surfing & spirituality
s u r f i n g & s p i r i t u a l i t y
I first read Dr. Peter Kreeft’s work whilst preparing a presentation entitled: “How can a God of Love allow Pain & Suffering in the World?” He lectures philosophy, is an Apologist and the Author of many Books on Apologetics, Philosophy and Christianity. I found his work to be very insightful, reasonable and balanced.
Recently I also found out that he is an avid Bodyboarder and Bodysurfer and has done quite a bit of writing around these topics in relation to our Spiritual Journey. Below is a short excerpt I found on his website (click on image to go there) where Dr. Kreeft explores the relationship between Surfing & Spirituality from a Christian Perspective.
Over to Dr. Kreeft. . .
Nothing is more important than our journey to God, or “the spiritual life,” as many writers call it. For this is our ultimate reason for living. It’s what each of us was born for.Nearly all who write about the spiritual life distinguish stages in it. For it’s clearly like a road on which we move, and change, and progress.
Many different images from physical life have been used for the stages of the spiritual life, for example, Teresa of Avila’s “mansions” (in The Interior Castle), or Walter Hilton’s rungs on The Ladder of Perfection. Since these are just analogies, differences between them are not really contradictions. The same reality (the stages in the spiritual life) can be truly told by using many different metaphors, or symbols from physical life.
One analogy that’s never, as far as I know, been used—yet one that is quite arresting to many souls—is the analogy of surfing.
Many of us love the ocean. It’s our favorite place in the world. As soon as we have the vacation time and money, we spend it there. We feel a mysterious longing for the sea as some kind of secret to our own identity, as if our blood had salt water in it. (It does, by the way.) This longing is a commonplace of poets:
I must go down to the sea again
To the lonely sea and the sky
And all I ask is a tall ship
And a star to steer her by.
John Masefield
Roll on, thou deep and dark blue ocean, roll;
Ten thousand fleets sweep over thee in vain!
Lord Byron
We nonpoets feel it too. If we didn’t, we wouldn’t read and love the poets.
I’m not an expert swimmer, but I am a swimmer. I’m not a good surfer, not even a “real” surfer with a full-sized board. But surfing with a boogie board, or body-board—well, that is my “thing.” It’s not only one of the most delightful experiences I know but also one of the most profoundly suggestive. I know only a little about the spiritual life, much more from others than from myself. But what I know well (surfing) is a powerful teacher, by analogy, of what I don’t know well (the spiritual life). That’s the purpose of analogies: to use the better-known to better know the unknown. I here share my favorite analogy because I suspect many readers will reply, “What! You too? I thought I was the only one!”
The key elements in the symbolism are pretty clear: I, the surfer, am—myself. The body with which I surf in the sea symbolizes the soul, with which I “surf” in God. The sea is God. The beach is the approach to God. Surfing is the experience of God, or the spiritual life.
In my surfing experience I can distinguish twelve steps. In my experience of God I can also distinguish twelve steps. The twelve clear, physical steps in surfing help clarify the twelve more mysterious steps in the journey into God.
There are four main divisions, with three subdivisions in each.
The first three steps are preliminaries. The first step is the knowledge of the sea. No one will ever experience the sea without going there, and no one will go there withoutwanting to, and no one will want to without knowing about it. Thus, the first three steps are: (1) knowing about the sea; (2) wanting to go there; and (3) going there.
Parallel to these three necessary preliminaries for surfing are the three necessary preliminaries to God. They are the three “theological virtues” of faith, hope, and love.
First, we must know that God exists, and is good, and is our joy. That knowledge comes by faith. (It can also come by reason for some, but it comes by faith for all.)
Second, we must hope for God and seek him. “Seek and you shall find” implies that if you don’t seek, you won’t find.
Third, love (charity, agape) is the fruit of this plant of hope, whose roots are faith. For Christians, love means a life, not a feeling. As Kierkegaard puts it, love is “the works of love.” Faith blossoms into works. Faith works. The plant—roots, stem and fruit—is one. Faith, hope, and love—works are not three things but three parts of one living thing: the spiritual life, the life of God in the soul. This is “the one thing needful” (Lk 10:42).
Faith in God is our knowledge of God. This is like our knowledge of the sea. Hope in God is our desire for God. This is like our desire to go to the sea. Love of God is our actual movement and growth toward God, or in God. This is like our actual travel to the sea.
All three are delightful. Planning a vacation is almost half the fun. Foreplay is as much a part of love as consummation.
Our knowledge of the sea need not be deep, like the sea, for it to be sufficient as the first step in our journey. We needn’t be oceanographers to be vacationers. Similarly, we needn’t be theologians to be saints.
But our desire for the sea must be deep if we are to take the time and money to travel there. Mild curiosity isn’t enough. Most of us have to move a lot of schedules, people, and suitcases to take a vacation. We won’t do it without longing.
The next three stages in our journey to the sea happen only when we are already there, in its “presence”: (4) seeing the sea; (5) smelling the sea; and (6) running down the beach into the sea.
The gift of understanding is like sight. No amount of words or verbal explanations can substitute for seeing. You only believe the truth of the words in a travel folder. But you see the sea when you arrive there, and that sight strikes a chord in the heart, a chord of joy and homecoming—and at the same time of further longing. It’s a mysterious mingling of deep satisfaction and dissatisfaction, a divine discontent. For the restless heart that God has made for himself is not only restless until it gets to God; it’s restless until it rests in God.
The faith-hope-love pattern is repeated here. Seeing the sea is the fulfillment of the faith-from-afar that we had from travel folders. And seeing God is the fulfillment of faith: “If you believe, you will see” (Jn 11:40). Smelling the sea is the fulfillment of desiring hope from afar. Smelling is a most mystical sense. The thing itself enters into us, or we into it, when its very molecules enter our noses. And smells move us more deeply and mysteriously, sometimes, than any other sense. Finally, running into the sea is like self-forgetful, self-offering love. It’s an obligation, an offering of self.
The next three stages deepen our relationship with the sea and with God. First (7), we get our toes wet. Spiritually, we experience a little of what we have first believed and then understood.
Second (8), we get wet halfway up. Getting your bathing suit wet is the essential step. Bathing suits cover our private parts, our tenderest spots. This symbolizes the hopeful investment of our lives that is pain, sacrifice, and death. The starkest difference between the saints and ourselves is their willingness, even eagerness, to suffer for God.
Finally (9), getting wet all over symbolizes the total consecration of our whole self, whole will, and whole life to God, leaving absolutely nothing left for ourselves, not a penny or a second or any other thing we call our own.
The last three stages cover what is usually called “mystical experience.” Getting in over your head (10), with your feet no longer on the ground, symbolizes the mind plunging into the divine mysteries, the “dark night of the soul” that no words can mediate. We lose all footing. We are no longer in control. We’re a part of the sea, it seems. Thus, even the orthodox mystics say pantheistic-sounding things, for they see and feel only God, not themselves at all. Of course, they’re still there—who’s having the mystical experience, anyway? But they don’t know or feel themselves there any more. They’re in over their heads. This sounds scary only as heaven sounds scary. For it is heaven, the beginning or foretaste of heaven. All of us will be mystics there.
Then comes the actual surfing (11). Let’s make it body surfing. Body surfing is an even more intimate oneness with the sea than board surfing, whether with a full-sized board or small bodyboard. Here, our unity with the sea is greater than the passive getting in over your head (10); it is the active doing what the sea does. What the sea does is waving. So we wave. We become one with what the sea does as well as one with what the sea is.
Steps 1-9 were all dynamic process, motion. Step ten was the end, peace. But that’s notthe end. On the other side of the end there is more dynamism and movement, but this time from the end rather than to it, from within it, as waves come from within the sea. After we are moved to God, we find that once we are in God we are moved again, this time from God, by God. God is dynamic, like crashing surf, not static, like a stagnant pool. Living in God forever is the most dynamic, exciting thing there is. Body surfing is (for surfing freaks like me) a remote but intimate analogy, a weak yet powerful foretaste of heaven.
Finally, the analogy breaks down, as all do.
The last physical stage (12) is not joyful, but the spiritual stage it symbolizes is supreme joy. The last stage is drowning (something I would not advise!). It symbolizes mystical union, death not just of concepts (stage 10) or of self-will (stage 11, when we’re moved wholly by the sea’s waves) but of the very ego-self itself. Something in us longs to die, for only death brings resurrection. Something in us that we cannot understand, something we both fear and love, cries out to God to slay us in the Spirit:
Blow, blow, blow till I be
But the breath of the Spirit,
blowing in me.
And, “I live, nevertheless not I, but Christ lives in me.”
apnea – what it takes
s t e p h a n e m i f s u d - apnea extreme
stephane mifsud is a freediver from france.
he holds a number of freediving world records for both static and dynamic apnea.
most recently, he set a new world-record for holding his breath for 11 minutes 35 seconds!
haven’t found too much information on him, and most of it is in french, but i reckon the video-clip below is worth a thousand words… the clip dates back to 2007 and is a demo of a documentary on him. since the video was made he has set a number of new records.
i n c r e d i b l e !
traysurfing
t r a y s u r f i n g
i really like it when someone takes something that is intended for one use and is able to come up with a different, completely unrelated, use for the object.
enter: traysurfing – take a perfectly good tray used for serving food at mcdonalds, or for serving tea at grandma’s house, and use it to ride waves. the video clips below are of guys doing just that.
enjoy.
mike horn – hydrospeed
mike horn down the amazon
towards the end of the 90’s i read an article about a south african guy named mike horn who had become the first person to hydrospeed/riverboard the entire length of the amazon river. the trip was close one 7 000km’s long and lasted 7 months. reading that article made a big impression on me & i was especially struck by the incredible mental fortitude that one would have to have in order to pull off such an adventure.
from there, my interest in mike’s exploits grew & i regularly followed his adventures via his website Mike Horn Website, which includes circumnavigating the globe on the equator entirely solo and without mechanical assistance, which took him almost 2 years to complete…
then, recently i came across some video footage of mike & a friend named cedric (dont know surname) running some whitewater in Peru which I think was around 1994. the footage is something of a ‘holy grail’ of hydrospeeding / riverboarding and includes mike’s world record setting 21m waterfall descent. the narration is in italian (anyone able to translate?) but if you ignore that & just watch the footage it is probably still the best video footage ever of the sport of hydrospeeding / riverboarding. i believe the filming was arranged by mike’s main sponsor at the time: sector watches. he was one of their “no-limits” team members. dont know the chap who put the footage up on youtube, but my thanks.
take a look and i’d be interested to hear your opinions…
read more about mike horn here: mike horn on wikipedia
poetry in ocean
mark cunningham - poet in motion
some vintage bodysurfing footage of mark cunningham who is regarded as one of the best bodysurfers in the world. there is a fair amount of bodysurfing video-clips and footage on the internet… but considering this video-clip dates back to the 1980’s, it is one of my all-time favourites. even if you’re not that interested in bodysurfing, just watch how mark is able to move through the water and navigate his way on waves. it really is a form of artistry.
photo & video source unknown
old women of the sea
Japanese Women Divers
to be called an ama is a rare honour in japan. it means you are part of a small but tight-knit group of female shellfish divers who have been immortalised on stamps and in the 1967 james bond film, “you only live once”. sadly, the ama women are a group dwindling in numbers as the unrelenting pace of progress continues to whittle away at yet another culture heritage now threatened by extinction.
the word ‘ama’ literally translates in japanese as ‘women of the sea’ and they dive mostly for different kinds of seaweed and abalone, and have been doing so for more than 1000 years. it is said that this kind of diving has traditionally been a women’s work, since ladies have a different distribution of fat to men, thus enabling them to withstand cold water temperatures. in 2003 the average age for ama divers in the shirama region of japan was 67 years old, the youngest being 50 years old and the oldest 83.
carrying a day's catch
“young women today don’t like the sea as much as we do, they lack courage and don’t want to get their skin darkened by working in the water or the fields,” said motohashi (a 68 year old ama) lamenting the lack of followers in her wake.
shirahama’s ama still earn at least 100,000 yen in the may to september season, with the best divers making around three million yen, a substantial extra income for these women whose main livelihood these days is farming rice, soya, broad beans and flowers.
collecting abalone is hard work. equipped with a long stick, the divers go down about 8-10 metres (26-33 feet), either diving from small boats or swimming out from the beach, and only have as long as their breath holds — about one minute 20 seconds — to prise the molluscs from the rocks. the youngest of the ama stay in the water for up to four hours a day, resting and chatting with friends on a floating wooden box.
one of the most distinctive features of the ama is their loud speaking voice and their laughter. Honed over years of shouting over wind and wave, their voices are deep and brassy. and, in testimony to living a life of danger and hard work, they have very well developed senses of humor and burst into laughter at the slightest provocation.
in the afternoon, after a long, cold day of diving, the women gather around a warming fire in the center of the building and discuss the day’s work and anything else that interests them…
text and images above, researched from various internet sources & youtube clip taken from a documentary film entitled ‘fit surroundings’on the ama divers by david plath and jacquetta hill
gnarliest wave ever bodysurfed?
shipstern bluff bodysurf
- click image to watch video -
shipstern bluff is a wave off tasmania and is known to be one of the heaviest waves on the planet. earlier the year, while filming a new surfmovie entitled A Deeper Shade of Blue [a deeper shade of blue], one of the guys (Damian “Dom” Wills) in the line-up had a leash come off his surfboard and he was stuck in the impact zone. he decided to swim into one of the waves and try bodysurf it. besides the wave being really HEAVY, he did this without flippers which makes it even more challenging since it is really difficult to generate enough speed – swimming into a wave like that – to assist you in making the take-off. below is a quote of his, following the wave:
“When I came up my leg-rope plug had pulled out of my board, so I swam around in the line-up for a bit before I bodysurfed one okay wave and went back for another. I could see a good one shaping up. I took a few strokes and it pulled me over with the lip. I knew I was going to hit hard. But overall it was fun!”
taken from TransWorldSurf
the photo above and video-clip shown here does not do justice just how gnarly Dom’s wave was. you will need to actually watch the movie to really appreciate it. nonetheless, i suppose to be fair, one could not really say that he bodysurfed the wave…. mad props for trying!
the life of ply
an inspirational surf story
I first came across this little gem of a video at the end of 2008. I just love the enthusiasm and character of Dorothy (Dot) featured in the clip. Want to encourage you to watch it with an open mind, and if you read the “My Life in Water” article, you may remember me referencing it there also.
Awarded ‘Most inspirational film’ at Cornwall film festival’s Board Shorts event by Mark Kermode. A short tale of enduring stoke catalysed by prone surfing on a ply board. Please visit http://pronetobelly@blogspot.com for more details. features the music of ‘The Loose Salute’, amongst others.
second paragraph text from YouTube description.
cross country swimming :-)
cross country swimmer - click image to watch video
i see this clip was put up on youtube more than 18months ago already…
it is clever, funny and original, i like it!
click on image to watch video.
underwater sculpture
jason de caires taylor's beautiful underwater sculptures
Deep under the waves of the Caribbean Sea lies one of the worlds most unusual and stunning art galleries. A circle of 26 children stands on the ocean floor.
Slowly theyre becoming part of their undersea world. Its about how children adapt to their surroundings. They take on the characteristics and personality of where they are, explains sculptor and scuba diver Jason.
Learning to combine his two passions, Jasons underwater works are designed to become an artificial reef.
(text adapted from YouTube Clip Description)
visit Jason’s website at: Underwater Sculpture Website
