It exists like a dream in my imagination – not least of all because I can no longer find the source – the beloved scholar Eugene Peterson, completes a video interview discussing his life’s work, then takes a swim in the lake beside his home – that important, ever-present body of water. He’s old by this point, not much longer for this world, the interviewer assists him down to the little jetty so that he doesn’t slip along the way, then Eugene dives in, full length.
It’s an inexplicable, healing joy. The mind, with its certainties and uncertainties, enters the enveloping coolness mere moments after the fingertips and out-stretched arms. We make our home by the receiving water.
Everyday sacramental
Sacraments are interactions. Interactions with the elemental. The sacrament of breathing is an interaction with the air, the atmosphere that surrounds us. The sacrament of swimming is an interaction with water. Ideally these experiences will be in some sense immersive.
Not to hinder the story by over-explanation, the concept of the ‘sacramental’ flows down from church practice and ritual, in which elements and actions are imbued with (or revealed to have) divine significance, in embodied, incarnational form, to (ideally) be experienced in a thoroughly existential way that interweaves with all the aspects of being. This approach, when it finds its flow, can burgeon outwards, informing our going about in the world, until things such breathing and swimming are revealed as holy.1
These kinds of natural sacraments have taught me how to interact with the sacraments of the church, have deepened my experience and appreciation of them, and vice versa.2 Hence, I have experienced a back and forth flow between the ecclesial and the natural, a tidal flow and current that will hopefully one day inundate the coastlines and river banks of my existence and being.
When hit with the glint of love’s light, even ordinary things become holy.3
Humans have always sought to understand our relationship with what lies beyond us. At times that ‘beyond’ has been the natural world. At other times, ‘beyond’ has been what we believe created the world and us, or a sense of the interconnectedness of everything. The feeling of connection is called by many names: empathy, compassion, awe, transcendence, ecstasy, love, wonder, enlightenment, flow, unity, mindfulness. It is felt during prayer, meditation, and worship; in tasks that take us out of ourselves, and in the moments when we care for others; on days and evenings when we marvel at the rising sun or the stars. We feel connection in settings from the humblest of temples to the most beautiful synagogues, mosques, and cathedrals; in forests or mountains or lakeshores; when we stand next to sleeping children or gaze into the eyes of loved ones, or when we see or touch the creatures of this world and marvel at the magnificent diversity of life. [Psychologist William] James called this connection mystical consciousness… ‘No account of the universe in its totality can be final which leaves these other forms of consciousness quite disregarded,’ he said.4
Whether it be termed mystical consciousness, contemplative living or sacramentality, I suppose this approach could be construed as over-spiritualising life. But it isn’t that way. This is about integration and unity, a return to the design intent. Though it can be useful to separate things out for the sake of examination or science, none of this stuff was intended to be ultimately separate. It’s everyday, it’s commonplace.
Water
Now it is time to engage the water element that signifies the depths within us.5
We are born of spirit (breath), water and earth.6 It’s a scientific truism that humans are around 60 percent water (and up to 75 percent) – we are composed of it. ‘Science writer Loren Eiseley once described human beings as “a way that water has of going about, beyond the reach of rivers.”’7 And it cries out to us and in us, calling us back for our renewal, cleansing and sustenance.
Perhaps we awaken to it, make our discovery of awareness and experience in childhood, or at least in some childlike state. ‘The sea, once it casts its spell, holds one in its net of wonder forever,’ said ocean-explorer Jacques Cousteau.8
Vastly nuanced and efficient in its sacramental role, ‘Water has nearly unlimited ability to carry metaphors…’ It is ‘the fluid that drenched the inner and outer spaces of the imagination,’ wrote Austrian philosopher Ivan Illich.9
‘The zen-like stillness and thereness of the land makes it vulnerable; it cannot get out of the way. But the ocean has a fluency, it can travel anywhere, even deeper into its own self,’ wrote theologian, philosopher and author John O’Donohue.10
‘It is the layers of rhythmic, structured symphony performed by waves and wavelets, stones and pebbles. It is the known shallows that taper into the mysterious abyss. Water is both lover and mother, murderer and life-giver, source and sink. It is the endless mutability, the surprise and unexpectedness of its ever-changing colours and moods that stir artists, musicians, writers, filmmakers, and thinkers alike. Water unleashes the uninhibited child in all of us, unlocking our creativity and curiosity,’ says marine biologist and author Wallace J Nichols.11
Faced with this influx of meaning and significance, it is entirely appropriate to simply be in the presence of water, and allow the mystery to stand. ‘There’s … a part of me that doesn’t want to know why I love the water, a part that prefers to just see its effects as magical, something unknown – indeed, unknowable – but deeply felt,’ says socio-environmental advocate Céline Cousteau.12
Mysterious and familiar, much like the divine, water is both internal to us and external, and it all desires union. Deep calls to deep – the water calls to us.
And,
…you don’t have to stay on the shore once you know you’re standing on a shore.13
A northward flow
My wife and I moved north, to the rugged west coast, where the Tasman Sea swells in with the prevailing weather and batters islands out of existence. Ripiro beach is notorious, for shipwrecks and unsafe swimming. The undertow digs a hole beneath you, then drags you out. We know with a kind of primal knowing, and perhaps personal experience, that not all sea states are beneficent and revitalising. All the various waters contain the potential for danger.
In the two and a half years we lived in Dargaville, I never went for a swim at Ripiro. Though I did often walk along the edge, letting the cold, powerful Tasman break, then surge against and pull at my bare legs and feet.
Further north again, though, were the pristine clear fresh-water Kai Iwi Lakes. Their baptismal quality was unrivalled, calling me up and in again and again with their ripples of light, their depth and clarity, and a coolness that soothes the mind.
To swim is in a certain sense to re-enter this womb-like medium. To do this meditatively is to re-awaken that primal sense of belonging from the time before one’s individuality first broke free.14
At first, simply and beautifully,
It is enough to hold your breath and put your head beneath the water. Once you are there, it is enough to open your eyes and see.15
When we open our eyes underwater, we open our eyes to abstraction, impressionism. With the addition of mask and goggles, a clarity emerges. It is all in aid of different ways of seeing, and thus different ways of being.
Snorkelling has been a life-long passion that admits access to another world for a kid who always struggled to master the art of breath while swimming. My mother paid for countless swimming lessons but I never did master the breathing technique. To the frustration of my teachers. One held my head underwater and yelled ‘Blow bubbles!’ as I frantically pushed up against the weight of his hand.
With mask, snorkel and fins I was free. And in the Kai Iwi Lakes that passion re-emerged. Diving deep, enacting the body movements that you see underwater mammals perform (and humans when they play in outer-space). You observe your own body with wonder… it looks different down there in the blue-tinged light and slowed to a kind of gracefulness by the dynamics of liquid. Sound is dampened towards silence. The sun filters down slantwise, creating a new world of light. You could lose yourself just in the contemplation of the bubbles that rise up from the ground below and from the stems of aquatic plants, or in the prismatic edges of ripples.16
You have entered a new world of proximity of sense. You live and move and have your being in that enveloping substance. If you’ve never seen the mercury silver of the underside of the surface as you swim on your back just below that liminal margin of water and air, there is a considerable wonder in this world still waiting for your consideration.
A southward flow
Then we moved back southwards, and back to the east coast where islands are sheltered enough to exist. We were back in the Bay of Plenty and at last living close enough to the water that if it rose up in some future apocalyptic event, it could surge in around the foundations of our house.
And so now I’m back to taking my baptisms in salt water. It’s shallow water, just enough to float on your back. You have thoughts of stingrays and have seen them on this coast. A fleeting imagination of a sudden laceration of your back passes through your mind. But you know there are no utterly safe places in the world. You lie back and float, you position yourself so that the little waves approach from the top of your head and travel the length of your body, flexing your relaxed limbs as they go, coaxing you towards the notion of oneness with the water. Eyes closed enhances that experience, eyes open introduces another expanse – the sky. And now you’re floating in that as well, baptised in the cloud and in the sea.17
Until you think again of stingrays, or the possibility of people watching from the shore and worrying about an apparently lifeless body floating in the harbour. To reassure these imagined people, and to reassure yourself about the proximity of stingray barbs, you break the meditation, come to, come upright and look around, your chin at the level of the waves.
After a while, newly inspired, you power along with the aid of your swim fins, on your side, your left shoulder tilted under, making yourself streamline, the surface skimming by at eye-level, a bow-wave at the crown of your head, shocked and exhilarated by the splashes that unexpectedly wet your face. Then you relinquish effort once more, and float again as your leg muscles relax, and your heat rate and breathing steady.
When I get out of the water, these two states of mind seem to merge happily. The anxious desire for clarity encounters the endorphic bliss of suspended thought; hard-edged practicality enters the same field of perception as whimsy; movement and fixity change places promiscuously; surface and depth cease to be distinct from each other; patterns of light and shade generate the appearance of floating islands, which at one moment are masses of brightness and at another of darkness.18
It’s all normal life.
Upon the waters
Kin to the practice of swimming, or perhaps I should say of simply being in water, is kayaking. Here my interaction is with the air-side surface of water, mediated by the small vessel that contains me, gives me buoyancy and provides a means to travel over expanses of water, exploring coastline edges and inlets, rivers, estuaries, creeks, lakes, coves and streams. Or to paddle out into a mid-point and simply be, listening to the sound of the water against the sides of the boat, a sound that takes me right back into childhood. I grew up in a family of boats.
Out there you might see the sun set on one side while the moon rises on the other. You might battle against the current or let yourself flow. There’s a time for both, depending on where you’re headed and the purpose of your intent. You might tuck yourself into the coastline and explore under pōhutukawa trees that are vastly older, and perhaps wiser, than you. They know how to live at the meeting point of sea and land. In age they sculpt themselves with a kind of ancient knowing and cloak themselves with the deepest greens, erupting in a virtuosity of deep sacramental reds.
I cast myself out like bread.19
Not long ago, I paddled across to Matakana – a 20-kilometre-long island that stretches from Mauao (Mount Maunganui) to Te Ho Pā / Te Kura a Maia / Katikati (Bowentown).20 Where we now live is the nearest point between island and mainland along that stretch.
The currents flow strong in this area… on an outgoing tide, the full weight of all the inner waters of Tauranga and its surrounds head for two departure points into the Pacific Ocean. All the rains and springs heading downwards from the Kaimai Range, carving out a multitude of streams and rivers, empty at the coastline and add to the flow. You wonder at the force of water, when it has all that ancient energy? The harbour is remarkably accommodating and patient when you consider what it might be. By all means, enjoy blatting all over it, but consider your awesome host.
Anyway, it was a calm Sunday morning, the day of worship and rest. And I found myself paddling over to the island. The vigour of the sea was contained beneath a smooth skin that nonetheless moved this way and that, lifting and sliding under my boat as I paddled crosswise to the main current.
On the other side, the beach was deserted. I was once again the island dweller of my primal DNA and in loving solitude. The sun warm on my skin, the little waves at the shore and my feet in the sand. Leaving my t-shirt on the beach I entered the sea. And there I floated as previously described, in water that was cold to perfection. All mingled in with the ancient flow of mountains, rivers, earth and tide.
And then the wind picked up. Now there were sharp waves on the sand bar I’d crossed on my way over. In a little boat, like my kayak, there’s only one direction to point in a sea like that, when home lies on the other side: bow first. Up and over, plunging down and rising up, shipping water when the nose buries or the top of the wave breaks, trusting in the buoyancy of the hull and your ability to make progress into wind and tide.
So there I was, the self same person who had been floating on my back in the calm not half an hour earlier now back in my little boat, battling to get home in the self same water now showing a different face – a different magnificence.
‘You’ve been in these situations before,’ I told myself. And it was true I had, we have. I embodied my prayer, my arms strengthened and pushed forward.
In the scheme of things, the work was soon done. I made slow and tiring headway under the watchful eye of a nearby fisherman in his boat, until I crossed the sand bar, found calmer waters in the lee of the mainland, then let my little boat drift homeward in the flow of the current. I return, resting my arms.
It’s all normal life.
The sacrament of swimming and of water, and a home by the sea.
Benediction
The Avowal
As swimmers dare
to lie face to the sky
and water bears them,
as hawks rest upon air
and air sustains them,
so would I learn to attain
freefall, and float
into Creator Spirit’s deep embrace,
knowing no effort earns
that all-surrounding grace.21
Notes
2. Indeed, in a time of pandemic, or some other separation from the gathering of the church and limiting of its ritual, the natural sacraments carry enhanced and focussed significance.
3. Rachel Held Evans, Searching for Sunday, Nelson Books, 2015, Kindle, loc2188.
Meanwhile, a quote from Basil Pennington that picks up the thread of the same thought: ‘…for we are incarnational people, and all is sacramental of the Presence of Creative Love.’ M. Basil Pennington, Centering Prayer, Image Books, 2001, p63.
4. Wallace J Nichols, Blue Mind, Little, Brown & Company, 2015, p184.
5. John O’Donohue, The Four Elements, Transworld, 2010, p46.
6. John 3:5 & Genesis 2:7.
7. Nichols, Blue Mind, p10.
9. H2O and the Waters of Forgetfulness, quoted in ibid., p197.
10. O’Donohue, The Four Elements, p65.
11. Nichols, Blue Mind, p192.
12. Foreword to ibid., px.
14. O’Donohue, The Four Elements, p56.
15. Pablo d’Ors, Biography of Silence, David Shook (trans), Parallax Press, 2018, Kindle, p53.
17. 1 Corinthians 10:1-4.
18. Ian Wedde, ‘Walking and Swimming to Venice’, in Bill Culbert: Front Door Out Back, Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna o Waiwhetu, 2013.
21. Denise Levertov, Collected Poems, New Directions, 2002, p142. The poem carries the dedication: ‘For Carolyn Kizer and John Woodbridge, Recalling Our Celebration of the 300th Birthday of George Herbert, 1983’.
The featured image for this post is a detail of an image from an on-going photographic series with the working title Sea State.
The Sacrament of Breathing 