Fishers of Men

By Fr. Conor Donnelly

(Proofread)

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

My Lord and my God, I firmly believe that you are here, that you see me, that you hear me. I adore you with profound reverence. I ask your pardon for my sins and grace to make this time of prayer fruitful. My Immaculate Mother, Saint Joseph, my father and lord, my guardian angel, intercede for me.

“And passing along by the Sea of Galilee, he saw Simon and his brother Andrew casting their nets into the sea, for they were fishermen” (Mark 1:16).

The new year, as we start the liturgy again, opens with this passage of the Gospel. It’s very appropriate as we look to a new year in our apostolate.

We see Our Lord passing along by the Sea of Galilee. It seemed like a very ordinary moment in His life. Possibly He had passed along there very frequently.

We are told He saw Simon and his brother Andrew. Our Lord could have been thinking about the view, He could have been thinking about the beauty of Creation and all the beautiful things that God has made, or many other possible things could be going through His mind, but He saw Simon.

He saw Simon and Andrew because He was looking for them. The mind of Our Lord was on the apostolate. He was very much focused on the souls.

That's how He wants us to be always, and particularly as we begin a new academic year, looking at the possibilities there in front of us, and also seeing the possibilities or opportunities that might not be very obvious, that might come to our notice only after a certain period of time—possibilities or opportunities that might be around some corner, but little by little we might see them or discover them.

There was a lady once in Australia who would go to a certain petrol station to fill her tank. Over a certain period of time, she happened to get into conversation with the lady who owned the petrol station—just a passing conversation.

Then one day, she was thinking again about her own personal apostolate, who she could invite to retreats this year, or to recollections, or have some sort of a spiritual influence on.

One of the people that came into her field of vision, appeared on her radar screen, was this lady that she had sort of got to know over the previous period. She invited her to a retreat.

She came and she heard a meditation on apostolate of friendship and confidence. This lady was not very taken with that, friendship and confidence.

‘In my work I don't have too much opportunity for friendship and confidence. People come in, they fill up and they drive out. It's a three-minute relationship.’ She decided she would pass on that one.

Later there was a talk on promoting the family—how to promote the family in our work, in our environment, where we are.

The Holy Spirit began to work and she got the idea that she could try and make her petrol station into a family friendly petrol station. She could have balloons and she could have slides for the kids when the tank was filling, and magazines for ladies, and football results for men, and things like that. She decided to do that.

That was her resolution from that retreat. She went home and she began to change the tone of the whole petrol station—a bit unusual, using a petrol station to promote the family.

She got this idea and she ran with it. She put up bunting and flags to make the place a little more exciting. She found it was very fruitful, very good for business, very lucrative. Many of the kids wanted to go to that particular petrol station.

She was very happy with her resolutions from the retreat. Then the lady invited her back again another year. This time the talk on apostolate was about doing apostolate with our peers, reaching out to people at our own level and our own profession. That began to click a little bit. She began to think.

Later on, there was a talk about promoting the family again. She put the two together and she thought, I could call a meeting of all the petrol station owners in my area, and share with them my experience of being a family-friendly petrol station.

The result was that all the petrol stations in the area became family-friendly petrol stations, promoting the family in all sorts of ways.

From a situation where there seemed to be nothing to be done, the fields seemed barren, nothing could possibly happen, there was no possibility of putting any seeds into the barren ground or in this particular area, there seemed to be an exception to the rule of where we could do apostolate or promote any fruit, enormous fruitfulness came. A great influence in society.

As we begin again, Our Lord wants us to look again at our apostolate, look again at the fields that are around us, at the aridity of some areas where He has placed us, people or opportunities or places that don't seem to have any potential.

Yet with our deeper prayer, from our mortification, with the graces we receive in the sacraments, we can ask Our Lord to open our eyes to see people, souls, potential, opportunities. The sky is the limit.

In the last few weeks, I've been reading a book on the history of the Diocese of Kitui, which only was written this past year. Really, it's a beautiful story of heroism, dedication. When people of the Church went there, there was nothing; ery arid, dry, no rain, very difficult.

There were 5,000 or 4,000 Catholics there in 1956, but in 1996 there were 70,000, plus 220 schools, plus nineteen parishes, plus two hospitals. It's an incredible story, beautiful story, like a microcosm of what the Church has done all over the world.

It's beautiful when we see what the people of the Church have done before us. They have gone to apparently arid, barren lands, and converted them into places of great fruitfulness. Now there are something like seventy priests in Kitui, and there's thirty seminarians, and the whole panorama is completely different. It's just fruitfulness.

We're involved in a similar sort of thing: turning the ground, watering it, planting ideas, looking for opportunities where there may seem to be none, putting up with situations that might seem to be so unusual.

I visited a Kitegan priest there recently, and he told me how one of these missionaries in one of the farthest places of Kitui wrote down in his diary—because this book is all compiled from stories that the missionaries have written in their notebooks or diaries or whatever—he wrote down that ‘it will take a million years before Christianity has any influence in these people.’

Then he said, two months ago the new bishop of Kitui opened a parish in that particular town. It didn't take a million years; it just took a few decades.

Sometimes we might be involved in what might seem to be impossible situations, impossible people. We might seem to be getting nowhere, or the seeds won't go into the ground. But maybe it just needs a little time to pass.

In the grace of God, the most barren places become very fruitful. But God wants our patience, our endurance. “By your patience you will gain possession of your souls” (Luke 21:19).

Our Lord saw Simon and Andrew, but it's as though He didn't just see Simon and Andrew. It's as though He saw millions of other things that were to come as a result of that.

We also can ask Our Lord for that same apostolic vision, if we see past difficulties, or past little blocks on the road, or circumstances that may seem to have turned out completely the opposite of what they might have been.

One story in that book tells how a substitute priest came to a parish. The other priest had gone away on leave or something. He told them that, Now this man here, he's the factotum, he's the guy who knows everything, and he can fix any problem, and he can do all sorts of things. Great trust was placed in this man.

The first day he had to go out to visit outstations that were quite far away, maybe twenty, thirty miles on the Land Rover, and he needed the tank to be filled with petrol, and the guy filled it with water.

All sorts of contradictions, the opposite of what you've been told. Here we are in this situation, this guy thinks, that the tank fills with water. You really have to start at rock bottom.

We might find ourselves in similar sorts of situations. Things might be the opposite of what we had hoped, or what they could be. In fact, they might even be discouraging. You sort of scratch your head and you wonder, What am I doing here? What's this all about?

Yet that's all part of the equation. God has planned things in such a way that we would make acts of faith, and acts of hope, and acts of fortitude, and acts of perseverance, and keep our peace and our patience, and realize that this is the prayer that God wants from me—for the seas to go even deeper, and for the vocations to come, and for all the evils that we might see in society to be completely drowned.

“They were casting their nets into the sea for they were fishermen.” St. Josemaría liked to emphasize how God called these people in the midst of their work, when they were busy.

He went to them when they were in the middle of what they were doing; He interrupted what they were doing. He wants us to look for busy people, who are busy doing their work, who seem to know how to do what they're doing; people with prestige who take their work seriously, who are hard at it.

“Jesus said to them, ‘Come, follow me, and I will make you into fishers of men” (Mark 1:17). Many words in these short phrases.

“Come!” All through His life Our Lord was to repeat those words. “Come to me, all you who labor and are heavy burdened, and I will give you rest” (Matt. 11:28).

“Follow me.” Don't just follow a series of ideas or follow this book. It's very personal. I want you to have a very deep personal relationship with me.

“No longer do I call you servants...but I have called you friends” (John 15:15). As we begin again in our apostolate, we come back again to that basic idea: friendship, a deeper friendship.

Lord, help me to be better in this business of friendship.

St. Josemaría in The Way says we have to go after each soul to win it for Christ. Treat them all with affection. Drown them all in love for Christ. Each soul, one by one.

When Blessed Álvaro went to Korea in 1987, the cooperator there asked him how many people were there in Opus Dei. He said, ‘There are 75,000.’ And this cooperator said, ‘Only? A year after Opus Dei begins in Korea, there will be 75 members of Opus Dei in Korea!’

Don Álvaro said, ‘Good.’ He liked the way they were thinking. “But,” he said, “one by one. Because that's how we do it, one by one.”

He told this story afterwards. The “one by one” is important in our spirit. We go after each soul.

I think we're still waiting for the 75,000 in Korea, a few decades later. But we're in the process of going after them, one by one. Eventually we’ll reach the 75,000, but it's little by little.

Treat them all with affection, he says. Drown them all in love for Christ.

We're in the business of opening up like a fan, having souls dangling from each finger, and growing in that whole process of friendship.

In order to have more friends, we have to give ourselves. We have to think about them. We have to pray about them. We have to remember them in our prayer, in concrete little details.

In The Man of Villa Tevere, the author Pilar Urbano says, “He visits them, he writes to them, he invites them over.”

He describes all the ways that St. Josemaría goes out of his way to build up friendship with people, as though telling us that we have to be the aristocrats of friendship—good at starting friendship, good at maintaining the friendship, good at keeping the contact warm, so that that soul that may be in Alaska for the last twenty years, somehow, we remember that soul. They have a place in our heart. We never forget them; we're close to them.

Through that contact, through that communication, where we keep the contact warm, he shows concern for their health and for their projects. Their projects!

Friendship means knowing what they're up to, what they're interested in, what they like, what they enjoy, what they dream about. He knew about the happy and sad incidents in their families.

Friends are people who are there for other people. They're there in the difficult moments. They try to see beyond the words that they hear. They try to see, What does this person really need? What is this person trying to say to me?

There's something deeper in these words. They don't get tired of the problems of their friends, because that's what love does. It binds them close. He squeezes time out to help them in some small or great necessity.

We're in the business of making time for our friends—being available. We're not just any friend of these people, we're special friends. We're also teaching them what friendship is.

They should be able to say about us that we're a special friend, or that there's something special about our friendship. They can rely on us. They trust us.

They see our generosity. We put other things aside to make time for them. We're there in the important moments of their life. We know the right things to do and the right things to say, because that's what love does.

Sometimes we know how to be silent, just to be there, but with that physical presence, we're sending a message. We're building up this whole business of friendship in the world and teaching people how to be better friends, all fired by the virtue of charity, because “God is love” (1 John 4:8).

We try to transmit that message in a million ways, to touch the hearts and minds of people with the love that we bring to them—with our actions, with our words, with our thoughts, with our prayer.

He does them favors when he can, and when needed he takes his honor for them. Our Father does favors for people. We're also in the business of doing little favors for people.

Sometimes people need little things. Could you buy that thing when you're there in the supermarket? Could you find out that other thing? Could you get me that contact of that other person? Could you ever do this?

Could you transmit that message? In principle, yes, because that's what we're here for. That's how we build friendship—even if we have a million and one things to do, and even if we have a whole pile of favors that we've been asked by other people.

In principle, we find time for that extra little thing that's asked of us, because often it's just a question of generosity. It may not demand more energy or more time or for this or that. It just demands a little bit of a bigger heart to make room for that person or for that little thing.

The very fact that they ask us for it means it's important to them. It's going to make a difference. When we do that little favor, somehow that person realizes what we have done.

We have said ‘yes’ to them, and therefore, they can rely on us for that ‘yes.’ We've gone out of our way for them. That's the way we win their heart.

The channels of communication are open. They're willing to reciprocate. They're willing to listen to what we say, because we put into practice the things that we talk about. In short, you know how to love them.

These are the ways that we express that love. In certain ways we're repeating the words of Our Lord, “Come, follow me, and I will make you into fishers of men.”

We're in the business of fishers of men. It's interesting that St. Josemaría entitled the Chapter on the apostles in the Furrow, “Fishers of Men.” It's a great phrase.

Simon Andrew could have said, ‘You don't fish men, you fish fish.’ They could have been a bit put off by that phrase. What would that mean? It's a curious sort of phrase. But yet Our Lord used it very purposefully.

Lord, help me to become a fisher of men, and to take my fishing very seriously—the apostolic aspect of my Christian vocation.

That phrase contains many things. Sometimes you might see pictures of people in Japan fishing. They're sitting in their living room with a fishing rod and a line, and it's into a fishbowl, as though they do their fishing from the living room.

I guess they're far away from the sea, or that's what fishing means to them. But that's not our type of fishing.

It's good sometimes to watch fishermen. I was just noticing, in Jahazi these days, the fishermen going out early in the morning. When you see them walking along the road, they all walk with a great sense of purpose. They're not just stumbling along like you see other people all the time in the world.

Most people are going somewhere, they're doing something. They have their fishing rods on their back, or their nets, and they're going about their business. That's how fishermen walk, how they do things. Their mind is on the fish. That's their business.

They're going with a certain haste, urgency, because the fish are waiting. There's a job to be done: there are fish to be caught. They walk along that road because they've got to go to a certain place where they're going to fish from today, because they know where the fish are, or where's a good place.

They don't wait for the fish to come to them; they go to them. Sometimes that involves a lot of walking, or climbing over craggy rocks, or corals, or reefs, or other things, because the important thing is to catch the fish. I’m not just here to go through the motions, nor to just think about the fish, or to give the impression that I'm fishing.

Fishermen are out there in the deep water where the fish are, sometimes beyond the reef, where there are big waves, but that's where the big fish are. And they're casting their nets, or they're putting out their lines.

Maybe they've hurt themselves in the process, because they've scratched themselves on craggy rocks, or they've been thrown around the boat a little bit, or it's rough, or the circumstances are different. But they're there all the same.

Fishers of men. They're thinking about the fish, and they're thinking of how they can catch this fish—what sort of bait to use, what sort of a line, what sort of a hook. It's all very focused on the catching of the fish and the right bait.

Just as the fisherman goes through all these different processes, we are called to do the same thing with souls: to be true fishermen, and have our mind on the fishermen all the time.

We had a surgeon one time who was an avid fisherman. On a Monday morning going through the various cases—he was a general surgeon—and as he took out a gallbladder or fixed something else in some abdomen, he'd be telling about the fish that he caught over the weekend.

Then he'd sit down for a cup of coffee halfway through the morning, and he'd continue telling you the stories about the fish. If the surgical list ended a bit earlier than usual, he'd say, ‘I'm very glad we finished early today. I'm going off to do a little bit of fishing.’

Fishermen talk about what they do; they get excited about the fish. Their mind is on the fish, even if they're doing something else, because that's what it means to be a fisherman.

We can ask Our Lord in this coming year that we might grow in this business of our fishing. To think bigger, to think wider.

Fishermen are always thinking about how they can catch more fish, expand their business, maybe buy a boat, or even two boats, because that's how they function.

We won't make ourselves fishers of men, but Our Lord will make us fishers of men. “I will make you fishers of men” (Mark 1:17).

It's a process; it never ends. All the days of our life we'll be fishers of men, thinking of new ways to catch fish, to have an influence, to make our prayer fruitful, to find those new people we're looking for.

Gaudium et spes in the Second Vatican Council says, “The joys and the hopes, the griefs and the anxieties of the men of this age, especially those who are poor or in any way afflicted, these are the joys and hopes, the griefs and anxieties of the followers of Christ. Indeed, nothing genuinely human fails to raise an echo in their hearts.”

All the affairs of men are affairs of ours. It could be as a result of our prayer, of our talking with the Master Fisherman, the Lord of the harvest, that someday He will give us one idea—one idea that might change the whole of the fishing fields, or might change the way in which we cast our net, or might give us an idea for a new piece of bait, or a new type of hook, or a new way of going about our fishing.

It's a little bit what the adjustments of the regions are a little bit all about, to improve the efficiency of our fishing. “For though I am free of all men,” says St. Paul, “I made myself a slave to all, that I might win them all. To the Jews I became a Jew, in order to win Jews. ... To the weak I became weak, that I might gain the weak. I became all things to all men, that I might save all” (1 Cor. 9:19,20,22).

We're interested in everybody, as nobody is outside the realm of our vision. Every single last soul is important.

“And at once they lift their nets and follow Him.” The Lord throws down this challenge, throws down the gauntlet; opens up enormous horizons for their life; undreamt of horizons that change their whole existence, that fill them full of enthusiasm and joy, spirit of adventure.

These are the great things that Our Lord places before us in each new period of time, with new graces, with new horizons, with a new maturity, because each year that passes, we’ll come forward in the whole process of the evangelization of the world.

New ground has been covered. We've reached a new harvest, a new maturity. It's a time for new action, casting out our nets in different ways, or different lines, or different places.

“Cast the net to the other side of the boat” (John 21:6). In some ways it was very simple; it's just they hadn't thought of it before: the other side of the boat.

Sometimes the other side of the boat is full of fish waiting to be caught. New ways of doing things, new ways of looking at things.

Suddenly all our formation, all the books we've read, all the spiritual reading we've done—and if we have done fifteen minutes of spiritual reading in the past year, then we have spent something like eighty or ninety hours reading a spiritual book. Enormous amount of input.

Now we cast our net in a different way, because we have new formation and greater formation. We know more things. We have more things to give people.

“Going on a little farther...” Our Lord was not just happy with this big catch of these two great apostles. He went on a little farther. His mind didn't stop at what He had caught, because a little farther on there were new things, new horizons, new people waiting for Him.

Around the next corner, in the same place, He didn't stop to say, ‘Now, I've done my bit for today’ or ‘Now it's time to look at the horizon and the beautiful sunshine.’ The mind was still on souls all the time.

“...He saw James the son of Zebedee and his brother John. They also were in their boat mending the nets” (Mark 1:19)—doing ordinary things, finishing their work. That's where He called them: “Immediately he called them.”

Our Lord doesn't waste any time. There's a sense of urgency. It's important. We have things to do. We have a world to build. We have society to evangelize.

“And they left their father Zebedee in the boat with the hired men and followed him.” (Mark 1:20).

We can ask Our Lady, Queen of Apostles, that she might help us to have another look at all those souls that God has brought close to us, at all the areas that we're involved in, all the possibilities that these things can bring, and to help us to see the undreamt of possibilities, things that we never imagined, the things that He wants us to reveal, so that we can see the length and the breadth and the height of all the great adventures that He's placed in front of us.

I thank you, my God, for the good resolutions, affections, and inspirations that you have communicated to me during this meditation. I ask your help to put them into practice. My Immaculate Mother, Saint Joseph, my father and lord, my guardian angel, intercede for me.

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

MVF