a natural drift

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about catch and release.  And “let go and let God.”

Catch and release fishers let their fish go within a minute after landing the fish they have pursued.  The fisherman may have pursued a specific fish for several casts, or he may have called out “fish on” with the first cast in the riffles, and after fighting the fish through the current, “playing” the fish – letting it run, perhaps, so as to relieve the strain on the line — positioning downstream to ease the fight, he brings the fish to the net, unhooks the fly, admires the fish for a second or two, then releases it back into the current.  The adrenaline rush of the fight is replaced with the satisfaction of the release and the fish’s swift return into the current.

And so it is with letting go and letting God.  We hook something and struggle with it, play it, respond to its moves, sometimes letting it run like the fishing line through our reel, try to outwit it. Then: feel its heft and weight in our hands.  And until we acknowledge the thing’s weight and tug in our hands, we cannot let go and let God.  Until we feel the catch, we cannot release it into the world around us, into the hands of a Higher Power, into the swift current in which we steady ourselves once again.

This entry was posted on December 12, 2012 at 1:34 pm and is filed under Fishing, Healing and Recovery, Nature. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.