We Do Not Always Know What the Net Is For

The obedience of casting the net when we no longer understand what God intends to gather

“Master, we toiled all night and took nothing! But at your word I will let down the nets.”

— Luke 5:5

There is something almost painfully human in Peter’s words.

We toiled all night and took nothing.

He is not refusing Christ. He is tired.

He has already done what he knows how to do. He has worked through the darkness. He has cast the nets where fishermen cast them, at the hour fishermen cast them, with the knowledge accumulated through years of experience. Morning has come, and there is nothing to show for it.

The nets are empty.

And perhaps even more significantly, Peter is washing them.

The night is over. The work has been judged fruitless. He is preparing to put everything away.

It is precisely then that Christ enters the boat.

The fathers of the desert understood something about this moment. They knew that God often begins His deepest work only after our own understanding of the work has been exhausted. The monk enters the desert imagining that he knows what he has come there to find. He seeks purity of heart, perhaps; stillness, prayer, freedom from the passions. Yet the years strip him even of his understanding of these things.

He discovers that he did not know what purity would cost.

He did not know what silence contained.

He did not know what prayer would become when consolation disappeared.

He did not know what God intended to gather through his life.

We rarely do.

We think we know what the net is for.

A vocation is given, and we imagine its shape.

A ministry begins, and we imagine its fruit.

A relationship, a community, a work, a responsibility is placed into our hands, and almost without noticing it we begin to identify faithfulness with a particular outcome.

Then comes the long night.

The net returns empty.

Circumstances change. Doors close. Strength diminishes. The structures through which we once understood our lives no longer seem capable of containing what is happening within them.

And we begin washing the nets.

Perhaps this is finished.

Perhaps I misunderstood.

Perhaps nothing came of all that labor.

But Christ does not explain Himself to Peter.

He simply says:

Put out into the deep.

Peter could have answered with his expertise. The conditions are wrong. The hour is wrong. We have already tried. I know these waters.

Instead he says something that contains nearly the whole spiritual life:

At your word I will let down the nets.

The modern elders returned continually to this poverty of obedience. St. Silouan learned to remain before God when everything within him seemed to testify to abandonment. St. Sophrony understood that there are moments when the soul is stretched beyond every familiar measure and must consent to stand before God without possessing an explanation. Elder Aimilianos spoke again and again of allowing God to lead the soul where it could never have planned to go.

This is not passivity.

It is something far more difficult.

It is obedience without advance knowledge of the meaning of obedience.

We cast the net because Christ has spoken, not because we understand what He intends to place within it.

And sometimes what He gathers astonishes us.

There have been times in my own life when I thought I knew what I was being asked to gather. People. Ministry. Books. Communities. Teaching. Prayer. A particular form of ecclesial life. Perhaps even some recognizable fruit that could assure me that the long labor had not been wasted.

But I am less certain now that we ever know what the catch is while the net is being cast.

Perhaps at one time God asks us to gather people.

At another, silence.

At another, suffering.

At another, the fragments of a life being stripped of its familiar shape.

At another, He places into our hands one aging person whom we are simply asked to love.

And the strange arithmetic of the Kingdom may reveal that this small hidden net contains more than all the others.

We do not know.

That is the wound in the Gospel.

But it is also its freedom.

Peter receives the miraculous catch only to discover that the fish were never finally the point.

The boats fill.

The nets tear.

The fishermen are astonished.

And then, almost unbelievably, they leave the catch on the shore.

What seemed for one luminous moment to be the culmination of the story becomes something they walk away from.

Because Christ was not teaching Peter how to become a successful fisherman.

He was teaching him that he did not yet understand what he was being called to gather.

Henceforth you will be catching men.

Even that Peter could not yet understand. He would have to pass through failure, denial, tears, restoration, Pentecost, persecution, and eventually death before the meaning of those words was disclosed.

The call was given long before its meaning could be borne.

So it is with us.

There are seasons when God permits us to see the catch.

There are seasons when He gives us nothing but the net.

And there may be still deeper seasons when even the net seems to be taken from our hands.

The desert fathers would tell us not to measure these seasons by visible fruit. Remain in the cell. Keep the prayer. Receive the brother. Care for the sick. Forgive. Repent. Begin again.

Cast what you have been given where Christ tells you to cast it.

Do not demand to know what He intends to gather.

Perhaps this is one of the hardest forms of poverty: relinquishing not only control over our lives, but control over their meaning.

We want to know what all of this is for.

God sometimes answers only:

Put out into the deep.

And so the Jesus Prayer becomes enough.

The person before us becomes enough.

The duty of this hour becomes enough.

Conscience illumined by prayer becomes enough.

We no longer need to force the scattered pieces into a coherent future. We no longer need to decide whether the night was successful or wasted. We no longer need to manufacture a catch simply because an empty net frightens us.

Christ is in the boat.

That is enough.

Perhaps only at the end will we discover what He had been gathering all along.

Perhaps what seemed like loss was purification.

Perhaps what seemed like interruption was vocation.

Perhaps what seemed like an empty net was being emptied precisely so that it could receive something we would never have chosen for ourselves.

Peter did not understand the night.

He did not understand the catch.

He did not understand the call.

But he knew enough to say:

At your word.

There are moments when the entire spiritual life becomes that small.

And that free.

We cast the net once more—not because we know what we will catch, but because we have begun, at last, to understand that the net belongs to Christ.

And so does the sea.

And so does the catch.

And so do we.