It’s the story of a Presbyterian minister’s family in early 20th-century Montana. The minister loves fly fishing almost as much as he loves Jesus, and teaches his two sons the same love. The older, Norman, is a model eldest child, while the younger, Paul, becomes addicted to alcohol and gambling and eventually is killed in a fight. Paul is also clearly the best fisherman of the three.
Here, Norman and his father discuss Paul’s struggles, and whether and how anyone might be able to help him. Norman’s father speaks first:
“You are too young to help anybody and I am too old,” he said. “By help I don’t mean a courtesy like serving chokecherry jelly or giving money.
“Help,” he said, “is giving part of yourself to somebody who comes to accept it willingly and needs it badly.
“So it is,” he said, using an old homiletic transition, “that we can seldom help anybody. Either we don’t know what part to give or maybe we don’t like to give any part of ourselves. Then, more often than not, the part that is needed is not wanted. And even more often, we do not have the part that is needed. It is like the auto-supply shop over town where they always say, ‘Sorry, we are just out of that part.’”
I told him, “You make it too tough. Help doesn’t have to be anything that big.”
He asked me, “Do you think your mother helps him by buttering his rolls?”
“She might,” I told him. “In fact, yes, I think she does.”
“Do you think you help him?” he asked me.
“I try to,” I said. “My trouble is I don’t know him. In fact, one of my troubles is that I don’t even know whether he needs help. I don’t know, that’s my trouble.”
“That should have been my text,” my father said. “We are willing to help, Lord, but what if anything is needed?”
“I still know how to fish,” he concluded. “Tomorrow we will go fishing with him.”
Does the passage cast light on the question that brought it to my mind? Perhaps there’s a clue in the father’s announcement that the three of them will go fishing together the next day, to go where they are free to be most themselves. There, on that common ground/river, the would-be helpers and the one seeming to need help might find what they all really need. It’s a step they have to take, together.
+++++++
Totally unrelated post script that I just found on Wikipedia—
“The following quote from the (1992) film version of A River Runs Through It, which is not present in the novella, is displayed at the base of the statue of Michael Jordan at Chicago’s United Center.” (It is Norman’s reflection on Paul’s expertise as a fly fisherman, I think from that day the three of them fished together.)
At that moment I knew, surely and clearly, that I was witnessing perfection. He stood before us, suspended above the earth, free from all its laws like a work of art, and I knew, just as surely and clearly, that life is not a work of art, and that the moment could not last.
