What Is The Chief End Of Man?

A RIVER RUNS THROUGH IT

NORMAN MCCLEAN

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What is the chief end of man?

Chapter * v

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"In our family, there was no clear line between religion and fly fishing. We lived at the junction of great trout rivers in western Montana, and our father was a Presbyterian minister and a fly fisherman who tied his own flies and taught others. He told us about Christ's disciples being fisherman and we were left to assume, as my brother and I did, that all first-class fishermen on the Sea of Galilee were fly fishermen.

It is true that one day a week was given over wholly to religion. On Sunday mornings my brother Paul, and I went to Sunday school and there to "morning services" to hear our father preach and in the evenings to Christian Endeavor and afterwards to "evening services" to hear our father preach again. In between on Sunday afternoons we had to study The Westminster Shorter Catechism for an hour and then recite before we could walk the hills with him while he unwound between services. But he never asked us more than the first question in the catechism, "What is the chief end of man?" And we answered together so one of us could carry on if the other forgot, "Man's chief end is to glorify God, and to enjoy Him forever." This always seem to satisfy him, as indeed such a beautiful answer should have, and besides he was anxious to be on the hills where he could restore his soul and be filled again to overflowing for the evening sermon. His chief way of recharging himself was to recite to us from the sermon that was coming, enriched here and there with selections from the most successful passages of his morning sermon.

Even so, in a typical week of our childhood Paul and I probably received as many hours of instruction in fly fishing as we did in all other spiritual matters."



Book Editor comment

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..................."Unique in the annals of modern fiction A River Runs Through It is more than just a portrait of a vanished America--it is a living piece of that world. Written when Norman Maclean was in his seventies, his first book of fiction was nomiated for a Pulitzer Prize and became a bestseller. The title novella recalls the experiences of a young man in frontier Montana of his minister father, who taught his sons the ways of grace and fly fishing; of his brother, an artist at trout fishing but less than successful at life; and the swift, cold rivers that ran from the heart of the mountains unto the still-mysterious heart of man."

Publisher Pocket Books a division of Simon and Schuster, copyright by the University of Chicago, 1976 , ISBN #0-671-77697-6 , Chapter 1

"Eventually, all things merge into one,

and a river runs through it.

The river

was cut by the world's great flood

and runs over rocks from the basement of time.

On some of the rocks are timeless raindrops.

Under the rocks are the words,

and some of the words are theirs.

I am haunted by waters."