Fish
“Fishing is merely an attempt to connect to something that you know is there but can’t see—a perpetual series of occasions for hope.”
I am a consumer. I like inputs. Books, classes, lessons, shoes, journals, pens, workshops, Instagram posts, cookies—I often need just one (or two) more to round out my experience. Sometimes, the desire comes from that unhealthy “grass is always greener” place—no, you don’t understand, this planner will be the one that will get me all organized and move my blogging income out of double digits! Sometimes, I just get RickRolled into the media wormhole of interesting links upon links upon links and never give up clicking.
Sometimes, I just need one more reassurance, one more sign.
Tell me again that you love me.
I am sure I’ve mentioned my love Bonnie Smith Whitehouse’s book “Seasons of Wonder.” Smith Whitehouse is a English professor and American Anglican whose book is a weekly devotional rooted in both literature and Anglican beliefs. While I admire her project and take inspiration from almost every one of her meditations, her Anglicanism has a decidedly American and Southern angle, especially when she tells stories of her religious up bringing in East Tennessee:
“Weekly Bible lessons were taught in our public elementary school by a kindhearted woman named Miss Johnson” who was sent by the most powerful Baptist church in town to tell children stories about Jesus. Miss Johnson also shared “carefully-chosen characters from the Old Testament.” Smith Whitehouse goes on to write that “the Catholic and Jehovah’s Witness kids would leave the classroom during Miss Johnson’s Bible lessons…because their parents did not want them to attend.” She calls the Bible classes “audacious” and compares them to other “quite progressive” activities her school system provided kids in the 1980s.
The story and epigraph above make up the meditation for this week—week 19 of the year. I think her “fish story” rather jumps the shark, so each week 19, I ignore her chapter and create my own devotion for “Fish.”
Fish
Once again, as in late April, I am asking for input, for a sign. I’m still attempting to decide the business part of the business of me—what teaching and learning opportunities I should embrace this fall.
In keeping with the theme, I asked to see a fish. And, as before, I immediately thought this was too easy as I was about to get in my car and had a pretty good chance of seeing multiple “Jesus fishes” on cars along my route. But, I decided, a fish is a fish is a fish. Except for when it is not.
“An airplane is not a fish (it’s a bird), a swimming car is not a fish, a swimming pool is not a fish, and a chicken sandwich may resemble but does not count as a fish sandwich.”
My eyes searched every car bumper, semi-trailer logo, and roadside billboard for possible fish. I saw a lot of things that I wanted to be fish or hinted at fish, but were not fish. Finally, I spotted a red van with two trout stickers on the back window. Okay, universe, that’s one (or perhaps two).
A little while later, I spied the same van and two fishes again (they are multiplying—Jesus and the miracle of the fishes but not “Jesus fishes”). That’s two.
Or perhaps four.
A few minutes later, I passed a car adorned with a sticker of a shark.
Is a shark a fish too far?
I don’t know, but I know the shark’s happy fin poking above the water gave me, as Brandi Carlisle writes, “an occasion for hope” and a connection with the opportunities circling around out there, but that I cannot yet fully see.
