He Binds It All Together
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So he picked me up at General Mitchell International with rods and tackle in tow, and we dutifully drove north to an out-of-the way lake where there was a good chance of encountering bluegill and very little chance of encountering my mother. He was a prolific maker of fires, of which I have happy memories — be that lake-side or camp-side or just in his back yard — but with a party to get to there was not time to cook our catch, so instead we stopped in at The Fin & Feather to eat amidst the mounted game and the sundry locals who had likewise just gotten a line or two wet. I do not recall what we talked about that day, but I’m sure it circled around topics I enjoyed, as he had a knack for turning a conversation toward those matters that were of interest to whomever he was with. He seemed always present, always engaged, always at peace about things.
That was many years ago. But I was lately reminiscing about it while I was listening to the story of the day that St. Peter and the other apostles fished, after Jesus had risen. Having just personally lived through the climax in the arc of Man’s fall and redemption, the grand turning point in the cosmic battle between good and evil, life and death, Peter decided to go fishing. What a curiously simple, earthy sort of thing to do.
I suppose it was comforting and familiar for him. Maybe slipping out onto the water, feeling the wind on his face, and letting his hands do something they’d done countless times before freed his mind to do something it had never done before: contemplate the life and death and life again of God incarnate. I imagine he looked at the boat and the darkened waves and the brightening shore and he thought on the meaning of Church. As embodied spirits, perhaps it is necessary that we connect with the lowly things of the world from which we were made in order to process the higher things of the World to which (we hope) we are going.
In any case, for whatever reason, he went out and got a net wet, and I hope it brought him some peace, if not, at first, any fish. And eventually Jesus arrived on the shore, in all his glory, no longer the least bit dead. But despite his glory, here too the setting is curiously simple and earthy. There is no passing through walls, as with Thomas. Indeed there was no need, as Thomas was indoors but Peter he met outside, on the beach, the wind on his own face. And there he made a fire (reflecting and redeeming the fireside at which Peter denied him), on which he prepared fish, the fruit of Peter’s trade. Where did they come from, these particular fish? Maybe Jesus miraculously caused them to arrive — he had a history of doing that sort of thing and would do so again momentarily — but maybe before any of this, Jesus himself had spent a bit of solitary time fishing the morning waters, breathing in the quiet joy of his Earth. Regardless, Peter and crew eventually saw him, and then they finally caught something as well. One hundred and fifty-three somethings, to be precise. And that precision, too, is curious.
St. Jerome postulated this very specific number symbolizes the one-hundred-and-fifty-three species of fish that were known at the time, and these in turn symbolize all the nations and people of the earth. And as I listened, I briefly wondered about the other thirty-two-thousand species of fish we now know of, and I guess it’s all the same because the apostles knew of one hundred and fifty-three in their time and place, and that’s what matters — a time and a place — and that is the point. The local is where we find the universal, and where it finds us.
Indeed, in the case of my uncle, it wasn’t even one-hundred-and-fifty-three. It was bluegill, perch, crappie, bass, and an occasional walleye. That’s what we have around here; that’s our local stock and fare, and my uncle was the consummate localist. By which I do not mean, as is often meant, that he was someone who wrote essays about ‘localism,’ though I imagine he could have done so well enough. He was a great bibliophile, and early in life he had hoped to go to school to be an English professor. But he married a lovely young lady from the neighborhood softball team (my aunt, who had apparently taken up the sport in the hopes of meeting him), and soon enough they married and soon enough children came along who could not wait for a doctorate to feed them. So he took the uncredentialed jobs available to support a family in a small town, and he kept at it day after day, year after year. And he spent most of his time in a fairly tight radius in our unassuming neck of the woods, which, he once confided to me, is a true paradise. And although he kept responsibly informed about persons and matters far away, about wars and weather patterns, congresses and conclaves, he never seemed worried or unsettled by them. He mostly focused on the things and the people nearest to him, one of whom had long ago said ‘Let not your hearts be troubled.’
Both men eventually met their earthly end: Peter in Rome in AD 64 or so, and my uncle in his home in Wisconsin just recently — on my mother’s birthday in fact. A couple of years back, he had told my grandmother and the family assembled in his living room that he had cancer, and I will not soon forget the peace with which he accepted this, and the complete sincerity with which he told us that he was grateful for it and for whatever lay ahead. This past weekend my aunts gathered again to make food and preparations, but this time for the more somber occasion of his funeral.
Consider, then, these two men. They lived thousands of years apart, and neither ever set foot on the same plot of ground, nor even the same continent, as the other. One is known the world over, and the other you’ve only just heard of for the first time. Yet they are indelibly tied to one another. A transcendent faith connects them, across the miles and millennia. They are linked and conjoined and made as one body by he who summoned fishers of men, he who is the Prince of Peace yet came to set a fire on the Earth, he who lived and died and rose in a particular place at a particular time among particular people but who in his very person binds all times and places and people together.”
~Matthew Giambrone
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