When I was in New York staying at the Leo House last week, I noticed an old, somewhat dingy sculpture standing in the corner of the lobby. I paid little attention to the large form until last Wednesday morning when I had a few minutes to study it closely. At first, I was attracted to the fish being carried by the boy and questioned its meaning. As many of you know, I love the fish image in its many manifestations. I was born under the sign of Pisces, I wear a tiny enameled silver fish, I enjoy fishing, and I have drawn and painted fish most of my life. The fish is my icon. So, I was strongly attracted to the fish image in this sculpture. Then I was completely astounded to notice that the fish had a human eye! I asked a few employees of the guesthouse whether they had noticed the human eye of the fish that the boy was carrying. I questioned the iconography and meaning. I inquired about all this of Sister Joann and finally Sister Marilyn who are part of the community of the St Agnes Sisters who live at Leo House.
Wisely, Sister Marilyn told me that the sculpture was a gift from the early 20th century and that it had been restored several years ago. Sister Marilyn knew the entire provenance and also the meaning that I describe on this journey daybook page. She told me that the story depicted comes from the Book of Tobit. The Book of Tobit is part of the canon of the original Bible but was later separated into the Apocrypha or Deuterocanonical Scriptures and eliminated from the Protestant Bible at the time of the Reformation. In the 1950’s parts of this beautiful story were uncovered as part of the Dead Sea Scrolls. Sister Marilyn told me that “St Raphael as patron of travelers” was chosen for the gift because St Leo House shelters travelers. When I got home, I read the biblical texts of the Book of Tobit in a few translations, I looked at historical images, and learned that St Raphael led and protected the boy, Tobias, on his journey to Media. During this trip, a big fish jumped into Tobias’s arms. St Raphael directed the son of Tobit to clean the fish, roast it, eat what was needed, and to save to save the liver, heart, and gall bladder of the fish because of their curative properties, which he did. Later, upon arriving safely back in Ninevah, Tobias rubbed the gall on the eyes of his father. Miraculously, Tobit’s blindness was cured.
I believe that the blindness of Tobit represents the blindness of the exiled Jews and, perhaps, the blindness of all people who are unable to appreciate God and the gifts of God. I speculate that the human eye of the fish may represent the all-seeing eye of God or the sacred curative properties of the fish and everything else that is beyond human understanding. Tobit’s eyesight was restored as a free gift of God when Tobias precisely followed precisely St Raphael’s directions, who was and is an angel and representative of God. My personal attraction to the fish is given a clearer, newer, and more elevated meaning through understanding the underlying meaning of “the mystery of the fish with a human eye.”