Caught by the fish

I only knew I ached at times in certain ethereal directions and I believed that in this direction there might lie the object toward which I ached, the Real Thing that would satisfy the homeward aching and make me feel at long last as I long had longed and longed to feel.

Eric Metaxas, Fish Out of Water

Anyone who has read much C.S. Lewis, especially his Surprised by Joy, will experience a bit of deja vu when reading the above line in Fish Out of Water (2021) by Eric Metaxas. Both men experienced a persistent longing — which Lewis calls joy and Metaxas calls "homeward aching" — that eventually led them to a vital Christian faith that ultimately influenced countless others.

Their early lives, which in most respects were quite different, had commonalities. They were both raised in ostensibility Christian families and attended prestigious universities — Lewis, Oxford and Metaxas, Yale — where they drifted into conformity with the intellectual trends of their generations. They rejected God, even while being incessantly and unwillingly drawn to him.

The son of a Greek immigrant father and a German immigrant mother, Metaxes was soaked in both cultures from an early age, even while growing up in the United States and experiencing that culture firsthand. He visited relatives in both Greece and Germany at various points in his youth. His family belonged to a Greek Orthodox church where even the priests never seemed to believe much of anything. The church was always more about culture than faith.

At Yale, he showed a flare for writing, yet despite a few successes rarely seemed to have anything to write about.

All the while Metaxas says he felt like a fish out of water, as if he didn't really belong in whatever environment he found himself. He says his conversion came in a dream in which he pulled a golden fish out of the water, and he realized, upon waking, that the fish represented Jesus Christ. A fish has long been a Greek symbol for Christ. What Metaxas had been looking for had found him.

Since then Metaxas has become a biographer of notable Christians, including Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and he conducts interviews on a weekly television show and on podcasts. Among the surprises in his fine book is his connection to Larry David, creator of Seinfeld, and the real individuals behind two of the main characters in that popular series.