Night Fishing in Galilee: the Journey Towards Spiritual Wisdom

Cross Currents, Fall, 2003 by Peter Heinegg

By Kenneth Arnold Cowley Publicatons 2002, $12.95 (paper)

"I am as passionate about fishing," says playwright-publisher-deacon (Episcopalian)-Seelsorger-and-expert angler Kenneth Arnold, "as I am about the church." Well, maybe--if one takes "the church" to be the mystical community of the Beloved Disciple, rather than the messy mainline Petrine institution. In any case, Arnold is a passionate and graceful writer; and he makes a brave attempt to unify these six wide-ranging meditations on John 21 (where the risen Jesus meets his disciples by the Sea of Galilee) through the metaphor of fly fishing. Readers of the non-piscatorial persuasion may question whether he pulls this off (or that anyone could), but he does develop some interesting trains of thought.

To begin with, his approach to the gospel text is decidedly protean. Arnold knows all about modern New Testament scholarship; and he doesn't shy away from its radical conclusions, as when he observes that Peter's conversation with Jesus ("Yes, Lord, you know that I love you," etc.) is not necessarily historical; it's not "a moment in real time." But then Arnold also experiments with the vigorous "You are there" realism of Ignatius Loyola's "composition of place" ("I see him [Peter] crawling, splashing onto the shore where Jesus is smiling, laughing at him. He sits on his haunches, spitting water and breathing hard. Jesus looks past him at the boat with its bulky net of fish wallowing toward them," etc.) And he enjoys the hoary old method of allegorization ("There are days of abundance and days of want: but the underlying goodness of God is always there. There are fish in the water even if we do not see or catch them. This is also the pattern in our lives").

Lastly and most convincingly, Arnold weaves the story of his own painful mid-life crises (job loss, divorce, caring for a parishioner with AIDS, the death of his father) into these quirky homilies. Since Arnold speaks with calm authority about the quest for "spiritual wisdom," it's good to know that he has gotten it, or made progress toward it, the hard way. By wisdom Arnold means a complex consciousness that combines awareness of "the Presence," stripping away self-centeredness, fusing with others, trusting in God's love, and practicing "radical discipleship in the world."

Such wisdom, Arnold quietly insists, is not the same thing as orthodoxy. Salvation is not "primarily about my personally living forever." It's a long process of maturation, a subject that, without either over-beating self-promotion or coy self-effacement, he feels competent to discuss from the inside. At the same time, his description of it often sounds perfectly traditional: "The ethic that Jesus offers is not one of mindless self-denial or morbid anxiety. He states a fact, however, that most of us keep at bay: the spiritual life is not about acquiring more for ourselves but about giving up ourselves."

A central feature of this life is, not surprisingly for a writer in his sixties, the clear-eyed acceptance of death. That doesn't qualify as a specifically Christian ideal; but Arnold is a comfortable ecumenist. He may spend far more time with Bonhoeffer than with the Buddha; still, his primary focus, it would be fair to say, is the path to enlightenment.

Fine so far, but what about this fishing business? Arnold's enthusiasm is powerful and, to some extent, infectious. Still, what is one to make of passages (and there are lots of them) like this: "I picture Jesus as a fly fisherman-and more than that, a catch-and-release angler who uses barbless hooks: what he takes out of the water he puts back. He appreciates the subtleties of the sport, the serenity of the river." (Apropos of rivers, wouldn't Israel rank as one of the world's poorer countries for fly-fishing?.)

But in John 21 Jesus is not a catch-and-release angler since: a) he helps the disciples catch and kill exactly 153 fish; and b) he himself roasts some fish for an impromptu breakfast on the beach. Arnold admits all this (and he guiltily recalls the time when, contrary to his usual custom, he killed a brown trout--as his bewildered 12-year-old son looked on). Nonetheless, Arnold finds the notion of fishing as a symbolic link between himself and Jesus just too appealing to forgo; and he keeps returning to it. After releasing an impressive but technically undersized striped bass, Arnold has a moment of wistful speculation: "What would Jesus do? He would not keep fish under the legal limit, even if they were only an inch too short, to feed himself. On the other hand, he might keep an illegal fish to feed others."

Actually, in the end Arnold acknowledges that his whole elaborate argument is a conceit. "The story is not about fishing, however; in that sense, the details do not matter. The story is about transformation in eucharist." Oh well, so it's the 21st century, and our sensibility is still dissociated--that's not Arnold's fault. The idea of "fishers of men" (Mt. 4.19) can't be pressed too far. Had Arnold chosen the metaphor of the Good Shepherd (mentioned three times in John 21), he would have been in even worse trouble, since sooner or later real-world shepherds deliver their beloved flocks to the butcher. All human metaphors for the divine inevitably limp. (And how many women can identify with the lonely exploits of fly fishermen?)