El Sacerdote y Los Peces

Alboraya-Almácera, Spain, 1348 

The mule’s body was warm under the padre and between his legs. The sun was hot on his head, and burned through the black cloth of his cassock to draw sweat from his shoulders and back. 

Gulls soared and flapped and cried overhead, skimming up from the sea, up the river before him that ran down to the sea. 

The mule’s hooves clattered and clunked over the wet stones on the brink of the river the padre had to cross. Water and foam and leaves and sticks swirled in the shallows.

As the mule plodded deeper into the river, the padre gripped harder with both hands—his right in the mule’s mane, his left on the ciborium’s vertical shaft. Below his hand, a base spread out so the sacred vessel could be set down and stand on its own. Above his hand, shading it from the fierce sun, a cup with a lid was fixed. A fine goldsmith had made the beautiful piece for the use of the church.

Inside the ciborium were three white circles of unleavened bread, Communion hosts consecrated during a Mass. The padre was bringing Holy Communion to three homebound parishioners. 

In the center of the river, where the water ran quickest and the channel it dug was deepest, the mule set its weight on an unsteady stone, slipped, and lurched to one side. 

The lurch threw off the padre’s balance, and he plunged from the mule’s back into the river. 

The cold of the water shocked him as it soaked his long robe-like cassock and rushed into his nose, his eyes, his ears, his mouth. 

The padre’s back met the solid bottom and he kicked and flailed his arms until he had his feet under himself instead of over his head. Wet cloth tangled around his limbs as he tried to stand, jump, swim, anything to get his head above the surface. He was running out of air and the willpower not to breathe in. 

Fallen from the hand of man, the golden ciborium sank slowly away from the surface. The lid separated from the container beneath. 

At the instant of the opening of the smallest crack, water pushed through and pried it wider. All three white wafers of bread sped out the breach and danced away in the current. 

A fish patrolling for prey along the bank saw the flashes of white go by. They looked too far away to be worth chasing. Too far away, and getting ever farther, getting out of sight—yet too fascinating to ignore. 

With a thrash of its thin, strong body, the fish abandoned its course and raced after the captivating white flotsam. 

Two more fishes joined the first, and all three shot down the river swift as bolts from crossbows, following the dazzle of the Communion hosts, and gaining. 

Inside each fish, an urge was spurring them on, stronger than any urge to eat or hide or flee or mate or migrate. It came from deeper inside than scale, skin, muscle, bone, blood, heart, guts, or brain. Perhaps the urge was part of that unfathomable thing called instinct. For what is instinct but the name man has put on the knowledge the Creator put into every creature that was made by Him? And indeed every creature must have it, for He alone created all of them. 

It seems possible the Creator has a certain fondness for using fish. Or it may be that fish are particularly attentive to their creator. 

Why did parts of the body of a fish help to banish a murderous demon and heal blindness?

Did the fishes hear the God-Man’s voice on the Sea of Galilee one morning long ago? Did they feel a tremor stronger than any seismic shock, more secret than a pearl hidden in a clam, as the God-Man’s sandals touched the deck of the vessel they had avoided all night? What drove those individual lives into an impossible shoal that went straight into the fisherman’s net?

When a mortal demanded the temple tax of the One Who ordered and planned that building front the beginning of time, what caused a fish with a coin in its mouth to take the hook of the man He named Rock?

Why did a curving line drawn casually in dirt or sand with foot or staff, and mirrored just as casually by a second person so a simple fish appeared, become the secret silent knock of the persecuted Christians?

When a spiritual son of the Poverello called the fish to listen to him preach because the heretics would not believe him, why did they rise and arrange themselves as neatly as a human crowd and look at the man until he dismissed them?

Only the divine mind that conceived the being called fish, and everything else, can answer. 

The padre found the surface and broke through it, spitting water and blinking it from his eyes. Unsure if he would sink again, he took a gasp of air and held it. 

Mud smeared on his face as he tried to wipe his eyes to see where he was. Mud on his lifted hand. His other hand sinking in mud, pressing against stones. The padre was on the bank. He struggled to his feet, gasping, tripping on his cassock. 

He remembered the ciborium and looked into the river. Along the bank, disturbed mud swirled in the water. He caught no glimpse of gold. The Truly Present Body of the Lord was gone, lost. The shore of the sea was in sight. The hosts had been swept away. He had let go, like frightened Simone Pedro, and lost the Eucharistic Lord. 

“Padre!…”

Some fishermen were down at the mouth of the river, waving their nets and shouting for him to come see some fishes. Ah, shepherds and their marvelous sheep. 

Fishes holding white discs that looked like Communion hosts, they were saying.

The padre ran, ran like Pedro trying to keep up with Juan on the Resurrection morning, all the way to the church and then back to the estuary again with a new ciborium, and all the way to the seashore opposite the fishermen.

Three fishes swam in circles where the waves of the sea washed into the river mouth, holding their heads above the water. In each one’s mouth a white host glowed in the sunlight. 

Falling to his knees, the padre dipped the lower part of the ciborium into the estuary, leaving the bowl just above the surface. 

One by one, the fishes dropped the hosts inside the glinting gold vessel. With a shimmer of scales and a flicker of scales, they slipped away into the sea, leaving behind the astonished padre and fishermen.