Little Fish

Jerome is preaching to people who were baptized days ago, and he refuses to let the deer in the psalm be a gentle image. As the deer longs for running water, so my soul longs for you. That longing, he insists, is not a mild preference. The newly baptized burn. They thirst. Before this, he says, they kept asking one another, when will I go and see the face of God, and now they are standing in the house, having come to the altar at last. Then he flips the whole picture inside out, and it is the kind of reversal that stays with you. The world, he says, is a sea, and we were fish in it, swimming in the deep, eyes fixed downward into the abyss. The apostles fished for us. They hauled us out. And here is the strange part. Fish pulled from the sea die, but for us it was the opposite. We were dying in the water and only began to live once we were dragged out of it into the air and the light. Everything we assumed was our natural element was actually drowning us. We just could not tell, because it was all we knew. That is what Jerome wants the newly baptized, and the rest of us, to feel. The thing that looked like home was the deep we needed rescuing from, and real life started the moment we broke the surface and finally looked up.