Meditations on a Tackle Box

Themes: Fishing, Hope, Love

The plastic box contains a disjointed collection of fishing tackle: the aggregate of summer holidays, a tangle of failed temptations. Take out the plastic hand-lines and stack  to one side. The cork hand-line is more interesting. It can sit on its own. A small box full of lead. Hefty. Dense. Held shut with a rapidly perishing rubber band…

(Have you ever considered that an oyster is really a kind of elastic between two shells?)

… The bright points of stainless steel hooks and barbs prick out of the gray and rust. The brass spinners form seams of precious metals among the base. Ripe for the alchemy of the seas. These little plastic tackle boxes always come filled with compartments and into each one we place precisely the same jumble of hooksleadsinkersandspinners as all the others. Each compartment contains the chaos of the whole. Every tackle box I’ve ever seen is like this. Everything is like this. Set it aside.

I am interested primarily in the lures.
Of course.
After all, this is the Being of Fishing: the temptation of fish, the art of piscine persuasion unto death. “You will not surely die!” says the craftiest of God’s creatures to the innocent fish. “And when the fish saw that the bait was good for food and pleasing to the eye, she took some and ate it.”

The bottom of the box is filled with old lures. Scattered and discarded temptations. Hard wooden lures in lurid colours with bibs for bobbing, soft plastic lures that wriggle arousingly, lures that whir and spin: engines of discombobulation. Each attempts to embody the desires of fish. Each was purchased with hope, and cast into the waters with anticipation. Each is a salt-encrusted moment of ‘Fishing’…

(When did Man become the Tempter?)

… Fishing: an activity whose deepest phenomenological structure consists almost entirely of hoping. Standing on the edge of the world and hoping. Contemplating liminality and sublimity: land/water/sky/death. And hoping. Rising and falling with the movements of the celestial bodies. And hoping. Rhythmic, yet still. Consciousness focussed on receptivity: waiting for the little taps on the line. Morse code from beyond. Weirdly, this little school of fake fish, stranded at the bottom of a box is an archeology of human intentions and desires: formed, enacted, abandoned, mouldering.  Fishing generates a sweet awareness of power and a subconscious uneasiness. Moments, trivial to be sure, of planning, contemplation, exhilaration, frustration. Fishing is love and death, fashioned and handled with uniting desires.
I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.

There is a knot that every fisherman learns to tie. Seven turns, back through the eye-loop, through the loop now formed, slide down and pull tight. The blood-knot. I learned it from my father who claimed he could tie it in the dark. (Which was probably true back then). I have the same fat fingers as him: the same shaped hands that used to fascinate me when I was a child bored in church.
I never learned the blood-knot in a book. I bet hardly any fisherman ever did. We learned it as a tradition. The acts of tying, whether in the dark alone, with cold fingers and the wind peeling the skin from your ears, are enacted tradition. It ties more things together than just hook and line. Teaching it to others might be how we mend the world. Or break it.

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In defence of the proximate.

Themes: Art and Imagination, Beauty, Hope, Philosophy, The Future, The Trinity

Defence of the Defence (2 sentences)

1. Not the ‘approximate’, although it is worthy in its way. It is an attribute of God to be proximate to all and thus (a)proximate to human understanding. There are pleasant idle hours to spend in contemplation of the alpha privative. (Particularly one as odd as the ‘a’ in approximate). I nod in friendly estimation toward the Negative Theologian. But the via negativa is hardly a road, more of a fence to keep you on the road. We must journey further on the Way who proceeds.

2. And I challenge anyone to question my commitment to the ‘farther off’. Many of the finest things are farther off, don’t you think? Mountain ranges are an obvious case. In fact a double case: fine to behold from afar, and when you’re perched on the crest, making far-off things fine.
I long for the Delectable Mountains, to be shepherded in Immanuel’s Land; for the glimpse from Mt Clear of the gates of the Celestial City. I am tortured with the thought that perhaps they will always be farther off.

I lift up my eyes to the mountains—
where does my help come from?

Psalm 121:1

This, of course, is the dangerous ambivalence of the ‘farther off’. It can be constantly removing itself to the horizon. Perhaps because something in the human heart was created for visions, for anticipation and expectation, the ‘farther off’ is the most powerful of the modern techniques of power. Some things that appear farther off are not really there at all, no matter how fast you run. No trophy, no flowers, no flashbulbs, no line. The desire for the ‘farther off’ when undisciplined, when cultivated without wisdom or direction, flowers into an infinite dissatisfaction whose-not-entirely-approximate name is Hell.

The true lover of the ‘farther off’ engages a double aesthetic: on the one hand, a disciplined appreciation that somethings are fine simply because they are distant; and therefore one must keep one’s proper distance to love them truly. On the other, acknowledging that there is a ‘farther off’ which beckons us come closer: its name is ‘promise’. The true lover of the ‘farther off’ engages in this aesthetic discipline: cultivating joy, wonder, reverence, sublimity at the contemplation of the essentially ‘father off’; and yearning to come closer to the promised. (the cultivation of this discernment in human affairs is one of the true uses of philosophy, even of the post-modern hermeneutic of suspicion). This double aesthetic is the heart of Christian worship: it is its dynamism and transcendence; it is what makes it interesting for all eternity. It is the double aesthetic of the resurrection: the place where the true lover of the ‘farther off’ learns to cultivate discernment, to learn what it is that beckons us closer, and what demands that we remain distant. It is the double aesthetic of the Trinity and Incarnation. It is the character of God.

3. I rest my defence of the defence.

 

In defence of the proximate:

The proximate is neither approximate, nor farther off, nor promise.
It is what we must be in order to love them truly.

You and me and the friend
who draws near in faith.

“And they said one to another,
Did not our heart burn within us,
while he talked with us by the way.” (Luke 24:32 KJV)

I rest my defence.

(for Emma on her 30th Birthday)

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Hoping for Others

Themes: Church, Hope, Society

The Roman Catholic Archbishop of Westminster in England, Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O’Connor, last night gave a valedictory lecture at Westminster Cathedral. It includes an interesting perspective on the history of Catholicism in Britain over the last 160 years, but also some rather beautiful insights into the role of the Church in our secular society. The Church is one of the last voices in our culture to hold onto a set of expectations for the future which transcend personal or nationalist interests. We have a universal hope.
In the search for inclusive, inoffensive labelling, our secular society has taken to branding Churches as ‘faith communities’. Perhaps we have an opportunity to fill out that label with our own particular content – something that brings out the truth that (largely uniquely now) it is Christians who are The People Who Hope For Others.

Here’s a quote from Cardinal Murphy-O’Connor,

One day the Church may be in favour with the secular powers, another it may be pilloried. We do not seek respectability, we seek faithfulness – faithfulness to the reality of Christ who is the Light of this age and every age and to the Church which receives its truth from Him and the gift of his Spirit. And with that faithfulness to Christ and his Church comes faithfulness to what it is to be human and building of a society in which everyone has the capacity to flourish whatever their race, creed, age, status and ability. The lamentation for a past time, some glorious golden age, is not a Christian song. It is not the song of faith but of despair, for our faith gives us a vision not of what has been but of what will be – whatever the difficulties or sufferings we have to endure – we cannot surrender or lose confidence in the future which God has secured for us. This is why the Church must always be an active agent in the creation and building up of a genuinely humane culture.

It’s worth reading the whole thing, which you can do on Ruth Gledhill’s blog here.

BTW, what is the Cardinal doing to Rowan in that photo?

Photo by Catholic Church (England and Wales)

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