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Sunday
In today’s Gospel Luke tells us that Jesus told Peter, “Do not be afraid; from now on you will be catching people” (5:11). In “The Fish” Mary Oliver also uses fishing as a metaphor to grapple with Jesus’s promise of life after death, and she does so in a way that speaks to me as I grapple with the death of my brother.
Oliver describes eating a fish she has caught in a way that invokes the Eucharist. Through symbolically consuming Jesus’s body and blood in the ritual of Holy Communion, Christians see themselves becoming one with Christ and therefore “heirs of his eternal kingdom.” If one sees this kingdom as all of creation, as Oliver and I both do, then she engages in her own version of this sacred ritual following her own fishing expedition:
The Fish
The first fish
I ever caught
would not lie down
quiet in the pail
but flailed and sucked
at the burning
amazement of the air
and died
in the slow pouring off
of rainbows. Later
I opened his body and separated
the flesh from the bones
and ate him. Now the sea
is in me: I am the fish, the fish
glitters in me; we are
risen, tangled together, certain to fall
back to the sea. Out of pain,
and pain, and more pain
we feed this feverish plot, we are nourished
by the mystery.
Oliver here is invoking the pain of the crucifixion, and having just seen my brother endure “pain, and pain, and more pain” before dying, I do not take the fish’s death lightly. With all the flailing and sucking, the fish does not go gentle into that good night. The “slow pouring off of rainbows” is a powerful way of describing the transformation of a beautiful creature into inanimate flesh.
But if one looks past one’s separate self, death does not get the last word. (As Dylan Thomas puts it, “Death shall have no dominion.”) Life is everlasting because we are all “tangled together” in God’s creation, with life and death feeding upon each other. The power of Oliver’s poem lies, in part, in her big-eyed wonder at the process. She imagines surrendering one’s self to become part of a bigger self.
Oliver describes this process elsewhere. In her poem “In Blackwater Woods” Oliver concludes,
To live in this world
you must be able
to do three things:
to love what is mortal;
to hold itagainst your bones knowing
your own life depends on it;
and, when the time comes to let it go,
to let it go.
First there is this fierce love of life, along with the struggle to hold on to it. Then there is the letting go. And then there is that rising up that constitutes the cycle of life. This is the feverish plot that has us all in its grip but that can nourish us if we embrace the mystery.
