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Kathy Sparrow
956-793-0362
kathy@kathysparrow.com

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    In the tradition of MacLean’s A River Runs Through It and Dodson's Faithful Travelers, the book Healing the Fisher King: A Fly Fisher’s Quest by G. Scott Sparrow, is the story of one man’s fly fishing quest in 1997 to the familiar waters of his childhood  –– to the South Texas, primitive coastal estuary known as the Lower Laguna Madre.
    Lured by a desire to catch a giant speckled trout on his fly rod –– but directed by a luminous dream that points to the Laguna Madre as the setting for healing and transformation  –– Sparrow takes his boat and his eight-year-old son on a journey from Virginia to South Texas that proves more difficult and more meaningful than he imagines. He soon discovers that the unresolved pain in his life ––  stemming, in part, from his parents’ divorce and now his own –– is also alive in his son, who feels deeply wounded and angry at his father for leaving him. As they spend the first ten days fishing together, Sparrow and his son spiral into a dark place that is, at first, confusing and disturbing. The author draws upon the legend of the Fisher King and the Holy Grail, Jungian psychology, and his family’s past in order to arrive at a way to address his son’s needs, as well as his own. Their time on the water culminates in a powerfully moving exchange that opens the way for a more trusting relationship between father and son.
    As the author begins his concerted fly fishing search for the fish so aptly named named cynoscion nebulosus (i.e. starry nebulae), his experiences soon reveal the spiritual dimensions of the quest, in which the search for a great fish mirrors his lifelong yearning for communion with God. Making his way slowly toward the great fish and the wholeness that he seeks, he must, however, confront his own “shadow”  before he can proceed any further toward the goal. He is led throughout by radiant dreams, mystical encounters, his knowledge of spiritual traditions, and a willingness to face his own past with ruthless honesty.    
     Sparrow then confronts a new initiation brought on by the appearance in his dreams a feminine presence, who seems intent on bringing him to an awareness of what he has done all his life –– recoiling from his feelings, breaking promises, and denying his deeper needs. He relives earlier experiences in which he remained aloof from his heart, including an encounter with a prostitute when he was 15, the loss of a beautiful hawk through his negligence, and his failure to catch the fish of a lifetime in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia.
    Against a backdrop of rich, but largely failed fly fishing experiences, Sparrow considers how his parents fell short of their own dreams, and realizes that he has to follow his own path, rather than to live out a pattern of denying his soul’s sincere desire. While he makes progress toward understanding his lifelong resistance and how it affects his fly fishing efforts, Sparrow nonetheless sets the stage –– by breaking a promise that he makes with God –– for an eventual encounter with death through the agency of a stingray’s painful wound. Becoming infected with Vibrio vulnificus, a deadly bacteria in the cholera family, he eventually realizes that he has a choice –– to live fully, or to die.
    The resolution of this crisis parallels the author’s consideration of the importance of  the body on the spiritual journey. Drawing on his own past, his mother’s search for meaning, and examples from Tibetan Buddhism and Medieval Christianity, Sparrow becomes aware of the grief he holds concerning his mother and the debt he owes her for giving him life.  With the help of his mentor and Jungian therapist Chas Matthews –– to whom the book is dedicated –– Sparrow experiences a powerful encounter with his mother’s memory that paves the way for his emotional rebirth.
    In the end, he invites Kathy –– the woman whose love he spurned at the beginning of the journey –– to join him for the end of his retreat. With Kathy by his side, Sparrow meets new tests that spring up around his relationship with his brother. Meanwhile, Scott and Kathy find themselves being drawn inexorably into the natural realm  –– to the point where a sense of oneness is experienced through dreams and remarkable encounters with the animals that inhabit the Laguna Madre. In the end, Sparrow experiences the beginning of a new life that awaits him.
    Sparrow’s extraordinarily intimate relationship with Spirit and his candor about his own struggles puts the reader in touch with ageless spiritual truths grounded in the immediacy of human contact.
    Gregory Scott Sparrow, Ed.D. is an Assistant Professor at the University of Texas-Pan American, where he teaches in the graduate counseling program, and a faculty member at Atlantic University in Virginia Beach. He is also a Licensed Professional Counselor in Texas, a Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist in Virginia, a writer, and a fly fishing guide and casting instructor. Sparrow has also written Lucid Dreaming: Dawning of the Clear Light (ARE, 1976), I Am with You Always: True Stories of Encounters with Jesus (Bantam, 1995), Blessed Among Women: Encounters with Mary and Her Message (Harmony, 1997), Sacred Encounters with Mary (Ave Maria, 2002), Sacred Encounters with Jesus (Ave Maria, 2003), and Andrew's Quest for the Perfect Christmas Gift (WPB, 2005). He and his wife, Kathy, own and manage Kingfisher Inn, a saltwater fly fishing lodge on the Lower Laguna Madre of deep South Texas.

Journal entry: Tuesday, July 30, 2002
Arroyo City, Texas

A Disturbing Dream

    A stingray lay unmoving at my feet in the shallow, clear water. Before I could move out of its way, it transformed into a man of stone and began to attack me. Sensing that he intended to kill me, I desperately defended myself and eventually prevailed, but only after chipping away at him, piece by piece, until there was nothing left of him.

    Three days after the dream, almost to the minute, my alarm clock sounded at 4 a.m.
    I got out of bed and went upstairs to awaken my friend Tim Clancey and my son, Ryan. The first day of the 64th annual Texas International Fishing Tournament (TIFT) would commence at sunrise, and I intended for us to be on the water, ready to fish, by first light. Tim had come down from San Antonio to compete with me in the tournament, and Ryan — who had only recently begun to fly fish — had decided to go along and help us with the boat. It was a “kill” tournament — one in which the contestants take dead fish to a weigh-in — and I’d promised myself never to fish one again. But when Tim expressed interest in fishing together, I decided to fish the TIFT one last time.
    The night before, I had become obsessed with the idea of staking out a place called the Trout Bar — my favorite big trout venue — before the other contestants arrived. Having won the TIFT fly fishing division the first time I entered it two years before, I knew that catching a big trout was the key to winning. As I rushed around in the wee hours of morning packing gear and grabbing a bit of breakfast, I failed to visit the bathroom — an omission that can ruin my day.
    It was so dark when we left the dock that we had to use a Q-beam to guide us on our eight-mile journey. Even with the searchlight’s help, I overshot our destination and had to circle back to locate the exact spot. Planing onto the edge of the flat, I turned off the motor and poled quietly into an area that’s famous among local anglers for hosting the largest speckled trout in the bay — if not the world. Meanwhile, the running lights from several boats could be seen approaching from the south. We had arrived first, and the Trout Bar was ours.
    It was against TIFT rules to begin fishing before sunrise, so we spent some time preparing our gear and joking around. Ryan was in rare form, obviously excited to be a part of “the team.” Then, feeling the urge to relieve myself before the tournament began, I stepped off the boat and waded toward a nearby spoil island.
    Ryan asked, “Where are you going, Dad?”
    “To the men’s room,” I replied.
    He began to make fun of me, but I knew if I didn’t follow through, I’d be miserable later. As I approached the south island of the Trout Bar, the black skimmers and black-necked stilts that were nesting there began squawking and hovering overhead as I searched for the largest black mangrove to crouch beside, as if anyone could see me in the twilight. Burying the evidence of my intrusion under a pile of dead seagrass, I started back toward the boat. Instead of wading carefully, I moved quickly — deep in thought and eager to begin the day.
    My thoughts centered on finding and catching big trout, instead of attending to the task at hand. Distracted by that singular aim, I took a step, and when my right foot came down, I felt a sharp, stabbing pain that quickly rose to almost intolerable levels.
    “Oh God!” I yelled. It felt like a hot knife had sliced through my ankle, leaving behind the signature of something coldly impersonal. I could barely keep walking, as almost immediately my leg muscles locked up from the pain.
    “What happened?” Tim yelled, with alarm in his voice.
    “A stingray got me!” I yelled back.
    Tim and Ryan piled out of the boat and came to assist me. As I stood there waiting for them, I realized that the stingray’s wound had been foreshadowed by the ominous dream three days before and by a number of other dreams, as well. Indeed, a series of experiences beginning in 1996 pointed to my return to my home waters and to an encounter with an stingray.
     The year of 1996 proved to be a particularly difficult time. I had left my marriage two years before, and my seven-year-old son lived a mile away with his mother. Meanwhile, I had pursued a new relationship that was doomed from the outset and eventually came to a nightmarish end in the late summer. I recall sitting at my dining room table, talking to a Virginia Beach policeman, who was 20 years my junior, but wise enough to ask the obvious question, “Why do you let her back in?” I replied, of course, “Because I love her.” But I discovered, as so many of us are destined to learn in time, that love is not always enough.
    Free, at last, from the turmoil, but not the grief of ending that relationship, I visited bars almost nightly, and I drank too much beer on too many occasions before admitting the futility of that empty source of solace. After my friend Giles voiced his concern, I consented at last to spending my nights at home, sober and alone. By day I was a therapist, helping others. By night, I felt broken and invisible.
    On a cold evening in mid-January 1997, I took the first tentative step in my journey homeward by beginning to reminisce about the place where my father had taken me fishing when I was a child — the Lower Laguna Madre of deep South Texas.
    Of all of the places and people I had known, it alone called to me.








    When Jesus chose his first disciples, he selected several men who had fished for a living. People who do not fish may consider this fact irrelevant. But those of us who do fish — if only for sport — and who enjoy the companionship of others who do, can imagine what Jesus might have seen in the likes of Peter, James, John, and Andrew. For the dream of catching a big fish is not unlike the dream of communing with God: The fisherman and the mystic alike are driven by a yearning for something elusive and essential just below the surface of ordinary life. Whether we think of it as a great fish or as God himself who beckons us onward in our quest, it feels remarkably the same.
    Some of my first memories on the Gulf Coast of South Texas are of blue crabs and piggy perch, and of my father untangling my fishing line, again and again, on the dock below the cottage. Dad was always patient, and looking back, I realize now that this was his gift to me.
    We lived 45 miles inland, but we spent many of our summer weekends at the cottage on the Arroyo Colorado. Dad had “inherited” the cottage from my mother’s entrepreneurial father who had suffered a financial setback and could not afford to keep up the payments. So Dad, who would never have bought such a place for himself, took it over for several years until his penchant for self-denial under the guise of prudence prompted him to sell it for $4,000. I can remember that for many years afterward — as we launched our boat from the public launch like everybody else and boated past Arroyo City toward the bay — we would try to pick out from among the assortment of vacation homes the cottage that had once been ours.
    The Arroyo Colorado was once the riverbed of the Rio Grande River. It begins as a mere trickle 70 miles inland, at the point where the Rio Grande broke away centuries ago and followed a more southerly course. By the time the Arroyo reaches Arroyo City, it is over 100 yards wide and looks like a substantial river. Five miles east, it enters the Lower Laguna Madre — a shallow hypersaline estuary that lies between the mainland of South Texas and Padre Island. From the point where the Arroyo enters the estuary, the Lower Laguna extends about 40 miles to the north and 20 miles to the south. Encompassing nearly 300 square-miles of sand flats and grassy lagoons, the Lower Laguna is remarkable for its primitive and unmarred beauty. It reveals itself as a spacious expanse of clear water, and it is the largest continuous shallow-water flat in the North America.
    Circumstances have conspired to protect the Lower Laguna from the encroachment of modern life. One of the largest ranches in the United States — the King Ranch — claims much of the western shoreline of the estuary northward from the Arroyo. And then, to the south, the Laguna Atascosa National Wildlife Refuge insulates the shoreline for another 15 miles. Consequently, the Lower Laguna Madre remains one of the last remaining primitive estuaries in the world. Except for a few fishing huts on stilts, there is absolutely nothing unnatural to see, except for an occasional barge on its way somewhere, or a small boat that seems lost in the expanse of water and sky.

    As a child, I knew nothing of the Laguna Madre’s secrets, nor of its beauty. My father’s plywood V-bottom boat could only travel in the channels created by dredging, which limited our range of exploration considerably. We were restricted in our fishing to the murky, manmade channel called the Intracoastal Waterway that slices unnaturally through the Laguna Madre from north to south, permitting deep-draft vessels to pass safely through the estuary.
    Back then, we would leave the dock at daybreak, and travel eastward five miles to the mouth of the Arroyo. We would stop and buy live shrimp from an old gentleman who lived in a hut on stilts, and whose loss of his larynx to cancer made him a man of a few whispered words. My father, whose responsibilities to his family always prevented him from pursuing the dream of a simpler life, often had something good to say about this man who lived so simply on the edge of the bay, and who could be so generous with his shrimp. At the mouth of the Arroyo, we would intersect the 50-yard-wide Intracoastal channel, and turning north or south, we would find a place to anchor along its edges. There we would cast live shrimp on treble hooks back into the deeper water and wait for the bobber — which we properly called a “cork” regardless of its composition — to disappear.
    For years, we caught innumerable spotted or “speckled” trout that way, so there never seemed to be a reason to go elsewhere or to innovate. But every once in a while, we’d see something that made us wonder. A tiny boat would pass us by to the east, skimming over water that was only a foot or so deep. These homemade plywood “scooters” were, essentially, wide flat-bottomed skis powered by outboard motors. When they would come to the dock, their captains — whom I remember as kind, but tightlipped old timers — would unload huge trout and redfish, the likes of which we had never seen at the end of our lines. Denial is a powerful thing, so somehow we kept explaining such miracles away until, in the face of the evidence, my brother began to wonder out loud what secrets the spacious shallow waters would reveal if only we could go there. But my dad, whose strong suit was consistency, was content to do what we’d always done. It was years before my brother and I left the old ways behind. When we did, we took our father with us.

    At the center of this watery universe lay an island that I never once visited as a child. From the first time I saw Green Island, I felt drawn to go there. Flocks of terns, herons, and egrets made Green Island their home. An occasional peregrine falcon could be seen circling over the island — probably calculating the risk of making a kill amongst so many sharp beaks. It was a place that was teeming with life and shrouded in mystery. Roseate spoonbills, also island residents, lined the southern shoreline and looked like a string of pearls around a impenetrable wall of green. No one I knew had ever stepped foot on Green Island. Today, it is an Audubon bird sanctuary and off limits to casual visitors, but back then, there was apparently nothing standing in the way of its exploration except shallow water and indifference.
    I would sometimes ask Dad if we could go there. When he explained that there was an impassable expanse of shallow water between us and the island, I would gaze at it longingly, imagining all of the things that might be found there. The tree-covered island was almost always somewhere within my view — if only as a thin green line on the horizon — and it worked on me continuously to awaken a yearning that would assume many forms later in my life.
    In time, I came to feel completely at home on the Laguna Madre. As we would speed eastward toward the bay in the morning twilight, I would dangle my legs over the bow of the boat, gripping the bow line like a bronco rider and relishing the warm, humid summer air flowing over me. The pervasive smell of fish — both living and dead, the cool pockets of air left over from the night, and the occasional howl of a coyote roaming the tidal flats — each familiar sensation greeted me as part of a rich, expansive experience of arriving at the one place most precious to me in all of the world.
    I have since discovered that fly fishermen, in particular, often speak with a deep reverence for their “home waters.” The place itself does not have to be the best place to fish, nor even notable in that regard: But it is where — over time and by degrees — a fisherman acquires an intimacy with nature and a mastery of his sport. And above all, it is where he comes to feel most at home in the world.
    The recurrent experience of one’s home waters can become central to one’s spiritual life by intimating the possibility of an enduring state of inner harmony. Indeed, just as the fisherman’s desire for a great fish parallels the fervor of the mystic in his yearning for God, the fisherman’s experience of his home waters is not unlike the mystic’s experience of arriving at his destination. My initial experience of what the mystics refer to as the Holy Light, for instance, made me aware of how heaven must feel just like home — and how, in turn, one’s true home must feel just like heaven.

    I had just turned 19, and was away from home for the first time as a freshman at the University of Texas in Austin. The experience began as an ordinary dream in which I was returning home from my college classes, carrying my books. As I approached my home, which bore no resemblance whatsoever to my actual home or dormitory, I realized suddenly that I was dreaming. I looked at my body and was amazed at how real everything seemed. Marveling at this paradox, I approached large black double-doors with ornate brass handles and opened them. As soon as I did, intense white light poured into my being, lifting me into an exquisite sense of love and joy that I’d never known. I entered the small room, which appeared to be a chapel. The white light bathed everything, and the sense of being home was total and complete. At one point, I carried a crystal rod upright, over which a spinning circle of crystal was poised in midair. No one was there to explain the mystery of the light, or the immense purpose that I felt.
    Even today, when I think about this experience, I can feel something of what I felt then — so totally fulfilled and so completely at home. Sparse Gray Hackle, author of Fishless Days and Angling Nights  has said, “Sometimes I think the least important thing about fishing is catching fish.” He never says, however, what the most important thing about fishing is. Like the Hindu meditator who evokes the experience of the Divine by repeating the mantric words neti, neti — not this, not that — he says that fishing is really about something that cannot be easily named. As a fisherman matures on his home waters, this becomes increasingly clear. Indeed, I think that all great anglers eventually realize what the great mystics have always known — that the fulfillment of the quest is never exactly what you expect it to be. And while the true goal cannot be easily named, we know when we are drawing close to it when we begin to feel completely at home in the world.