Earlier this month, I was fortunate enough to spend a week fishing with a group of Holy Cross priests and brothers at the University of Notre Dame’s property near Land O’Lakes, Wisconsin. I never really grew up fishing, so each time that I am able to take this amazing trip up north I am able to learn so much. I’ve learned how to filet fish. I’ve learned which baits and presentations work well when targeting different species. I’ve learned how different weather patterns and pressure changes affect fish behavior and which environmental structures provide suitable cover for the fish. More importantly, I’ve learned some important life lessons. Many of these lessons really stand out to me because they have helped me connect my experiences of fishing to my prayer life and my life of discipleship. Here are three lessons that I spent quite a bit of time thinking and praying about during my week of fishing.
1. Trust your fishing spot, but don’t be afraid to move to something new
While fishing, sometimes the fish simply aren’t biting. That’s OK. We can’t always predict the behavior of fish. Trust and learn from your successes in the past, but don’t get weighed down by past experiences. Try a new lure, bait, or even a new location. Return back to your original spot when needed. When things are going well, we can stay rooted in where the fish are biting. However, when we can’t seem to get things to click properly, we can change things up. We can mix up our approach and find new fruitful locations and strategies through the help of others. In practice, fishing is an extremely hopeful endeavor because each cast and each change that we make expresses a belief in what cannot be seen. If we don’t believe that a fish could bite on each cast, then why would we cast out our lines or nets in the first place?
This idea can certainly be applied to our prayer and trust in God. We all have our go-to prayers, devotions, and spiritual routines in our lives. These are great and beautiful, and have provided us with so many fruits. However, when we go through dry spells of prayer, we can’t be afraid to mix things up. Perhaps God is calling us to something or someplace new. We can find a new time or location to meditate, pick up a new spiritual devotion, or begin a new spiritual reading. We cannot allow our past experiences to prevent us from the promptings of the ever ancient and ever new Holy Spirit. And we can always go back to the spiritual well that has given us so much in our lives. Heeding the advice of spiritual mentors and spiritual directors can help us determine where God is calling us to be and what graces he is giving us right now.
2. Keep your tackle box in order
At the end of a long day of fishing when the bugs first started biting or at the onset of some bad weather, it was tempting to throw my fishing equipment into my tackle box before hurriedly heading back to the main camp. I just figured that I would deal with the chaos later. However, these times would just build up. After a few of these experiences, my tackle box became a mess and knot of spinners, jigs, hooks, leaders, bobbers, and used plastic worms and grubs. I never realized just how disorganized and dirty my tackle box would get until I needed to find something quickly! I had to bring in my tackle box to empty it and reorganize it. As part of the experience, I had to ask myself how some of this stuff even got into my box, and I had to throw away quite a bit of stuff that was no longer useful. We need to take the time to clean our real and metaphorical tackle boxes.
In our lives of faith, we can get so distracted by the day-to-day stresses that we can overly clutter our lives or pick up habits that are detrimental to our wellbeing. It takes practices such as an examen — a spiritual practice where we can look at our lives in all honesty to see how we have responded well to the graces of God and where we could have done better — to come face to face with our failures, imperfections, and sins. Then we have the privilege to take the disordered and cluttered tackle boxes of our lives to the Sacrament of Reconciliation where the loving grace of Jesus Christ sets us back on the right path and puts things back in order. Making a daily examen can help us to see just when our “tackle boxes” are beginning to accumulate unwanted items and patterns so that we can address them accordingly with Jesus before the mess accumulates into something worse.
3. Fishing is about far more than the fish
Most of the fish that I catch and filet I bring back to my hometown of Jefferson City, Missouri, so my parents can host an extended family fish fry. It is always such a joyful experience bringing the family together in these gatherings. However, knowing the family fish fry is on the calendar can provide a bit of pressure to make sure I catch enough fish during my time at the lake! I have to remind myself that my fishing trip is about far more than just the fish I catch. Fishing is about the experience with God in nature. It is about the community I cultivate with my Holy Cross brothers during the week. It is about taking the time to rest and relax after another year of teaching high school students in Indianapolis. If fishing is only about the fish, I am just setting myself up for disappointment. I need to shift my perspective so that I can appreciate the opportunity of fishing and the relationships that it fosters. Plus, I know that even if I don’t catch a single fish, my visit home with family and friends will be just as joyful. Fishing isn’t about filling the freezer — it is about the experience and the opportunities it creates.
In our lives of prayer, we can become overly focused on the graces and gifts that we want to receive from God rather than the relationship that we form with him through the prayer itself. We can be tempted to view God merely as the powerful gift giver in the sky. We focus too much on what God can do for us rather than the relationship that we form with him. Our prayer can become transactional rather than an opportunity to encounter a Person, Jesus Christ, who “gives life a new horizon and a decisive direction,” in the words of Pope Benedict XVI in Deus Caritas Est. Let’s focus on what our relationship with Jesus looks like and trust that the graces will come through the loving Providence of God. We will miss so much if we just focus on the fish. God wants to give us so much more — God’s very self.
By Br. Matt Rehagen, C.S.C.
Published June 24, 2026 by the Office of Vocations
