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Fishing to Friending
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| Essay by Kevin G. Thew Forrester, PhD
April 9, 2020
Fishing
As a young boy growing up in southeastern Michigan, several strong stone throws from the banks of the River Raisin, our dad taught us to fish.
Dad was a teacher, not of fishing, but of high school kids. But he knew the basics of backyard angling – bamboo rod, red bobber, sinker and hook, and the coup de gras – a nice juicy night crawler.
Fishing – setting the bait, lowering the line and unswervingly (well, sort of) staring at the bobber for the slightest slip beneath the lip of flowing water. We were lying in wait to catch the fish unawares. Our hope, often unfulfilled, was to have set a bait so alluring that the passing trout or sunny would be turned from its fishy business and lured to the enticing wriggling worm.
Fishing was about luring and catching the fish before its finely tuned nervous system had become alerted to the con. Seduced, it would inadvertently disrupt the line in its surrounding of the creepy crawler with its mouth, signified by the slight sink of bobber. Ever alert, we would attempt to deftly jerk back the rod and set the hook in the completely unsuspecting mouth.
Startled by the pain, and driven by millions of years of evolution, the fish would pull back, seeking survival through swimming away as hard and fast as possible. The tug of war was on. Our task was to land the fish, against its primordial drive for survival. Pull it in against the life force animating its soul. Haul it from the water-home which makes its very life possible. Separate its mouth from the hook; and while the fish was bleeding and wriggling in its final futile gasps for survival, kill it. From fish to “it”.
Although our angling gear would progress to rod and reel and artificial luminescent bait, seduction into death was the reality of fishing for fish.
Metaphors Matter
Metaphors matter. Their compressed images contain and convey little (and not so little) worlds of meaning. Metaphors are powerful, because they describe and prescribe our relationships with one another with so few words. Their power lies in their awesome capacity to evoke a world. Metaphors can manifest and deepen our sense of the Holy Mystery, or they can mask and distort. Oftentimes it is a mixture. But the difference is real, and it matters.
Some metaphors are so woven into our language and story that they trip off our tongue and evoke emotions without thought, without reflection. They carry the pride and prejudice of untold generations of use. We find reassuring comfort in their evocation. Such is the case with the metaphor found in Matthew 4.19, and employed by teachers and spiritual leaders without a minute’s hesitation: “And he said to them, ‘Follow me, and I will make you fish for people.’”
But if we do stop for a moment or two and recall the actual experience of fishing for fish, the world carried and conveyed by this common metaphor is neither benign nor gracious. To fish for people? Metaphors matter. To deploy this metaphor as descriptive and prescriptive of authentic and humane human interaction is to draw upon speech that masks and distorts the true expression of boundless love in our relationships. It is a metaphor that masks the distortion of power, masks the distortion of honesty, masks the distortion of the invitation to trust the sacred nature of reality as it already is.
I don’t believe that what we are about as spiritual leaders is fishing for people. The metaphor matters and is far from helpful.
We don’t “stand” on the bank, or on the corner, or in the sanctuary, or in the pulpit, or on the printed page, or on the radio, or internet, or television, lying in wait for the unsuspecting person to be caught unaware as they pass by.
We don’t set bait to capture human beings against their will.
We don’t try to find a bait so alluring that it entices a person away from their own sacred unfoldment.
We don’t reel human beings in against their own heart’s desire.
We don’t seek ways to unsuspectingly set a hook from which another cannot escape without harm to their being – physical, emotional, soulful.
Matthew’s metaphor does not travel well across centuries and cultures (and for many scholars the image does not harken back to Jesus). Some metaphors damage more than deliver, and so it is with “fish for people”.
Authentic spiritual leadership is not about landing human beings, bleeding and gasping on the shores of a hungry community – no matter how well intentioned.
This metaphor misses and distorts the vital truth that all human beings are already always sacred. Each person is already on a journey. It is their own journey. No one, especially a spiritual leader, should abrogate another’s sacred right to discover their own path; authentic leaders do not lure (which is to deceive) in order to get someone on the path they think is the right one for them. Authentic leaders have much greater humility (i.e., respect for sacred reality) than that.
Conversation and Friendship
Beneath and behind and within the metaphor of “fish for people” is the mistaken assumption that we are here to convert rather than converse. Once we recognize the inherent and integral sacredness of every soul, our response can only be one of longing to converse with the mystery before us. This precious pearl of a person is already a gateway to the Infinite. As such, they are the divine grace of invitation to engage in conversation and inquiry. Their presence calls our heart into joyous curiosity. Such conversation gracefully transforms all involved.
Conversation calls us into friendship. Here, Christianity is discovered to be a spiritual path rooted in the courageous capacity to befriend another. Here, is a metaphor that also matters: “I have called you friends” (John 15.15). Christianity is friendship. John’s community discovered in Jesus, the Christ’s invitation to us to befriend one another. Within friendship is a world where relationships mature through mutual regard, mutual affirmation, mutual compassion, mutual tenderness, and mutual maturation.
Friendship is a metaphor for the spiritual life that manifests the truth of the inherent dignity of each and every being. Such is the way of Holy Mystery. Friendship is a metaphor that deepens our trust in the experience of the inherent beauty and question that is another. In friendship, one is not baited; one is not lured; one is not hooked; one is not reeled in against one’s will; one does not die as an “it”. In friendship, we meet eye to eye, heart to heart, body to body, soul to soul. We walk toward one another out of mutual trust and affection. Through conversation trust is born and matures. We risk, we initiate, we explore, we fail and fall, we rise, we forgive, we love. Through friendship we are transformed in unimaginable ways. Such is the way of Holy Mystery. In friendship a new kind of world unfolds in which we hold in trust the questioning mind, the searching heart, and the thirsting soul. In friendship no one is killed, but there is dying to smallness and stinginess. Friendship is fruitful and delicious and satisfying. And friendship matters.
~ Kevin G. Thew Forrester, PhD
Read online here
About the Author
Kevin G. Thew Forrester, Ph.D. is an Episcopal priest, a student of the Diamond Approach for over a decade, as well as a certified teacher of the Enneagram in the Narrative Tradition. He is the founder of the Healing Arts Center of St. Paul’s Church in Marquette, Michigan, and the author of five books, including I Have Called You Friends, Holding Beauty in My Soul’s Arms, and My Heart is a Raging Volcano of Love for You and Beyond my Wants, Beyond my Fears: The Soul’s Journey into the Heartland. Visit Kevin’s Blog: Essential Living: For The Soul’s Journey.
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Question & Answer
Q: By Geoff
It strikes me that the God of the Bible, and most religions, is a changeable God; angry, not angry, satisfied with sacrifice, then finally satiated with the “perfect” sacrifice etc. It seems to me that God should be unchanging and unchangeable. It is no wonder that people are rejecting the God of the Bible. I do too. Fear of a changeable God seems inconsistent with the loving God that Jesus teaches. Is God really that fickle?
A: By Rev. Jacqueline J. Lewis, PhD
Dear Geoff,
I don’t think God is fickle, I think our understanding of God varies with who is doing the writing about God, and when. Once human beings walked out of the cave and into the light, we began “theology.” We wondered about God and climate, crops, fertility, fire. We wondered about God and our sickness, our health, and in the deaths of loved ones. We wondered about God and the storm, the volcano, the earth cracking wide open. We made sacrifices to God, we worked hard to please God. We sometimes thought good fortune came with the power of our sacrifices and good behavior. We were frustrated when God “failed” to do what we wanted, to be Who we wanted.
We talked about it with our kin; we told stories; we testified about the God we encountered in our everyday lives. God is good. God is strong. God is a very present help in time of trouble. There is no place away from God we can go. God caused the flood. God opened the sea. God killed our enemies. Did God do all of that? We’re not sure. God cured the cancer; God chose not to. Is that true? We don’t know for sure. But we want to know, we yearn to know. We watch, listen, learn. We grow, we change how we view God. We take more responsibility for the good, the bad and the ugly.
That is what changes, our view of the mystery, our understanding of the ineffable. The conclusions we draw about sacrifice, about prayer, about who God is and what God wants—these change. We wrestle with who God is, as did the writers of scripture, as do the composers of music, the authors of poetry, the creators of art. Frozen in a moment, it seems certain: This is who God is, right now! And then, in the next moment: No, in my experience, God is like this.
And God? God who is the same yesterday, today and tomorrow, understands our imperfect perceptions, can take our mischaracterizations. And keeps loving us. That is a constant. God can take our changing, our doubts, our wrestling. Because God is God all the time.
~ Rev. Jacqueline J. Lewis, PhD
Read and share online here
About the Author
Rev. Jacqueline J. Lewis, Ph.D. is the Senior Minister of Middle Collegiate Church in New York City. She is a nationally acclaimed activist, author, public theologian, and organizer of an anti-racist multicultural movement of love and justice. She has been featured in The Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, and on The Today Show, CBS, and MSNBC. She write The Power of Stories: A Guide for Leading Multiracial and Multicultural Communities, and also wrote a book with her husband John called The Pentecost Paradigm: Ten Strategies for Becoming a Multiracial Congregation.
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Bishop John Shelby Spong Revisited
The Origins of the Bible, Part XXV: The Book of Psalms
Essay by Bishop John Shelby Spong
April 30, 2009
When I was a child I went with my mother from time to time to Chalmer’s Memorial ARP Church, the church in which she had grown up. Those letters “ARP” identified that church as belonging to the Associate Reformed Presbyterian tradition, an ultra-fundamentalist branch of the most rigid form of Calvinism. What was most unusual to me about this church was that they did not sing any hymns. Hymns, they argued, were made up of human words written by human authors and as such they were considered unfit for use in worship where only “the words of God” were meant to be heard. Instead of hymns, the members of this church set to music the 150 psalms from the Bible, which they claimed were “God’s words.” So the Book of Psalms became the hymnal of this church. For all of the strange literalistic theology that was reflected in this reasoning process, this church had understood correctly the original purpose of the Book of Psalms. It was in fact the hymn book of Judaism, created for use in worship, first in the temple and later in the synagogue. Once this insight is grasped, the language of the Book of Psalms makes sense. There are numerous liturgical references and directions found in the psalms: imploring people “to sing to the Lord a new song,” frequently mentioning the choirmaster and referring to a variety of instruments traditionally used in Jewish worship, such as the trumpet, harp and lyre. The psalms also refer to things like sacrifices, processions, altars, burnt offerings, thanksgivings and sacred vows, all of which are liturgical acts.
When one looks at the Book of Psalms through the lens of the worship life of the Jews it also becomes apparent that a number of the psalms were designed for the specific celebrations observed in the annual Jewish liturgical cycle. For example, Psalms 113-118 were used in the three extended festivals that mark the Jewish year: Passover, which was expanded into the Festival of the Unleavened Bread; Sukkoth or Tabernacles, the eight-day harvest festival in the fall; and Dedication, an eight-day festival of light that comes in the dead of winter, originally marking the return of the light of true worship to the synagogue at the time of the Maccabees, and which today we refer to as Hanukkah. Psalm 118 was particularly adapted to use in the great procession that accompanied the harvest festival of Sukkoth. In that procession people waved in their right hands bundles of leafy branches called lulabs, made of willow, myrtle and palm, as they recited the words from this psalm: “Hosanna! Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord. Hosanna in the highest.” It is clear to see how the Christian observance of Palm Sunday was influenced by this liturgical observance of the Jews. Psalm 119 was probably written originally to be used at the annual Jewish observance of Pentecost or Shavuot, which celebrated the giving of the law to Moses on Mt. Sinai. Shavuot came fifty days after Passover (hence the name Pentecost) and was marked by a twenty-four-hour vigil. It takes a long psalm to serve a twenty-four-hour vigil and that is why this is the longest psalm in the Bible. It is also a hymn in praise of the glory and beauty of the Torah, which the Jews believed was God’s greatest gift to the world. Psalm 119 is conveniently divided into eight segments of three stanzas each to fit the vigil format of eight three-hour units, thus providing a reading for each part of the vigil. The length of this psalm is not an accident.
Other psalms, especially numbers 102, 120, 171 and 130, were used on days of public penitence and some festivals. They are quite reminiscent of the earliest hymns of the Christian Church, which were surely modeled on these psalms. I refer to those songs that Luke puts into the mouths of the major characters in the birth narrative: the song of Zechariah, the song of Mary, the song of the angels and the song of Simeon, the priest. These psalm-like hymns are still used in Christian worship today, though we tend to refer to them by their Latin names: the Benedictus, the Magnificat, the Gloria in Excelsis and the Nunc Dimittis.
Most Christians are not consciously aware of the fact that the gospels themselves were actually born in the synagogue and are largely shaped by the liturgical patterns of the Jews. That is why we find some ninety-three references to the psalms wrapped around the story of Jesus in the gospels alone. The story of the crucifixion is in large measure based on Psalm 22.
There is a similar tendency in the gospels to relate the life of Jesus to each of the great celebrations of the Jewish year. The story of Jesus’ crucifixion was placed into the Jewish observance of Passover, for example, not because it actually took place at that time but because Passover became the liturgical context in which the death of Jesus was interpreted. From as early as the writings of Paul (51-64 CE), Jesus had come to be seen after the analogy of the newly sacrificed Passover Lamb. When one reads the exodus story, which the Passover liturgy memorializes, one notes that it was the power of the blood of the sacrificed “Lamb of God” on the doorposts of Jewish homes that protected them from death. When the story of the crucifixion of Jesus was told as the sacrifice of the “new” paschal lamb, the cross came to be seen as the doorpost of the world and the blood of Jesus on the cross was viewed as the power that banished death from the lives of believers, thus giving rise to the phrase “saved by the blood.” This intertwining of the story of the cross with the story of the Passover drew the two into the same time frame. It was not a reflection of the memory of history.
Other Christian signs that relate to Jewish holy days are that John the Baptist (and his message of repentance) was simply the transformation into a Christian context of the message of Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year. In both the people gathered and repentance was urged as the way to prepare for the coming of the kingdom of God. The story of the transfiguration of Jesus was adapted to reflect the observance of the mid-winter Feast of Dedication. In Dedication the light of God was said to fall on the Temple and in the story of the transfiguration on Jesus as “the new Temple,” which is what the body of Jesus came to be called. The gospels are clearly the products of the synagogue and as the psalms were a major piece of synagogue worship they inevitably became a major piece of the developing Christian liturgies.
Who wrote the Book of Psalms? This question makes no more sense to ask than who wrote the various Christian hymnals. They are both compilations of the worship traditions of the ages. Christian hymnals include the plainsong words and settings of the 13th century, the Reformation words of the 16th century, the social gospel message of the 19th century, the pious evangelical words of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the modern futuristic hymns of the late 20th and in hymnal supplements even the words that express the hopes of the 21st century. Likewise the Book of Psalms reflects the long religious history and pilgrimage of the Jews and thus has no single author. There are psalms dedicated to the beauty of creation, that extol the virtues of the king, that bewail the human condition and that express both the despair of the exile and the joy and hope connected with the return from the exile. Just as our hymnals contain some of the dreadful theology that speaks of blood and sacrifice and the expressions of the wrath of God, so in the Book of Psalms we are frequently embarrassed by the theology of yesterday. We meet in the psalms, for example, some of the worst aspects of a tribal deity who delights in smashing against the rocks the heads of the children of the enemies of the Jews. Contrary to what my mother’s ARP Church thought, the psalms are hardly “the words of God,” unless you want to attribute to God some dreadful aspects of depraved behavior. The psalms are made up of uniquely human words addressed to God expressing uniquely human emotions and feelings.
We have no idea how or when the Book of Psalms arrived at the number of 150 as the totality of the psalms that merited inclusion in the sacred text of the people. In one of our earliest complete versions of the Bible, a 4th century work known as the Codex Sinaiticus, the whole set of 150 psalms as we know them today are present. Yet another somewhat later 4th century work, known as Codex Vaticanus, lacks Psalms 49-79. We do know that at some point in Jewish history an order was imposed on the Book of Psalms. From the earliest time they seem to have been divided into five books, each ending with a doxology in the final verse of the last psalm in each section. Book One includes Psalms 1-41; Book Two, Psalms 42-72; Book Three, Psalms 78-89; Book Four, Psalms 90-106; Book Five, Psalms 107-150. That probably represented, once again, a Jewish liturgical adaptation of the use of the Psalter to accompany the five books of the Torah, Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy, the annual reading of which organized the yearly liturgical calendar of the synagogue.
There are other things in the Psalter pointing to a long development over time. The name of God is spelled two ways, reflecting the two centers of Jewish life and history: Jerusalem, where the name Yahweh was primary, and the Northern Kingdom, where the name Elohim was preferred. In the last verse of Psalm 79, we are told that “Here the prayers of David are ended,” as if to say that an incorporated section has come to an end. Verbatim duplications in some of the psalms reflect the fact that they were from more than one source. We now believe the psalms were compiled into more or less their present form by the Jews somewhere between 400-200 BCE. They reflect various times in the Jewish story and obviously various authors. For the record, the authorship of any of the psalms by King David is pious myth not a fact of history.
Should the psalms continue to be used in Christian worship? Time does “make ancient good uncouth,” noted the poet James Russell Lowell. Nowhere is that truth better seen than in the Book of Psalms. At best they are a mixed blessing!
~ John Shelby Spong
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