Portsmouth Abbey Boathouse

We have had the homilette included here on file at The Current for some time, awaiting its moment. Perhaps this week’s issue provides that moment, and place, sandwiched between Br. Sixtus’ discussion of the baptismal font and Prior Gregory Borgstedt’s discussion of faith and war. We find in this little sermon a distinct baptismal theme, though it does not speak explicitly of baptism. Just water, light, and the beginning of new life. It also speaks of a time of darkness and death, reflecting in turn the “great challenge” of war addressed by Prior Borgstedt. And somehow we also find wrapped up into the core of all three statements the theme of the Church and its call to evangelize. Perhaps we have much to learn from a little “Night Fishing.”

Luke’s Gospel contains the familiar story where Jesus asks Simon to put out into deep water and lower his nets for a catch. The peak moment in the story, of course, is the miraculous draught of fish, and Jesus telling him “From now on you will be catching men” (Lk 5: 1-11).

But I think the fish in this story can tell us something too.

Simon tells Jesus that they had been fishing all night. On the Sea of Galilee fishing was, and still is, nighttime work. That’s because its water is so clear that during the day the fish can see the fishermen’s nets and avoid them. In the dark they’re easily caught by nets they can’t see.

The light of day and the darkness of night symbolically represent a choice.

On the one hand, we can resemble those blind fish at night, when in sin’s darkness we remain snagged within the invisible net of our finite life. Cut off from eternal life, we deliver ourselves up to that death which consists in separation from eternal life. In the world, death is a limitation, a conclusion, an end – an end to a life spent mostly in the dark.
“The Collette” in the Stillman Dining HallBut on the other hand, in God, death, especially to sin, is not an end but the beginning of new life. Like fish in clear, day-lit waters, we can see the net descending from above, but not as a threat. Elevated above our own nature by the working of the Holy Spirit, we see it instead as the inrush of grace which never destroys or even interrupts where it enters. Drawn upward, we’re given to see that sacrifice doesn’t mean loss. It’s rather a revelation of the living God that invites mortification, our dying to the nets of our successive limits in order to be drawn up freely and joyously into new life in God.

Unlike fish, we have free wills. We can swim quickly away and seek the darkness, as we often do. Or we can let ourselves be taken up into the divine light, finding ourselves ever more deeply included in that miraculous draught of fishes that is the Church.

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