With the stealth of a Navy SEAL, Father Jake Anderson creeps through tall grass on the bank of a small stream in northeast Iowa. He stays low to the ground as he glances at the current flow, his right hand grasping a fly rod.

When he spots a change in current where a chunky brown trout might lie in ambush waiting for a bug to float by, he puts his fly rod in motion.

The back-and-forth movements are smooth and snappy, the rod seeming like an extension of his arm. The keen attention to detail, the passion for hooking trout on his assortment of hand-tied flies, and more than two decades of experience wading streams in several states have made him an expert in the eyes of anyone who fishes with him — though far less so in his own eyes.

On this particular trip to a state that is home to miles and miles of blue-ribbon trout streams, he is joined by 13 other men, including a priest he has fished with, and another man who was ordained to the priesthood just days after the retreat. It is an annual men’s fly fishing retreat, complete with a spiritual theme and a patron saint — St. Zeno of Verona (see sidebar below), after whom they have named a group they formed, with members going on local outings throughout the year that sometimes include wives and children.

The 11 laymen at the retreat belong to the parishes of St. Michael and St. Mary in Stillwater, where Father Anderson served as parochial vicar from 2015 to 2018. He was looking for an activity that could draw men together for fellowship, fun and faith, and discovered that there were several parishioners who shared his passion for fly fishing. Among them was Pat Houlton, 73, who helped get the group — St. Zeno Anglers — started in 2016 and helped Father Anderson launch the first fly fishing retreat four years ago.

Also making the retreat were Father Jim Livingston, whom Father Anderson has fished with in recent years and is pastor of St. Paul in Ham Lake, and Father Julian Druffner, who was ordained to the priesthood for the Diocese of Superior, Wisconsin, May 28.

Father Anderson’s devotion to what some call an “art” started when he was 11 and growing up on a small farm near Baldwin, Wisconsin. He remembers exactly when he first desired to pick up a fly rod.

“It was a June day,” recalled Father Anderson, 37, who was ordained in 2015 for the Archdiocese of St. Paul and Minneapolis and now serves at St. Lawrence Catholic Church and Newman Center in Minneapolis. “My mom went shopping and my dad wasn’t working that particular day. And, he said, ‘Hey, do you want to watch a movie?’ I said, ‘Sure.’”

The movie was “A River Runs Through it,” a fly fishing drama produced by Robert Redford in 1992 and starring Brad Pitt. It won an Oscar that year for cinematography, with spectacular river and mountain scenes filmed in Montana. After watching the movie, Father Anderson was hooked on fly fishing.

“That day, I said, ‘Dad, I want to learn how to do that,’” Father Anderson said.

So, he did. His father, Mark, who has since died, went to the garage, pulled out an old fly fishing rod that he had made while in college, and started teaching his young son how to cast.

“I started practicing in the yard and then went to Fleet Farm and bought some cheap rubber hip waders,” Father Anderson recalled.

The Rush River was just a few hundred yards off their property, and he started making regular trips there on his bike, wearing the hip waders while pedaling. He quizzed people who were fly fishing and took copious notes about what he saw and heard; he also poured over books on the subject.

His passion grew and continued through formation for the priesthood at The St. Paul Seminary in St. Paul. He got away to fish whenever he could, and grabbed fellow seminarians to join him. Day trips happened during his free time, and he waded miles of streams with his fly rod in search of trout. He enjoyed teaching other men to fish, but even more, he wanted to “deepen a sense of fraternity.”

This year’s retreat took place May 21-24, with fly fishing sessions in the mornings and afternoons, and retreat talks, prayer and Mass interspersed during other parts of the day. For Father Anderson, it’s as easy to mingle faith with fly fishing as it is to drop a hand-tied “woodchuck caddis” into a trout’s line of vision.

“We want to just keep it as simple as possible,” he explained. “It’s not like a retreat center. You’re not going into formal silence and there’s not three meditations a day. It’s more like just taking something guys like doing and yet having the Lord at the center.”

It works. Men arrived promptly on Sunday for this year’s retreat, and all of them brought enthusiasm and attentiveness to the opening Mass, which Father Anderson celebrated outside on a deck of the large cabin where the men were staying. He engaged them with a homily about the ascension of Jesus, with deep conversations about spiritual and earthly topics continuing through dinner and well after sunset around a campfire.

“There’s something beautiful” about going on the retreat, said Mark Setterstrom, 39, who is married with children and at one time played in the NFL. “I know these men so deeply. There’s such a deep commonality that comes together, not just from the fishing, but (from) spending time together in the Eucharist, in prayer, and then in God’s great creation.”

When the retreat dates — usually sometime in May — are put on the calendar, “I make it a priority” to sign up, Setterstrom said. “This is the most deeply manly thing most of us will get in the entire year.”

For him, it boils down to one thing: “We know Christ through this.”

The men who came this year ranged in age from 28 to 85, and that is part of the draw. Some of them are young fathers who like to fish and pray together with men who have decades of experience in both raising children and working in the professional world. The older men are willing and eager to share what they have learned throughout their lives, including the art of fly fishing.

The men vary in skill when it comes to casting for trout. That’s why they are divided into teams of two or three, with experienced fly anglers on each team assigned to help and encourage beginners and novices. Houlton, in addition to helping organize the retreat, serves as one of its main fly fishing mentors, a role he relishes.

After doing it for more than 30 years and sharing the sport with all five of his sons, he finds joy in continuing to help others catch fish. He also likes the friendships he has formed through both the retreat and St. Zeno club events. They are what keep him coming back.

“It’s just great fellowship,” said Houlton, who counts Father Livingston among those he has taught to fly fish. “As men, we bond through activity. … And, the fly fishing allows us to have an activity that we can share together.”

It also opens the door to more serious topics while sitting around a campfire at the end of the day — like the battle Houlton’s wife, Janet, is fighting with cancer, and the battle his son-in-law’s sister is also fighting with cancer. Fishing first and talking later is, perhaps, an indirect and winding road to the things that matter in life. But, it is a destination these men always seem to reach during the retreat.

“If you put men together in something like this,” Houlton said, “then they will talk more freely and they will talk about things — and, I think, more personal things. It opens that up.”

It is why Houlton declares: “This is my kind of retreat.”

The oldest man at this year’s gathering, Buzz Kriesel, 85, wholeheartedly embraces this retreat for similar reasons. He has been on all four of them and he attends most of the local outings, too.

He is known to take naps in between fly fishing sessions, but he is fully awake to the benefits of this type of gathering, and to having men of faith, including Father Anderson, to share a trout stream with.

“They’re all deeply faithful men, Catholic men,” Kriesel said. And “the families that they’re raising — the younger guys — are absolutely amazing.”

He reserved the strongest words of praise for Father Anderson, whom he honored during a campfire tribute on the first evening of the retreat.

“God bless you, Father Anderson,” Kriesel said, as applause broke out among the men encircling the embers. “You’re the glue for this whole thing, you really are. You give us the heart, the spirit — and you out-fish all of us.”

That last remark drew hearty laughter from the men, but it’s true. On the first afternoon of fishing, Father Anderson worked a short stretch of flowing water and landed more than a dozen trout in conditions all the men described as very difficult. Seeing him ply the waters with his fly rod, it’s clear that his is a refined craft, performed with hands as skilled as a sculptor’s.

Make no mistake — fierce competitiveness burns within Father Anderson. He does not like to lose a fish, and he definitely does not like to get skunked (that rarely happens). Yet, he would never measure a trip by its trout. In the end, fly fishing is but the means to something deeper, something greater. From beginning to end, there is no mistaking what he is really aiming for on this retreat — helping the men deepen their relationship with Christ.

The men know that. This is the true bounty they take back home to their families, in addition to any trout that falls under their fillet knives.

Their wives know that, too. Travis Amiot, 42, said even though his wife teases him about calling three days of fly fishing a “retreat,” she is on board with him leaving her and their children for a few days to share fly rods and fellowship with the other men.

“She knows the quality of the men that are coming, and she knows for sure I’m better for coming,” he said. “She likes to give me a hard time by joking that it’s not really a retreat. But, in the end, she knows that coming here, the notes that I’ll take from what Father Jake says, and the time with these guys, we’ll be a better family because of it.”

Zeno

St. Zeno of Verona lived in the fourth century and is the patron saint of fly fishing anglers. A group of parishioners at St. Michael and St. Mary in Stillwater, led by Father Jake Anderson, who served at the parish from 2015 to 2018, formed a fly fishing club in 2016 and named it St. Zeno Anglers. They commissioned local artist Nick Markell to create an icon for the group, which each year is blessed at an annual men’s fly fishing retreat led by Father Anderson and given to one member to take home and keep until the next retreat.

Pat Houlton, a member of the group who helped start the annual retreat, had it in his home for two years (he was not able to attend the retreat last year) and passed it to Todd Knaeble during a special ceremony May 22 after the retreat’s opening Mass. Houlton’s wife, Janet, has been battling cancer, and he said it was meaningful to have the icon in their home during the last two years. Also, it was Janet who who discovered that St. Zeno is the patron saint of fly anglers and informed Pat.

During his opening talk of the retreat this year, Father Anderson talked about St. Zeno, who lived in Verona, Italy. He noted that the saint “was a great fisherman” who often went fishing in the river that flowed through Verona, which is why art depicting him often includes a fish dangling from his crosier.

“He’s also the patron of children learning to walk and children learning to speak,” Father Anderson added. “And so, (he’s) just a great namesake for this group.”