There are many these days who claim themselves to be "spiritual", yet not religious. I know this from having encountered them as either a) vacuous celebrities who attempt to mask their facile vacuosity by clothing themselves in a cloak of "metaphysical depth" which never quite seems to fit, b) random people I meet at parties, in pubs or on trains who probably aspire to being "vacuous celebrities who attempt to ... etc.", or c) harmless New Age hippy types caught in a Woodstock time warp, but one thing on which they all seem to agree is that it's in the great outdoors that they most frequently experience a "transcendent other", and while I find their inability to pursue, recognise and name the source of their claimed experience frustrating, I do kind of "get it."
What angler doesn't appreciate the beauty of his or her surroundings, as much as they do the fish they seek to catch in them? The wisest anglers are those who sagely realise that the fish themselves are often only the presenting reason for our passion, and that the magic of our hobby is more than just the fish, and is something bigger and beyond our mortal selves.
Norman Maclean in his exquisitely written part autobiographical work "A River Runs through it" begins the story with the line "In our family there was no clear line between religion and fly fishing", and goes on to state that he "learnt to cast Presbyterian-style". My own Christian faith was a conscious adult decision that was subsequent to my childhood experiences of fishing, so my early casting was unencumbered by denominational allegiance, but for me, as for Maclean's minister father, the space between Heaven and Earth seems a thinner one when I'm fishing!
I am not for a single moment claiming that only an angler of faith persuasion appreciates the beauty and splendour that surrounds them, but as one who fished before encountering God in a personal sense, and one who continues to fish now as someone primarily defined by their relationship with God, I can attest to an added dimension. For me, the experience of being awed by my surroundings goes beyond the aesthetic or the namelessly numinous and points me to a God who reveals himself in the commonly acknowledged beauty of the natural world and uses that general revelation to draw me to his specific revelation of himself in the words of the Scriptures and the person of Jesus Christ.
The 18th Century poet William Cowper posited that "nature is but a name for an effect whose cause is God", and it seems to me no co-incidence that the two earliest and most venerable works of fishing literature both have a Christian element. Dame Juliana Berners, whose 15th Century "Treatyse of fyshynge with an angle" is the oldest tome on the pastime was the Prioress of a Nunnery in Hertfordshire, and Izaak Walton, author of angling's most famous literary offering, "The Compleat Angler" punctuates the fishing instruction with Christian meditation and God-ward reflection in his piscatorial magnum opus.
For me angling is an icon (a window into spiritual truth), and a sacrament (a visible sign of a greater invisible reality and grace) such that when I'm fishing my heart soars with the hymnwriter's and I'm caused to think (if not to sing) "O Lord my God, when I in awesome wonder, consider all the works thy hand hath made .... then sings my soul, my Saviour God to thee, how great thou art ...."
Fishing as a "spiritual discipline": ..... works for me, and then some.
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