Where The Real Fish Are Swimming

The Brothers Karamazov, 1879

There is a lot of talk these days, maybe especially among those like me who used to be English professors, about the astonishing decline of interest in the humanities, those subjects we know as literature, history, theology, biblical studies, philosophy, art, music. This decline is going on among all of us, not just students, but most certainly students are drawn to something, they believe, more certainly lucrative.

In addition, as my son Mark, also an English professor, told me again the other day: “Dad, students just don’t read books anymore.” To persist with something as long and intricate as The Brothers Karamazov or Moby Dick or Middlemarch or Wolf Hall, well, forget it. Attention spans have shrunk to the size of texts or Tweets, many of those written with horrifying grammar.

I’ve written about this before, but in the last few weeks, I’ve been involved in conversations where someone felt the need, with a little snicker, to dismiss poetry as worthless. And then, just last week, David Brooks offers suggestions “How to Save a Sad, Lonely, Angry and Mean Society,” mainly by reading literature, listening to music, standing before great paintings. This is where we find what “furnishes your mind with emotional knowledge and wisdom; it helps you take a richer and more meaningful view of your own experiences.”

We are choosing to ditch deeper thinking, allowing ourselves to be satisfied with surface conversation, even on things that matter, like joy and peace and purpose and suffering. We’ve lost a kind of thoughtfulness. We’ve certainly lost interest in the mystery when God shows up in our lives. These are matters that writers and artists throughout time have engaged, so often through exalted language and masterful skills. Can we afford to dismiss all of this?

Stay with me for a moment, slow down, take a few deep breaths, read slowly these magnificent lines from Theodore Roethke’s “The Shape Of Fire”: 

To have the whole air!— 
The light, the full sun 
Coming down on the flowerheads, 
The tendrils turning slowly, 
A slow snail-lifting, liquescent; 
To be by the rose 
Rising slowly out of its bed, 
Still as a child in its first loneliness; 
To see cyclamen veins become clearer in early sunlight, 
And mist lifting out of the brown cat-tails; 
To stare into the after-light, the glitter left on the lake’s surface, 
When the sun has fallen behind a wooded island; 
To follow the drops sliding from a lifted oar, 
Held up, while the rower breathes, and the small boat drifts quietly shoreward; 
To know that light falls and fills, often without our knowing, 
As an opaque vase fills to the brim from a quick pouring, 
Fills and trembles at the edge yet does not flow over, 
Still holding and feeding the stem of the contained flower. 

I used to teach from a book by the mid-twentieth century poet and urbane writer, John Ciardi, called How Does A Poem Mean? I would love to teach that course again, this time maybe to ignite new interest in something as wonderful and now-neglected as Roethke’s poem.

And for my Christian friends. The kind of writing we find in Roethke, and in so many other poets, shimmers from beneath the surface with something sacred. This kind of writing echoes with the rhythms and sounds and speech of biblical language. Even as Christians sometimes dismiss poetry and story and metaphor as not mattering anymore, we need reminding that most of the Bible is written in poetry and story and metaphor.

I had a life-changing encounter with Jesus one night out on the shores of Lake Gennesaret. I was flying back to Seattle from meetings in D. C., a little worn down from trying to make the case for the Christian university in our pervasively secular world. Under the soft glow in my little corner of the plane, I perked up when Jesus stepped up to a group of fishermen: “How’s the fishing going,” I heard him ask. “Not so good,” they responded.  

And then something remarkable happened. Jesus encouraged them to “put out into deep water and let down your nets for a catch.” Stop fishing in the shallows. Those words changed the lives of the fishermen. Those words changed my life forever too.

And so my prayer this morning is this: Lord give us the longing to follow you and put out into the deep, more often through words and paintings and music. Help us to see more clearly where the real fish are swimming.