Patrick McManus, who used to write a great back page for Outdoor Life Magazine, once described how fishermen have a language that is all their own, a sort of code. On a pleasant early morning on the water, a fisherman may turn to his buddy and say "well, it sure is peaceful." This is code. It means "we aren't catching any fish."After a few minutes his buddy might reply "you know, I enjoy just being out here." That means, "We aren't catching any fish." Now later on maybe they do catch a fish, and he says: "my, that's a nice looking fish right there." That means, "we caught a small fish."
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| C.O.U.S.'s? I don't believe they exist. |
The fishing hole near home used to be a clay pit for the Kaolin Pottery. It only covers a few acres, but the old-timers swear that the Kaolin pit is over a hundred feet deep. Way down at the bottom, they say the machinery is still there, like ghostly steel leviathans in the dark deep. They also say that among these ghosts lurk C.O.U.S’s. That’s catfish of unusual size, monsters, old and crafty.
Of the great depths, the ghostly machines, and the C.O.U.S.’s, I have seen precisely the same amount of evidence. Which is... well, none.
My canine buddy Sam knew a fishing pole when he saw one and ran over to wait by the passenger door of my Ranger. It was just a mile or two, way down a big hill, and down a scarcely-marked gravel road. This scene repeated many times, almost always with the same predictable results: skunked. More than once I'd be fishing and would realize I didn't have a bucket or cooler or anything to take fish home in. Oh well, I figured, it's probably not going to be an issue, and kept on fishing. There are some great fishing spots in the Shawnee's west side, but this just wasn’t one of them. But it was mine: just me, and Sam, the Whip-poor-wills, and a Great Blue Heron or two.
"Master, we've been working all night and have caught nothing." Every fisherman knows that feeling, when you've been at it for a long time, you're skunked, and it dawns on you that you're going to go home empty-handed. At such a time, fishermen are desperate for a tip. So you know they’re going to listen when they get a tip from the Lord himself. They put out into the deep.
I don’t think you’ll find a more poetic and profound description of the challenge of spiritual life. “Put out into the deep.” Is it possible that they’d been fishing all night long and hadn’t tried that yet? Of course it is. We get stuck in the safe shallows, the familiar shallows, timid and comfortable. We run over the same ground so many times for so long that we barely notice we’ve nothing to show for it.
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| Sloth makes Kristen Bell cry. |
“Put out into the deep.” That’s a message for our world, our church, our parish, and for each person here. When I say it’s a message for our world, I mean especially the rich western world. We’ve become extraordinarily good at producing things. Just marvel at this for a second: we produce so much that we have a whole segment of our economy devoted to convincing people to want things it hadn’t occurred to them to want. This isn't a “down with pop culture” rant, but just spend some time perusing the top television shows, or look at the bestseller list or the magazine rack, and tell me whether you think it’s all just... shallow. Now I’ll go just a little out on a limb here. You know what the besetting sin of our time is? A lot of people say lust. It isn’t lust. Nor is it greed, or wrath, or even pride. It’s boredom. Boredom is an advanced form of sloth. A lot of us aren’t passionate and alive enough to even be any good at lust or greed - we’re just settling for them because we're bored. And we're bored because we weren't made for the shallows.
“Put out into the deep” is also a message for our Church. When you look at the last several decades of the church - again, speaking mainly of our part of the world - don’t you agree that it’s very often been awfully shallow? When churches across the country painted over priceless murals and frescoes with beige paint-rollers, right there you’ve got the perfect metaphor. For a lot of Catholics, Catholicism is like a beach ball: light, airy, hollow, and carried with whatever prevailing wind is in the air. Something to be toyed with in the shallows until it’s batted away. But we weren’t made for the shallows, and Catholicism isn’t a hobby to entertain us. It’s Noah’s Ark upon the deep, bearing us safely over chaos and death. It’s the Barque of Peter, whose Lord can command the winds and walk on the waves.
“Put out into the deep.” It’s too easy to criticize the culture of death and beige Catholicism. Let’s get closer to home and talk about our parish. We’ve been through some changes. New name, new designation of “chapels” instead of “parishes” that we’re trying to get used to, though frankly none of us totally understand what it all means. Fundraising. Building project. The Diocesan Restructuring and Renewal Plan, still going on. And on any of these things, if you put five of us in a room, you’ll find six different opinions. Now I don’t want to imply for a second that these concerns haven’t been valid, or haven’t been worth all the debate and consideration, or haven’t been worth the innumerable hours of meetings many of you have so generously endured. But you will know what I mean when I say these are the shallows of our Catholic life. They are insignificant compared to the infinitely more important things: loving God with all our heart, mind, and soul, and loving our neighbor as ourselves. Going forward, we’re going to be talking a lot about money and architecture. I believe with all my heart that building something beautiful for God is worth doing. But I believe just as strongly that if it isn’t about love, it’s worthless.
The one needful thing is conversion: not other peoples' conversion, but mine, and yours. Take the words of Christ as personally as if He was standing right in front of you, took a firm grip on your shoulders, looked you in the eye and said, “Put out into the deep.”
I can’t be specific because I’m talking about that call of Christ in your life that is utterly unique and intimate. However holy or wicked you are, He’s calling you to take a step further. There’s always deeper water. This word is especially for you who feel stuck in a rut in any way, for you who feel like you’re spinning your wheels, for you who feel like your faith is hollow and airy, for you who feel like you’ve been fishing forever with nothing to show for it, for you who are just plain bored. That’s your conscience speaking... listen. You weren’t made for the shallows.
One last story, from some years ago, when a young man named Malcolm stood on the English coast and stepped into the ocean. He waded out until he was swimming, and he kept on swimming. Malcolm was tired of being alive, and his simple plan was to swim out to sea until life didn't burden him anymore. Eventually he began to sink, with a strange kind of sleepiness coming over him as his muscles gave out. As he went under, he turned to take one last look back at the coastline. As the waves closed over his head, Malcolm saw outline of the distant land, the line of little lights and suddenly he was overcome with the feeling that this was his home, the earth, that he must stay on the earth because he belonged there, because his life had not yet run its course. Somehow, he has no idea how, his exhausted body made it all the way back, and he was different after that. Malcolm Muggeridge was one of England’s greatest journalists, and among other things he was the reason the world learned about Mother Theresa. But it was out in the deep, far from safety, at the end of his strength mentally and physically, having turned and found himself with nothing, nothing at all but grace... it was only there, out in the deep, that he remembered that it’s good to be alive.
It is good to be alive. And it’s time to leave the shallows. Put out into the deep, and be alive again.
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