All life is dynamic. 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, many think 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. We have talent and trained so hard and been so good we think we can swim against any current life throws at us. 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. We are lifted up on the wave of the Spirit and flow through life with exhilaration and joy.
Life is dynamic, we influence and are influenced by a multiplicity of forces and relationships. 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 as Buddhists call it, dance and fight and make up. We are unique, but part of the same whole.
In the Bible’s Gospel of John, which comes as a wave from the great Mediterranean storm of Roman oppression and destruction of the temple in Jerusalem in the late first Century CE, 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 son is executed, but his life energy, his Spirit, love and grace move on, rippling through the sea of time and space to become incarnate, to break on the shores of our own heart.
A fleeting wave, a single water molecule, with only a momentary movement contains the grace and power of life eternal; it literally embodies energy that has been moving through all time and space. So we look for the truth of life not only in the heavens but also in our individual hearts. Still, it, (I) is not about me, in any isolated, narcissistic way: this knowledge of the Spirit of life within us is humbling even as it is empowering. We have paid attention to nature, know where the waves will be best, learned when to exert energy and effort and how to go with the flow to paddle out and get in position, learned how to stay as close to the power as possible to tap it and feel it without getting consumed by it, but even as it moves through us it is so much more than just us. That is why surfing and life gracefully well lived make us feel both aware of ourselves and greater than ourselves.
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.”
