First, the nets.
I watched the silver fish twist in torment as it died, I watched its red gills barbed into the tightly wound strings, and I knew this poor creature’s thrashing into final despair was my doing.
My family had to eat, I know, but for a moment a guilty compassion stole into me. But my family had to eat tomorrow as well as today. I wrenched the broken fish out, threw it in a basket, and got down to the prosaic end to a fishing trip; the untangling of heavy sodden nets. It made my saltened wet hands cut and blister, it made my tired senses rebel; it made my already overworked mind sigh inside. Pushing out another knot only to reveal another one; there was nothing poetic about it.
Let it go, said the bloke, uncannily unlike a Disney princess. Let it go. Leave the damn nets, come on, let’s get a pint and I’ll tell you my plan. Or something like that, if the gospel is to be believed.
It’s not the only liberation from nets I’ve come across.
Singing Psalm 127 alongside my soft rock hero Ian White in the 1980s I loved what seemed much more poetic; “Like a bird, like a bird out from the net – we have broken free, yes we have.” Being a young adult finding my place in the world, without fail I mispronounced it to call myself a bird broken free from the nest! – but there it is, deliverance for the bird, if not for the fish.
It occurs to me now how deeply Biblical, in fact, those nets (and nests) are. I went back to the nets over and over, unable to let those tangles go; they still ate into the tendrils of my salted, blistered soul. But I tried and tried, let it go, let it go, try and listen to the bloke’s plan. Not unlike the William Stafford Message to a Wanderer I posted in here a while back, I was attached to the nets and nests of my own imprisonment but freedom was always an occasional, surprising love, again and again. Surprised by Joy, as old C S Lewis put it; but not in a binary conversion. More in flickers and flashes between the greys of Scottish rainclouds.
How strange that ichthus, the fish, should die in the toils of the net, because the secret symbol of the hastily scribbled fish acronym (Iēsous Christos, Theou Yios, Sōtēr – Jesus Christ, God’s Son, Saviour) far predated images of the crucifix, much nearer to the primitive fish murderer I have been.
If the fish writhes in horrible death, the dove soars free of those nets.
And that sums a lot up pretty well; moments of participation in both Ichthus the butchered fish and, just often enough to save me, the dove descending with the lark ascending. While the nest of Fatherhood (and Motherhood) feels still unsafe to accept. For now. For now, I only see the dove between moments of being Tangled up in Blue.
I thought I’d ended there, but the skein continues. Tunes float into my head – that wonderful old Victorian sentimentalist George Matheson writing
| O Love, that wilt not let me go, I rest my weary soul in Thee; I give Thee back the life I owe, That in Thine ocean depths its flow May richer, fuller be … | |
| O Light, that followest all my way, I yield my flickering torch to Thee … |
… and the Victorian poet Francis Thompson writing of The Hound of Heaven, Love pursuing us in perhaps too aggressive a metaphor – or not? Listen to the opening lines:
“I fled Him, down the nights and down the days;
I fled Him, down the arches of the years;
I fled Him, down the labyrinthine ways
Of my own mind; and in the mist of tears
I hid from Him, and under running laughter.
Up vistaed hopes I sped;
And shot, precipitated,
Adown Titanic glooms of chasmèd fears,
From those strong Feet that followed, followed after.
But with unhurrying chase,
And unperturbéd pace,
Deliberate speed, majestic instancy,
They beat—and a Voice beat
More instant than the Feet—
“All things betray thee, who betrayest Me.”
And then the tender resolution of the poem:
Is my gloom, after all,
SHade of His hand, outstreatched carressingly?
Now into my mind is drifting the metrical Psalm 84:
Behold, the sparrow findeth out
An house wherein to rest;
The swallow also for herself
Hath purchased a nest;
Ev’n thine own altars where she safe
Her young ones forth may bring …
But where I will end is with a story I came across in Life of Pi today. I abhor all theodicies as a vile insult to the suffering and the needy. But I caught a glimpse of mercy for me in my tangled skein.
The holy man was inside the mouth of the god Vishnu, but when Vishnu yawned and opened his mouth he fell out. He saw all of the cosmos and infinite reality, and was terrified. So Vishnu picked him up and put him back in his mouth. Do I want to be swallowed by God, just as, in the Christian narrative, we swallow God in the sacrament? Do I leave my nets or do they leave me? Have I really disowned enough restlessness to snuggle into that altar nest? One day, I’ll know.
