Retrospective

Today is the anniversary of our nation's independence.  Trish and I are celebrating it in Las Vegas where we're being hosted by Trish's beloved sister Kathy, her husband Byron, and her daughter Megan.  Having a few days with no fishing activity has given me an opportunity to catch up on some personal business, and also this opportunity to transcribe certain recent thoughts and experiences that I've not had time to write about up to this point on my odyssey.

When I was in New Mexico I mentioned that I would cover the subject of religion in a future post.  This is it - now's the time.  Don't worry, I don't plan to say anything that's terribly controversial or offensive to anyone's personal religious convictions or lack thereof.  I promise to show all due respect.  As I've driven through 18 states on my journey so far, I've often seen things that remind me of my own religious experiences, and that's what I want to cover in this post.  As I am sometimes wont to do, I will even connect this topic to fly fishing if you are patient enough to read the entire post.

It may come as a shock to those of you who haven't known me as long or as closely as some others have, but I grew up in a Southern Baptist family and, during my undergraduate college years, was a part-time evangelist and missionary.  I briefly attended a seminary and strongly considered becoming a pastor.  For a variety of reasons I didn't follow through.  Suffice it to say that by changing my course I did a big favor for myself, all Baptists and just about anyone else I may have touched in my life.  I'm quite certain now that God wasn't calling me to be a minister.  But I learned some valuable lessons and had some very interesting experiences in the period of my (occasional) piety, and am often reminded of them now.

When I was in New Mexico a couple of weeks ago, one of the campgrounds I stayed in was a stone's throw from Glorieta, which is the name given variously to:  1) a town, 2) the high mountain pass where I-40 crosses the Sangre de Cristo range to Santa Fe, 3) a monument to a Civil War battle near the pass, and 4) a camp and conference center founded by Southern Baptists in the 1950s which is still operating today.  As I drove by Glorieta, and again when I drove into Las Vegas a few days ago, I was reminded of the summer of 1972 when I was a "missionary" in Las Vegas.  I concluded that season by attending the annual Southern Baptist youth conference in Glorieta.  It would take a book to properly contain the story of that summer:  prowling the back rooms of the Vegas entertainment centers with the "Chaplain of the Strip," being interviewed on air by the then-top local radio personality Walt Reno, preaching fire-and-brimstone sermons that, to my own surprise, generated remarkable power to bring certain vulnerable people to their knees.  I was a dumb, immature kid with no common sense.  What did I know?  I didn't know anything, but there I was grappling with Satan in Sin City with a message of fear, hope and redemption.  Wow.

In mid-August of 1972, a Las Vegas pastor drove me all the way to Glorieta where I joined some of my friends from Iowa and maybe another thousand or two thousand kids in their late teens and twenties at the youth camp.  In those days I was also a musician with intermediate proficiency playing the guitar.  Each day at the camp, lunch was served in a big auditorium and there was an open microphone for those with sufficient courage and talent to attempt to entertain the lunchers.  One of my buddies and I were contemplating performing as a duo.  I possessed a cheap twelve-string guitar and had composed a song that my buddy and I worked into a passable arrangement.  On the day we planned to step up on the stage, the opening act was a good-looking, long-haired guy who performed the Led Zeppelin song "Tangerine," accompanying himself on 12-string guitar.  That kid blew us away.  Substantially all the other performers sang traditional or modern Christian-themed songs, but this kid wowed us with a decidedly secular tune.  If we had closed our eyes, we could easily imagine that Jimmy Page and Robert Plant were on stage, but it was just this one charismatic kid.  When he was finished, my buddy and I were totally deflated.  There was no way we were going on stage to follow that act.  That's what I remember most about Glorieta - an awesome rendition of "Tangerine."

But my preaching, praying and singing days weren't over then.  A couple of years later I traveled with a group of my Baptist friends from Iowa to attend a large Christian conference in Dallas and another smaller conference in Norman, home of University of Oklahoma.  At some point during that trip we were invited to a church service in Del City, Oklahoma, which is a small city that I recently drove by on my way from Memphis to New Mexico.  If I recall correctly, during the early and mid-70's, the Del City church was reputed to be the largest Southern Baptist church in the world.  (Not long after that, the esteemed pastor of the church was elected President of the Southern Baptist Convention, and not long after that, the church defaulted on $14 million of bonds that it issued to build the mighty edifice that I visited and otherwise extend its ministry.)  I'm not sure whether the Del City church was in fact the largest of its kind, but I do know that the church's auditorium and its congregation were duly impressive in size, and it was intimidating.  At that church I found myself standing before thousands of folks, leading them in prayer and playing my guitar.  Wow.  Have I said before that I was just a dumb, immature kid with no common sense?  In the couple of years between the summer in Las Vegas and the service in Del City, I hadn't learned much at all, but once again I was held out as an authority to a large group of people who were apparently eager to obtain my spiritual guidance.  Did I give them any useful guidance, spiritual or otherwise?  It's hard to imagine that I did.  A world in which a dumb, immature kid with no common sense is respected as a mouthpiece for God is a strange world indeed, but that's our world.

What do my experiences reveal?  People are spiritually hungry.  Even people who don't know they are spiritually hungry are spiritually hungry.  There are all kinds of ways in which they try to satisfy their hunger.  Some go to church and adopt certain sets of dogma, and some take advice from people with messages that sound right even if the people with the messages actually have no idea of what life or spirituality is about.  I'm not ashamed to say I have a spiritual hunger.  This is where fly fishing comes in.

Regardless of your actual beliefs, assume for a moment that the Bible contains the Truth.  If you put together the collective statements of the prophets and apostles purported to have written most of the books of the Bible, you must conclude that God is omnipresent.  Specifically, the spirit of God is in all places, according to the Bible.  I personally believe that such a statement is representational rather than literal - that is, it's a specific Christian/Judaic expression of a universal truth that there a cosmic mind permeating everything that we humans, with our limited senses and imaginations, can wrap our minds around.  When I go fly fishing, I tap into that cosmic mind, or God, if you will.  Out in those vibrant places where streams tumble and tree leaves tremble, where surf crashes and grains of sand constantly shift positions in the endless dance of the elements of creation, I find myself looking over the precipice into the great abyss where my senses cannot penetrate and up into the cosmos where untold billions of stars, seen and unseen, speak to the inhuman scale of the multiverse.

Shortly before I left Pennsylvania in mid-May, my friend Eric Schaffhausen reminded me of the historical association between fish and Christians.  That association is why you often see fish symbols gracing the car bumpers of modern fundamentalists.  The fish symbols on their vehicles are marks of their Christian affiliation (and are often a giveaway of hypocrisy when the drivers of those cars practice road rage).  If you read the Bible it becomes obvious how this association was formed - e.g., some of the apostles were fishermen, Jesus asked them to be "fishers of men," Jesus multiplied the fishes for a hungry crowd, etc.  I have my own interpretation of how fish symbolize the search for spirituality.  The surface film of a river or other body of water is the border, or curtain, between the seen and the unseen.  Beneath the surface film is a watery, alien world in which the inhabitants - fish and certain insects and other aquatic creatures - move and breathe in ways that we humans cannot.  We cannot live in that world.  When I cast a fly into or beneath the film on the water and a fish eats the fly and I pull the fish through the veil that separates us and I touch it, it seems almost magical, as if I were reaching up into the sky and an angel's hand suddenly materializes and touches mine.  Fish, like the fairies of the pagan religions or angels of the Biblical tradition, come from another place -  a place that's foreign and strange, but a place that we want to connect to, precisely to solve some of mystery associated with it.  Unless they are protecting us from something specific that we fear, we don't like fences, walls, curtains and other objects that separate us from something else.  We are curious about what's on the other side.  Sometimes the borders are not physical objects; they are simply the limitations of our senses.  Spirituality is about connecting with realities that are beyond the limits of our senses - things that we cannot see, smell, taste, hear or touch.  Connecting with a fish through fly fishing is within the limits of our senses.  It is not spirituality per se, but is symbolic of spirituality.  Consciously or unconsciously, the practice of fishing reminds us of our spiritual strivings and, in some small way, satisfies them.

My journey around America is like floating on a great oceanic current.  I look around and I see other boats and I remember being on some of those boats.  I see great steeples like the spaceship spires of the Mormon temple in La Jolla, CA, tall crosses like the rough-hewn "old rugged cross" attached to a rural Virginia church, and signs proclaiming the path to salvation like the dozens of billboards with Bible verses scattered on the roadsides across the Bible Belt.  I've been on that boat.  I'm on another boat now but I'm still casting lines in the water, connecting with mysteries and wondering what else may be swimming up my chum line or rising to a blue-winged olive.