

               In the same way it is hard to break a bad fly fishing habit that actually catches fish it is even harder to let go of an ego centered life strategy that “works” for us.  Yet, true deep spiritual growth involves letting go of the old (at least the motive) through repentance and honestly examining how each one of us has tried to figure out a way of making  life work without God. Perhaps the ultimate arrogance is in the thought, “I can make life work on my own. I do not need God. I can do it my way. I can find my own way to find love. I can find my own way to impact my world”.

            C.S. Lewis, in his fictional story titled “The Great Divorce” describes people who after getting off of a bus are trying to climb a mountain to get to heaven and they are met with angelic beings that try to tell them how they must let go of their old ways.  The more they hang on to their old life strategies of the heart the more “flimsy’ and ghost like they become. But the individual who lets go of the old life strategies begins to grow more solid and can continue up the mountain. These are the ones who turned and were willing to face who they really were and knew they needed to let go of their old life. They were honest enough to look at their naked “skeleton”.

              When we look back at the tale of the fisherman who snags into a skeleton we see that he cannot get away from the skeleton he has hooked. Frantically he paddles to shore and yet it follows. He runs across land but the skeleton follows. Exhausted he dives into his snow-house and he thinks he is finally safe only to find that the skeleton is right there beside him.  But as he faces the skeleton and no longer tries to flee the fisherman begins to change. He feels compassion for the skeleton. He starts to untangle his fishing line from among the bones. And then as sometimes happens in tales, a transformation takes place as the fisherman gets a new heart and the skeleton new flesh.

              We must examine our strategies of the inner heart. When we turn and face our selves honestly, even our skeletons and turn to God, our heart is transformed. Our repentance is more intimate, honest, and of depth.   

               And as fly fishers, as we let go of our bad habits we learn new ways that change us and we learn to become more versatile fly fishers. It is not just the “bad habits” we have to let go of.  Perhaps if we let go of some of our old ways of doing things that catch fish, even lots of fish, (and recognize that success can sometimes be the greatest block to innovation) we would learn innovative techniques that would transform us.

               And we might become artists. 

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

Fellowship On the River: Insights From South Platte River Fly Fishing Guide

Wendell Berry wrote a poem about contrariness and in one of the lines he writes, “When they told me God was dead I said, No he’s not, He goes fishing every day on the river, I see him often”.

I often feel a bit of the same contrariness in regard to things pertaining to faith and church. When “they” tell me I have to go to church to find fellowship, I say, (in the spirit of the poem), “No, I have fellowship every day on the river while fishing. I see them often”.

One would think that those of us who share a common Christian faith and attend church regularly would experience a deep meaningful fellowship with one another. Sometimes this is the case, often it is not. Many people can still feel very lonely while attending church where often the depth of fellowship does not go beyond the ritual of greeting your neighbors in the pew with a hand shake.

If I were asked where I have experienced the most meaningful, and deepest level of fellowship I would have to answer that those friendships often have taken place on the river. I don’t really know what is almost magical about fishing together with someone. Surely it is more than simply trying to catch fish. Perhaps it has something to do with spending time in God’s creation, watching the sun rise, or set and all the different shades of light on the landscape or,  two fishermen glimpse a rainbow or notice the sunlight dancing on a riffle. Maybe it is listening to the sounds of the river and watching it flow by over and over again. Maybe it is watching spring snowflakes the size of half dollar coins falling on the river as trout sip blue winged olive mayflies. Or maybe there is something about watching clouds of millions and millions of tiny glistening trico mayflies fall to the river and then watching the fish gulping them off the surface.  Maybe it is the excitement of when your friend hooks a large rainbow and it leaps out of the water and peels off line. At least at times, somehow these experiences shared can bond fishermen together in ways much deeper than many typical church services.

Two people who share a common faith sitting Sunday after Sunday in a church pew looking forward listening to a sermon, ironically may not enjoy such a mysterious depth of friendship. Perhaps the problem with sitting in church is that it is far too passive for anything of depth to develop. In contrast, fishermen on a river are actively engaged in a common task of trying to catch fish and there is an intimate sharing of ideas on how to achieve this goal.  Of course in some sense it could be argued that this is not a very big mission at all; in fact, it is a bit silly if one thinks about it, yet for anyone who has fished, often times something undeniable takes place between fishermen who are actively engaged in this task. The two people are bonded and changed in some way and usually somewhat “better” for the experience.

While trying to catch fish, there can be a lot of encouragement that goes on among fishermen on the river. I often hear people say, “nice fish”, or “great cast”,  or “well done”.  Sometimes I can even hear the Reverend Maclean as in “A River Runs Through It”, say to his son on their last fishing trip together when Paul was holding up his trophy trout, “Wow, you are a fine fisherman”.  Sentiments are expressed on the river that perhaps normally could never be spoken any where else.  

Strangely I don’t even think the fishermen on a river have to talk about important things for something meaningful to take place. Some times to simply fish together is enough. But of course it is on the river where fishermen will often share stories with one another, describing what they do not like about their jobs, or the fight they got in with their spouse, or some unlived dream, or about the hope that is in their hearts.  The river itself may have a way of listening, perhaps even speaking and drawing people out in ways that rarely happens in church.

While fishing, the Maclean’s seemed to have this special almost metaphysical  relationship with each other and with the river. It was Norman who while watching the  river noticed the heat mirages dancing on the river and said, “I  could feel patterns from my own life joining with them“, and that,  “It was here while waiting for my brother that a story had begun near the sound of water.”  It seems that for the Macleans, being on the river together had provided a medium in which a depth and love could develop in their relationships and this was all part of their story.

And then later in this story while Norman and his father were watching Paul fight a large fish and Paul had to swim across the river to get to a better place where he could land it, there was a sense that they were fighting the fish with Paul. Norman Maclean describes it this way, “We lived in him, and were swept over the rocks with him and held his rod high in one of our hands”.  

“We lived in him”? This may sound a bit too spiritual and metaphysical for a family or a group of friends fishing on a river or even for two people sitting in church to have this kind of a relationship with one another.  Yet, I can’t but help think of what Jesus said in the Gospel of John about his hope for us. He hopes that we would all be one. He says, “I in them and Thou in me that they may be perfected in unity”. 

Such a depth of unity seems mysterious to me and yet I believe such a bonding is possible. It intrigues me. But, when I think of the organized Christian church and my own experience of trying to connect to various churches over the decades, I must confess that I have not even approached such a depth. And yet I believe it exists even as I have not seen it or experienced it.

At best, I have only been on the fringes of this depth and mystery and even this has only occurred while I have been on the river.

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