Sermons at St. John’s Presbyterian Church

Theology of Surfing

Transcribed from the sermon preached July 15, 2007

The Reverend Max Lynn, Pastor

St. John’s Presbyterian Church

2727 College Avenue, Berkeley, CA 94705

 Telephone 510-845-6830    Fax 510-845-6837

Scripture Readings: Psalm 93:1-5, Psalm 148, John 1:1-4

My father used to take us to Huntington Beach in the summer time.  I still remember the first time I saw him body surf. He went flying by with a big smile on his face.  I also remember the first time I got into deep water and my feet came off the ocean floor.  I was a good swimmer with lots of confidence so I put my head down and swam like crazy.  After a bit I looked up and discovered I was still right next to my dad.  With all that swimming I hadn’t moved from where he was standing.  I lost some of my confidence and reached out and grabbed my dad.

My father laughed and said, “you are in a riptide.  When you are in a riptide you should swim laterally to the rip and shore until you get out of it.  Then swim in.”  My father was teaching me a lesson that applies to much of life: Sometimes it does no good to fight against the current.  Sometimes, you just have to go with the flow.

As waves crash to shore, the water eventually looks for a way back out to sea. A riptide is the long shore current flowing toward the deepest part of the sand bar to escape. Surfers get into the riptide in order to get out to the surf. It is like an escalator to the waves. On a big day at Ocean Beach, if you can't find a riptide, you don't even try to travel out.

The revelation that in surfing and life you just have to go with the flow opens a deeper lesson still: that there is a flow to life. Dualistic thinking begins to break up. Life is not just a competition for me to subdue, a series of unrelated objects placed for me to exploit on the way to my goal. Danger and chaos here, and safety and order there. Sometimes, what is a problem in one situation is a gift in another. Chaos in one place becomes beautiful play in another.

To understand this thought better, let's look at where the ocean waves that we surf or panic in come from. It helps to picture throwing a rock into a small frog pond.  At the point of impact there is a big splash with drops of water and waves of multiple shapes and sizes.  But as the initial splash settles down and the waves move outward they begin to stretch out and clean up.  Soon you see no sign of the rock but the rings of waves moving across smooth water. 

The Pacific is the frog pond, but instead of a rock God throws wind. The friction of the wind on the water creates ripples which join together to create waves.  Small waves join to form big waves and big waves join to form swell. 

Stormsurf.com tells us that there are three factors that influence the level of energy in swells: wind velocity, wind area (fetch), and duration.  That is, the speed of the wind, the amount of ocean surface affected by wind blowing in the same direction (also known as fetch), and the amount of time those winds blow over the same part of the ocean.  Ideally, to make a huge swell, one would want strong steady winds blowing at maximum velocity over thousands of miles in the same direction (fetch aimed toward your beach) for days on end.  But our atmosphere is highly dynamic, and rarely do such conditions exist or persist for long. 

In the summer we get local wind over a short time and space.  All that does is make a mess: like being at the point in the pond where someone throws a bunch of gravel. So, northern California surfers dream not of an endless summer, but an endless winter. During a typical open ocean winter storm, one could expect to see winds of 45-50 knots blowing over 600-1000 miles for 36 hours.  In such a storm, the average highest waves (or seas) commonly reach 30-35 ft towards the center of the fetch area and produce a swell with a period of 17-20 seconds.

Period is the distance between wave crests and makes a huge difference in the size and quality of the surf. It helps to picture a glass of water and a pot.  The glass and the pot are the same height but the pot is much wider.  Small period waves are like the glass and the longer like the pot.  While the height of the water in the pot is no taller than the glass, the pot holds much more water and has a much bigger impact when it reaches shore and pours over itself.  A typical swell will produce multiple period waves.  The longer the period the faster the wave moves, so as waves travel away from the storm they clean up and get in line.  The short period chop dissipates and the longest period waves lead the way.  2000 miles is a nice distance to clean up a swell.

Each reef and beach has its own personality and prefers a particular swell height, period and directions to others, and does different things on different local winds and tides. So, depending on the swell (long distance wind), the direction it is coming from, its height and period, and the local tide, local wind, contour of the land, family and work schedule, the experienced surfer decides where and when he or she may catch the biggest, most organized and cleanest surf possible.

Notice that I haven’t mentioned any surfing tricks or bravado of athletes, no great competition, no screaming fans, no cheerleading girls.  There are few places more isolated from other humans than big surf on a cold winter morning.  Even when there are other guys around there is almost no talking.  A couple of weeks ago when I preached on the theology of sport I wasn’t sure how to work surfing into it, so I just left it out.  Since surfing is the last sport this 44-year-old guy is still doing, I decided maybe I should think about why.  Its not that surfers can’t tell a tall tale, nor that there are not times and places where testosterone and competition make a show.  The Sunday after the Centennial I told the story of the Huntington Beach local who used the UCLA swim team as a slalom course. 

But what I didn’t know when I was a kid standing on the pier was that the surfer wasn’t a stronger, more gifted athlete and swimmer, but the guy who best knew his surroundings. . When experienced surfers are talking with each other, what really makes their mouths water is not the description of human acrobatics or competition, but casting a vision of the alignment and flow of global forces.  Translated into a theological question: How did you read life around you to find the most joyous and powerful way to live today?  How do you place yourself on the wave of your life?  What wave do you find to ride?  Surfing is more about the wave than the athlete. It is more about a relationship with the ocean than standing on a board and doing tricks. The wave itself is God's trick, and the surfer just wants to be a part of it. Who stands around after a game in awe of the basketball court? 

Often, when we find ourselves in a riptide of life, a family or work or national crisis, we think that the solution to our problem is to keep doing the same thing, to keep heading in the same direction but just try harder.  Our child acts out and our solution is to tell them how to do it.  They do it again and we lecture them again, but this time with more passion.  We seek a partner by swimming toward them like they were the shore that will save us.  They get more distant and so we swim ever more desperately toward them. Stuck in the riptide of war, our President is certain that changing directions is out of the question.  We need to keep going in the same direction, but just fight harder.  We see the solution in our own effort rather than our vision of the world around us.  In Christian language, this desperate, stubborn view is known as salvation by works.  Baptism is a symbol of drowning after our own self-centered efforts have failed, and by God’s grace, we are reborn to live life with new vision and new direction.

The basic rule of the riptide applies across the globe. Or to get more to the truth, what happens on the seashore is part of a global dance. Nature looks for equilibrium. Pressured water or air seeks less pressure. Force seeks to exert itself. But the pressure does not work on its own, as the soft side, the area of low pressure attracts with equal but opposite strength.

It makes no sense for the high pressure to say to the low, "I am the strong one, I am the one in charge. I am not going to change. They give each other power and definition. They are nothing without each other. Their meeting is beautiful and tumultuous; the low and high pressure, the masculine and feminine, the yin and yang dance and fight and make up. As we know from love and dance, sometimes with Christ, like Christ, we remember we are one with the Creator, with all of life.

In John 1 we hear that the Spirit of the Creator is the life Spirit of Creation. There is a cosmic connection of all of life to the Creator, the unifying power that makes all things a part of a great and glorious whole. Yet the specific holds the cosmos within itself. The Creator is found incarnate in the Son. The Word was with God, and the Word was god. What has come into being in him was life, and the life was the light of all people.

In John 1 we hear that The Spirit of the Creator is the life Spirit of Creation. There is a cosmic connection of all of life to the Creator, the unifying power that makes all things a part of a great and glorious whole.  Yet the specific holds the cosmos within itself. The Creator is found incarnate in the Son.  The Word was with God, and the Word was God.  What has come into being in him was life, and the life was the light of all people. 

A fleeting wave, a single water molecule, with only a momentary movement contains the grace and power of life eternal. So we look for the truth of life not only in the heavens but also in our individual hearts.  In a story of a peasant from an obscure country between the Nile and the Tigris and Euphrates, we find the truth of the cosmos.  He comes alive, and travels like a swell from a storm through 2000 years of history, and is found incarnate on our own shore, in this small 100-year-old congregation on the Pacific Rim, in you and me.

I leave you with a quote from Diarmuid O’ Murchu’s book Quantum Theology:  The invitation is about participation, not mere observation.  We are not journeying in the universe but with the universe.  We are not concerned about living in an evolving world but co-evolving with our world.  We are parts of a whole, much greater than the sum of its parts, and yet within each part we are interconnected with the whole.”