Water Stories (or The Sacrament of Swimming, and of Water)

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

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Notes

1. I talk a little more about what is meant by ‘sacramental’ in my essay The Sacrament of Breathing.

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.

8. Quoted in ibid., pix.

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.

13. Ibid., p183.

14. O’Donohue, The Four Elements, p56.

15. Pablo d’Ors, Biography of Silence, David Shook (trans), Parallax Press, 2018, Kindle, p53.

16. For a taste of this experience, see my video post I Have Become a Ripple of Light, which was shot in Lake Waikare, the Kai Iwi Lakes.

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.

19. Ecclesiastes 11:1.

20. The site of Te Ho Pā features in the first interlude of my essay The Sacrament of Breathing.

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.

A Gathering Sense of Home

In 2020, I was invited by Tim Nash of the excellent UK-based Nomad Podcast to write for their regular listener stories feature. It was a kind of spiritual autobiographical vignette that charted a pathway to my current position, as it was then…

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I was a child of the Charismatic Movement, in quite a literal way. Two years after my Anglican-Presbyterian mother got born again and Spirit filled, God told her to have another child. She stopped taking the pill, and I was born about a year later.

Continue reading at the Nomad blog…

I Have Become a Ripple of Light

I have become
A ripple of light –
Upheld and borne along.

I never grow tired of shooting underwater light effects – water and light in unending variation – appearing here with a short poetic meditation.

The footage itself is unedited, feel free to watch with sound on or off. Watch on Vimeo for fullscreen.

On Shadows (A meditation, an experiment or symposium)

I have a favourite biblical metaphor: ‘in the shadow of the Almighty’. It comes from a reading of the meaning of the name of one of my heroes, Bezalel – the character in Exodus who was ‘filled … with the Spirit of God, with ability and intelligence, with knowledge and all craftsmanship, to devise artistic designs’.¹ All the dictionaries make ‘in the shadow of’ synonymous with ‘under the protection of’. But why limit the metaphor?²

Anyway, creativity consists of bringing often disparate ideas into conversation to see what emerges, and so I decided to try out an unlikely symposium. I read The Dark Night of the Soul by 16^th century Spanish monk and mystic St John of the Cross alongside In Praise of Shadows by 20^th century Japanese writer Jun’ichirō Tanizaki. What might emerge?

Aesthetic and Religious³

The 19^th century Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard charted a philosophical progression from the aesthetic life (a life of youthful sensuality and surface beauty), through the ethical life, to the religious. If these categories are used as a framework for textual critique, our two authors immediately appear to fall into separate camps.

Tanizaki’s work makes no bones about being a thorough-going work of aestheticism and he wouldn’t, I think, see anything pejorative, as Kierkegaard did, about the aesthetic life.

John’s work is a thorough-going religious ascetic exposition that has the ultimate vision of freeing the reader from earthly realms and into unity with God.

Tanizaki relishes the sensual deliciousness of the shadows, while John notices the distinct sensual bitterness (even horror) of darkness.

And yet, there is an aged wisdom in Tanizaki and a profound appreciation for beauty that defies Kierkegaard’s stereotype of shallow, merely hedonistic youthfulness.

And John embraces fleshy and aesthetic metaphors (in all his writing, influenced as he was by Song of Songs), to a degree that seems to verge on the spiritual erotic, that point to a profound (trans-sensual, as it were) deliciousness being found through the darkness, beyond the purgation of the basic human senses.⁴

A Dark Mise-en-Scène

Both Tanizaki and John begin their excursions grounded in an architectural sense of space, with an evocative, mysteriously dark mise-en-scène.

I.
In a dark night,
With anxious love inflamed,
O, happy lot!
Forth unobserved I went,
My house being now at rest.

II.
In darkness and safety.
By the secret ladder, disguised…⁵

says John.

Meanwhile, Tanizaki situates his essay within the traditional Japanese home with its shadowy interior.

John uses his mise-en-scène metaphorically, as a launchpad for his leap of faith, his foray into the realms of spirit (he wishes to leave his house), while Tanizaki tends towards the concrete, grounded in his material (he wishes to stay). Nonetheless, there is something evocative in Tanizaki that seems to hint (unless it’s just my eager imagination trying to make connections) at a kind of poignant presence:

And yet, when one gazes into the darkness that gathers behind the crossbeam, around the flower vase, beneath the shelves, though we know perfectly well it is mere shadow, we are overcome with the feeling that in this small corner of the atmosphere there reigns complete and utter silence; that here in the darkness immutable tranquillity holds sway.⁶

And (in a passage that I think St John would have appreciated, at least metaphorically):

On the far side of the screen, at the edge of the little circle of light, the darkness seemed to fall from the ceiling, lofty, intense, monolithic, the fragile light of the candle unable to pierce its thickness, turned back as from a black wall. I wonder if my readers know the colour of that ‘darkness seen by candlelight’. It was different in quality from darkness on the road at night. It was a repletion, a pregnancy of tiny particles like fine ashes, each article luminous as a rainbow. I blinked in spite myself, as though to keep it out of my eyes.⁷

The Religion and Dynamic of Light and Dark

Later, Tanizaki remarks on the Western preference for light, makes a true observation, tries to explain it, but misses noticing that it is, to a significant extent, a religious situation.

Western Christianity, and therefore culture, is steeped in the metaphors of brightness. Western art loves chiaroscuro – the interplay of shadow and light – but the eye ever draws to brightness. This is what makes John of the Cross, and a few other Western Christian mystics, so remarkable… they notice the treasures of darkness, peer into it and treat the dark night as being a normal season in the life of faith. (This is their major gift to the church.)

In this way, they connect round to a more Eastern understanding (it is held in Orthodox Christianity as well)… the one alluded to (I think) in the above quotes from Tanizaki. Darkness is an inevitable fact of life, and there can be, and is, beauty and presence there.⁸

It’s a presence-absence dynamic, a paradox in which the two interweave into some kind of quantum whole… an ultimate unity. I think our worded mindset wants to run the presence-absence dynamic parallel with speaking-silence. But the two are not strictly synonymous, though that second paradox also ends up interweaving into unity. Whoops. For a minute there I lost myself.⁹

Emergence

Perhaps I’m not doing either author full justice by trying so hard to find them common ground (in reality they are very different works), but – the shared themes of the two essays?

The night and shadows bring their gifts which, if we are content to sit where we find ourselves and watch (behold) and see (a contemplative / mindful posture), forms of beauty will appear, emerge.¹⁰

As for our third conversation partner, Kierkegaard¹¹ sneaks in with the final word. For now. What becomes of aesthetics when all things flourish in the religious life, the life of Presence, when darkness is not simply darkness but the shadow and shade of the divine? A place of protection (sanctuary), yes, but also the space and ground of transformation, creation,¹² and so much more.

Everything in its right place.

As far as the aesthetic stage of existence is concerned what is preserved in the higher religious stage is the sense of infinite possibility made available through the imagination. But this no longer excludes what is actual. Nor is it employed for egotistic ends. Aesthetic irony is transformed into religious humour, and the aesthetic transfiguration of the actual world into the ideal is transformed into the religious transubstantiation¹³ of the finite world into an actual reconciliation with the infinite.¹⁴

Aesthetics with a capital A, our leaps of faith being like the dancer’s leap, both upward and grounded. Embodied but/and transcendent. Sacramental and complete.

That being the case, spare me the extremes of the body disconnection, excessive ascetic tortures and horrors of John¹⁵ and the fundamental materialism of Tanizaki but, partaking in something of their imagination, let me into the shadow of the Almighty.

 

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Notes

1. Exodus 31:3-4, ESV.

2. Interesting aside, I’ve read that, etymologically, the name Bezalel, when broken up into its constituent parts, could also be given the meaning ‘Swamp to the Lord’, or perhaps ‘God’s onion’ relating to layers that can be stripped off or unpeeled – make of these things theologically what you will. Personally, it gets my creative mind running. www.abarim-publications.com/Meaning/Bezalel.html, retrieved 28/7/19.

3. I kept wanting to play with the near homophone, aesthetic-ascetic – didn’t manage to pull it off!

4. As with other mystical writers who embrace the way of purgation, it is difficult to untangle the pain-pleasure dynamic in St John’s writing when castigation is seen as a divine love-move fuelled by the passion of both parties. Darkness, despite its horror, is the passage to divine unity. So St John is both repelled and attracted by it. Does this problematise the concept of asceticism? One thing is clear though – St John does not wish to stay in the darkness as if that were a sufficient final destination – it is, in the final analysis, just a mechanism to reach the glorious light of God’s presence and being.

5. St John of the Cross, The Dark Night of the Soul, David Lewis (trans), Thomas Baker, 1908. p1. archive.org/details/TheDarkNightOfTheSoul1908/page/n31, retrieved 28/7/19.

6. Tanizaki, Jun’ichirō, In Praise of Shadows, Thomas J Harper & Edward G Seidensticker (trans), Vintage, 2001. pp32-33.

7. Ibid. p52.

8. ‘we Orientals tend to seek our satisfactions in whatever surroundings we happen to find ourselves, to content ourselves with things as they are; and so darkness causes us no discontent, we resign ourselves to it as inevitable. If light is scarce then light is scarce; we will immerse ourselves in the darkness and there discover its own particular beauty. But the progressive Westerner is determined always to better his lot.’ Ibid. p48.

9. A related poetic expression:

But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting.
Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought:
So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing.

T.S. Eliot, ‘East Coker’, Four Quartets

10. Another voice, the Persian Sufi poet Rumi:

The Darkness
Night cancels the business of the day;
inertia recharges the mind.
Then the day cancels the night,
and inertia disappears in the light.
Though we sleep and rest in the dark,
doesn’t the dark contain the water
of life?
Be refreshed in the darkness.
Doesn’t a moment of silence
restore beauty to the voice?
Opposites manifest through opposites:
in the black core of the heart
God created the eternal light of love.

Rumi, The Pocket Rumi, Kabir Helminski (ed), Shambhala, 2017. p89.

11. Kierkegaard is an ascetic, so more in the tradition of John. I don’t know Tanizaki’s oeuvre well enough to assess his ascetic tendencies… if they are in In Praise of Shadows, they are perhaps expressed as simplicity.

12. ‘The earth was without form and void, and darkness was over the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters.’ Genesis 1:2, ESV.

‘The darkness is like a font from which we shall ascend washed and illumined…’ Thomas Merton, Dairies, April 8, 1950, II.428, in A Year with Thomas Merton, Jonathan Montaldo (ed), SPCK, 2005. p99.

‘The things of Time are in connivance with eternity. The shadows serve You.’ Thomas Merton, Dairies, July 4, 1952, II.487, in ibid. p221.

13. A note about terms: I love the embodiment and incarnational sacramentality that transubstantiation implies here (though I refrain from holding it as a real action in the Eucharist). But I love a bit of transfiguration. As I understand it, transubstantiation is about imbuing the ‘mere physical’ with Presence and glory, the outside divine coming in. But transfiguration is about revealing the Presence and glory that is already implicit and innate, the existing divine revealed. Both are something to behold – and I want to hold both concepts (mysteries) … an interweaving of transformation/incarnation and revelation.

14. plato.stanford.edu/entries/kierkegaard/#Aesth, retrieved 7/7/19.

15. We were taught to pray, ‘Lead us not into (save us from) the time of trial…’

The Sacrament of Breathing

Listen to the audio version

In recent months, I’ve been fascinated (and helped) by the practice of mindfulness. One text in particular that has been very good is Mindfulness: A practical guide to finding peace in a frantic world.¹ There’s an unexpectedly profound moment on track four of the audio of guided meditations that accompanies the book. During the meditation, Mark Williams, the Oxford professor who pioneered Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy, says, ‘Each in-breath a new beginning; each out-breath a letting go, a letting be.’

As mindfulness has become an important practice for me, I’ve become interested in how it might integrate into Christian spiritual practices … perhaps even beginning to think about it theologically. Others have done some work on this, and the practice is very similar and compatible with a long tradition of such Christian devotional contemplative practices as centring prayer.

But this line, ‘Each in-breath a new beginning; each out-breath a letting go, a letting be,’ led me off on quite a thought journey (slightly ironic when the primary intent of mindfulness is to stay in the present moment…).

My thinking about it revolves around the question: could we consider breathing as a kind of sacrament?

[Interlude] At the top of the hill, an old pā site, the wind storms in off the Pacific Ocean. Rushing over nautical miles, skimming the sea, harassing the tops of breakers, turning foam into sea mist, climbing the side of the headland in a terrific updraught, raking through mānuka and gorse, turning their silence to noise, pinning me back as I lean forward holding the trig station as an anchor. The wind enters my mouth as I gulp lungfuls of air, too big for my body to contain. Tihei mauri ora!

You speak, I’ll listen.²

Sacraments and the Sacramental

In Christianity, the sacraments are practices that embody key spiritual truths and allow us to interact with those truths. In Protestant Christianity, there are two main sacraments – Communion (Eucharist / the Lord’s Supper) and Baptism. In Catholic Christianity, these two are joined by a further five – Confirmation, Reconciliation (Confession), Anointing of the Sick, Holy Orders (Ordination) and Matrimony (Marriage). In Communion, concepts about Christ’s death are embodied in the consumption of the bread and wine, which are emblems of Christ’s body and blood. In Baptism, concepts about dying, cleansing and new life are embodied in the application of or immersion in water, followed by a re-emergence.

As an extension of the sacramental aspect of Christianity, there is a theological approach that looks for the embodiment of spiritual concepts in all kinds of ways within life – spreading and applying the idea of the sacramental more widely. In its active form, this can be described as ‘sacramental spirituality’.

One definition of sacramental reads, ‘an observance analogous to but not reckoned among the sacraments, such as the use of holy water or the sign of the cross’.³ The important point is the embodied actioning of spiritual concepts – embodied (or ‘incarnational’) spirituality – and the recognition of those concepts in the human and natural world around us. This can be taken even further, in fact, beyond mere ‘spiritual concepts’ into the embodiment of the presence of God [Him]self. In fact theologically, this approach takes its primary cue from the incarnation of God in Jesus Christ – God enfleshed. In that framework, the sacramental is the recognition of God, either metaphorically (symbolically) or in actual fact, in the stuff of everyday human existence.

Nothing is quite so everyday, embodied and, I think, divinely profound as breathing, and so it captures the imagination with regard to the sacramental. In a way that bears some similarities to how we receive Christ in the Communion, we could be seen to receive the Spirit in the breath.

Literal and Metaphorical

There’s an old theological debate about the emblems of Communion. In the Catholic tradition, the body and blood of Christ are literally present from the moment the priest blesses the emblems (transubstantiation). In Protestantism, the emblems though special are a symbol (a metaphor) of the body and blood. In basic terms, the conflict in interpretation is between ‘literal’ and ‘metaphorical’, and this can be reduced to an either/or dichotomy. But, for the sake of a thought-experiment, let’s hold the two interpretations equally together for a moment and form a paradox – i.e., in some way, the emblems are both literal and metaphorical.⁴ That might seem a bit tenuous, but in the case of the breath, holding the paradox of the emblem being both literal and metaphorical, is really interesting and, I think, more easily done than with bread and wine.

In the sacrament of breathing, if the breath is seen as metaphorical then the physical air that is inhaled (i.e. that substance which is chemically described as 78.09% nitrogen, 20.95% oxygen etc) is a symbol for the Spirit of God and the life that God breathes into us. It’s a good and beautiful metaphor and very full in and of itself. Through the breath, we are reminded of our reliance on God for life and sustenance, and reminded of the first impartation of life – reminded that we are formed dirt (or stardust, the base elements of the universe) animated by the breath of God.

But what say we literally inhale God when we breath? What say God is literally present in the air around us? While addressing the philosophers in Athens, Paul quotes the Greek poet Aratus, ‘in him [God] we live and move and have our being’⁵ – meaning that in some way we exist within God. Dallas Willard (in The Divine Conspiracy⁶) argues that the term ‘Heavenly Father’ denotes that God is right up close in the air around us. In Hebrew cosmology (he says) the first ‘heaven’ is the lower atmosphere of earth. God is denoted as being the God inhabiting the heavens – including this one – the air next to your skin. In this way God can be described as being in close proximity and utterly immanent.

Linguistically, a connection between the Spirit (of God) and air can be made through the Greek word pneuma, which is translated throughout the New Testament as spirit, including in reference to the Holy Spirit, and literally means breath, the wind or a movement of air. Similarly, in the Old Testament, the Hebrew word ruach can be variously translated as breath, wind and spirit, including in relation to the Spirit of God.⁷

Another interesting linguistic connection is with regard to the name of God, YHWH. The aspirate nature of the h sounds in the word have led to the observation that YHWH is in essence a transcription of the in-take of breath (the first syllable) followed by an exhalation (the second syllable).⁸ In the overall context of the sacrament of breathing, these linguistic connections emphasise the spirituality of breath (pun intended – the pneumality of the pneuma).

The God-breath dynamic is profound whether it is viewed as literal or metaphorical, but I think we can have both. In the sacrament of breathing – when we breathe mindfully and meaningfully (either during a dedicated period of prayer, contemplation, meditation or devotion, or in the course of everyday life) – we can hold the paradox – the idea that we are breathing God and life both metaphorically and literally.

[Interlude] Face down in water, I do the impossible. I breathe. The breath at first comes short and rapid – my brain’s survival instinct in confusion, the shock of a body plunged into an alien atmosphere. Then, when trust at last settles in, my connection to the surface and what I need above me reassured, things resolve into quietness, releasing myself, the mechanism of breathing dissolves from consciousness unhindered; enveloped now, I kick forward.

A Wander Through the Sacrament

Without seeking to establish a definitive liturgy or interpretation, I think the phrase said by Williams, ‘Each in-breath a new beginning; each out-breath a letting go, a letting be,’ can be utilised (appropriated) to guide us through a sacrament of breathing.

A New Beginning

The first phrase, ‘Each in-breath a new beginning…’ is immediately meaningful. Inherent in Christianity is the concept of new beginnings – being born again (and again, and again). The rhythm of it. Emerging and re-emerging. The tomb becomes a womb. Resurrection is an integral, and indispensable, concept of our faith. The thought that resurrection is part of our basic life system (breathing) is deeply compelling. Every breath is a new beginning – it focuses us on the importance of the present moment as a moment of God’s sustaining, reinvigoration and potential, and brings us alive to the grace of God – the gift of a new start with every in-breath that provides the oxygen we need.

Each in-breath is a re-enactment of our very first breath in this world, and a celebration of the gift of life itself. It is also a re-enactment of that primal first breath, when God breathed into ‘mud and stardust’ to create humankind. These moments of ‘in-spiration’ (in-breathing) continue to ripple outwards in acts of creativity.

A Letting Go, A Letting Be

The two parts of the next phrase are related – ‘each out-breath a letting go, a letting be’. Letting go is the process of surrendering to God – it’s a kind of resignation but without fatalism (more on that below). It is also a response to the invitation of Jesus to ‘Come to me, all who labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest’⁹ and to ‘cast all your anxieties on him [God]’.¹⁰ The process of letting go can be a difficult one – a loosening of our white-knuckle grip – but it’s about acknowledging that we can’t keep trying to make everything happen by ourselves, and finding peace on the other side of that acknowledgement.

‘Letting be’, I think, is a compelling statement of faith.

The Paradox of Faith

In the book Fear and Trembling, philosopher Søren Kierkegaard (under the pseudonym ‘Johannes de silentio’) writes extensively about faith, primarily by engaging with the biblical story of Abraham and Isaac. In Kierkegaard’s exploration, Abraham expresses ‘infinite resignation’ in being prepared to follow God’s request to sacrifice Isaac (or in Jesus’ words, ‘Father, if you are willing, remove this cup from me. Nevertheless, not my will, but yours, be done.’¹¹). But although this resignation is the vital first step, faith doesn’t stop there. While Abraham was utterly prepared to sacrifice Isaac, he also had complete belief that God would not ultimately require him to carry out the action. As Kierkegaard writes, ‘But what did Abraham? He arrived neither too early nor too late. He … rode slowly on his way. And all the while he had faith, believing that God would not demand Isaac of him, though ready all the while to sacrifice him, should it be demanded of him…’¹²

Kierkegaard is a complex writer, and I’m not sure it’s likely to ever feel as if you have what he’s saying completely nailed, but after engaging with these passages in Fear and Trembling (with a little of my own fear and trembling thrown in for good measure, and probably steering a course somewhat tangentially to Kierkegaard’s main thesis), I jotted down a possible definition of faith that I’ve liked ever since:

Faith is the complete acceptance of the way things are, and the total belief that things can be different.

This beautiful paradox finds its function in being grounded in the concept of the possibility and potentiality of an ultimately omnipotent and loving God. That grounding keeps the first half of the paradox from being or becoming fatalistic, creates forward movement into the second half of the paradox and is the springboard of hope. God is in the midst of the present moment, and we are held within the flow. It’s not a static state of being, it’s resting there, and discovering movement in that space.¹³ Meanwhile future moments are open to hyper-potential, the trans-rational and the transcendent. In a sense, the two parts of the paradox could be seen to mirror God as Still Point and Silence on the one hand, and Prime Mover and Speaker on the other.¹⁴

Another way of framing the resignation side of the paradox is through the New Testament concept of contentment, gratitude, trust and being at peace in the present moment and the current situation – being content, as Paul says, in all circumstances.¹⁵ All this while being open to intervention and a shift in circumstances – creation, incarnation, redemption, resurrection, restoration. As mentioned earlier, the second half of the paradox has to do with hope. So the faith paradox might be stated as:

Faith is contentment and hope, grounded in love.

The words ‘letting be’ from the exercise of our sacrament of breathing can be used as a frame for the paradox – especially when expressed in the form ‘let it be’. The words have a double meaning that encapsulates both sides of the concept. With eyes on the present, ‘let it be’ denotes a condition – even a sigh – of resignation, gelassenheit,¹⁶ contentment, being (rather than doing) and rest (mindfulness, by the way, is great for learning this state of being); while with eyes on the future or the transcendent, ‘let it be’ denotes a belief in the possibility of ‘that which is not, becoming what is’. In the Christian faith, ‘let it be’ is often provided as the definition of the word amen. Allowing for the double meaning, we can say that ultimately the sacrament of breathing, and an embrace of the faith paradox, can be about living life in an amen state of being.

This state of being, I think, will often be evidenced by a lightness of touch and gentleness – not to mention love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness and self-control (the other fruit of the Pneuma). In a wonderful passage in Fear and Trembling, Kierkegaard paints a picture of a character he calls ‘the knight of faith’. He describes how such a man might appear strolling through 19th century Danish life (Kierkegaard’s own context). This character is unassuming and almost happy-go-lucky in appearance – high on hope but utterly content. The descriptive passage ends with the following words (slightly edited and with the appropriation acknowledged): ‘this man has performed, and is performing every moment, the movement of infinity … He has resigned everything absolutely, and then again seized hold of it all…’

This feels like something akin to an idea expressed by Frederick Buechner: ‘Go where your best prayers take you. Unclench the fists of your spirit and take it easy. Breathe deep of the glad air and live one day at a time.’¹⁷

A Sacrament of Being

Each in-breath a new beginning; each out-breath a letting go, a letting be. The sacrament of breathing.

If nothing else, this winding and wandering discussion serves to show how the everyday, even the apparently mundane stuff of life, can explode with meaning when viewed sacramentally. The Spirit – the Pneuma, the Ruach, the Breath – is woven through, and is inseparable from, life. If there can be a sacrament of breathing, then there can also be a sacrament of eating, a sacrament of sleeping, a sacrament of resting, a sacrament of swimming, a sacrament of playing, a sacrament of working; a sacrament of being…

[Postcript, an ending, a beginning]
The clock comes round to 7.27 and the inevitable rising of the sun.
A liminal slipping into consciousness,
my fragile agile mind,
a starting cough and then an awareness of the breath,
the room lightening in a cross-fade from the night;
a commonplace, mundane resurrection.

‘Our father in the heavens…’
I begin.

Breathing in and into the trinity, breathing in faith, hope and love;
peace, patience and kindness;
grace, mercy and forgiveness;
healing, contentment and joy.

Shifting stiffened limbs, testing their usefulness for the day.
I pray in tongues until there’s nothing left to say.

‘I trust the breath; I am loved; I am held; I’m in the flow,’ I say silently.
I pray for you.

Breathing in and out the everyday subsistence, the substance of life.
I shift again, and hope for the best,
and hope the best means flourishing.

And so I find, the day begins,
with the surprising but inevitable rising of the son.

---

Notes

1. Williams, Mark & Penman, Danny, Mindfulness: A Practical Guide to Finding Peace in a Frantic World, Piatkus Books, 2011.

2. ‘Tihei mauri ora’: (noun) sneeze of life, call to claim the right to speak. maoridictionary.co.nz

Other poetic expressions of wind and body:

Weather-beaten heart
the wind must blow
right through my body

– Bashō (1644-1694), translated by David Young in Moon Woke Me Up Nine Times, Knopf, 2013, p.24.

WALKING INTO THE WIND
The wind is howling
against my eardrums
I walk through it
as if through water
I feel the power
of the breath of God
gusting across my face
my senses are overcome
with this roaring
it wipes out almost
every other sound
until all I can hear
is the keening of heaven.

– Mark Laurent, Perhaps, 1995, p.55.

3. Google definition.

4. This is actually similar to the view of Eucharist held by Martin Luther. He believed that the body, blood, bread and wine are all truly and substantially present in a sacramental union.

5. Acts 17:28, ESV.

Poetic expression of some of the concepts discussed in this paragraph:

Birds afloat in air’s current,
sacred breath? No, not breath of God,
it seems, but God
the air enveloping the whole
globe of being.
It’s we who breathe, in, out, in, the sacred,
leaves astir, our wings
rising, ruffled…

[…]

But storm or still,
numb or poised in attention,
we inhale, exhale, inhale,
encompassed, encompassed.

– Denis Levertov, ‘In Whom We Live and Move and Have Our Being’, Selected Poems, New Directions, 2002, p.194.

My soul breathes only in they infinite soul;
I breathe, I think, I love, I live but thee.
Oh breathe, oh think, – O Love, live into me…

– George MacDonald, 5 January, Diary of an Old Soul.

6. Willard, Dallas, The Divine Conspiracy: Rediscovering Our Hidden Life In God, HarperOne, 1998.

7. The Hebrew also has other words for breath, such as neshamah – e.g. Genesis 2:7, ESV, ‘then the Lord God formed the man of dust from the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life’. This is an excellent example of the breath originating from God.

8. As I recall, I read about this in one of Richard Rohr’s books – probably The Divine Dance.

9. Matthew 11:28, ESV.

10. 1 Peter 5:7, ESV.

11. Luke 22:42, ESV.

12. Kierkegaard, Søren, Hollander, Lee M. (trans), Selections from the writings of Kierkegaard, Kindle, 2013.

13. While this idea of surrender contains a sense of ‘stopping’, stillness and resting, even by itself (without the forward movement discussed with regard to the faith paradox in the paragraphs which follow) it doesn’t necessarily need to be conceived of as a static state of being (although it can be that too – there’s a season for everything). Further, Evelyn Underhill points out that this surrender is ‘not limp but deliberate, a trustful self-donation, a “living faith”.’ (Underhill, Evelyn, Practical Mysticism: A Little Book for Normal People, Kindle, first published 1915). Andrew Murray also addresses this. It is the act of surrender which enables forward momentum by relying on God’s omnipotence and giving God space to work. (Murray, Andrew, Absolute Surrender, first published 1895, http://www.ccel.org).

And Thomas Merton: ‘the truth is found by complete consent and acceptance. Not at all by defeat, by mere passive resignation, by mere inert acceptance of evil and falsity … but by “creative” consent, in my deepest self, to the will of God, which is expressed in my own self and my own life.’ (Dairies, July 31, 1961, IV.146, in A Year with Thomas Merton, Jonathan Montaldo (ed), SPCK, 2005. p218.)

14. A related poetic expression:

But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting.
Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought:
So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing.

– T.S. Eliot, ‘East Coker’, Four Quartets

Another observation about the faith paradox is that it could be seen to hold within the same existential space or continuum the spiritual pathways of the Via Negativa (subtraction, suffering, lack, darkness, unknowing) and the Via Positiva (addition, comfort, abundance, light, knowing), meaning that the two paths/experiences are not either/or but rather woven together.

Further, the two halves and forward movement or trajectory of the paradox (which I refer to as ‘the springboard of hope’) are a compelling pattern that I’ve since noticed in other theological statements. For example, this quote from Jürgen Moltmann, with notes inserted by me in square brackets:

‘For eschatological faith, the trinitarian God-event on the cross becomes the history of God which is open to the future and which opens up the future. Its present is called reconciliation with grief in love [a notion reminiscent of the position of acceptance of the first half of the faith paradox] and its eschaton [ie future] the filling of all mortal flesh with spirit and all that is dead with this love [reminiscent of the statement of possibility]. It is a transformation into the fullest degree of life.’ (The Crucified God, SCM Press, 2015, pp.263-264.)

The totality of this formulation, according to Moltmann, brings existential meaning to the human condition. The same, or similar, pattern is also found in Walter Brueggemann’s work on The Prophetic Imagination (Fortress Press, 2001), in which truth-telling and lament (analogous to the first half of the paradox) are partnered with a hope-filled word from elsewhere – a word from outside the current paradigm (again signalling possibility and potentiality, as per the second half of the paradox).

Or Thomas Merton (in a diary entry that follows on from the quote in the previous note, square brackets added): ‘Gradually I will come more and more to transcend the limitations of the world and of the society to which I belong [second half of the paradox / eschaton] – while fully accepting my own little moment in history, such as it is [first half of the paradox].’ (Dairies, July 31, 1961, IV.146, in A Year with Thomas Merton, Jonathan Montaldo (ed), SPCK, 2005. p218.)

15. Philippians 4:11-13.

16. The idea of surrender and resignation has long been a central concept in the Christian mystical tradition. The German word gelassenheit comes from one stream of this tradition (it was used, for example, by Meister Ekhart). Silas C. Krabbe, in his book A Beautiful Bricolage: Theopoetics as God-Talk for Our Time (Wipf and Stock, 2016) points out that this term was later picked up by the philosopher Martin Heidegger, and defines the word as, ‘to let something be or offer another thing space’. Elsewhere it is variously translated as ‘tranquil submission’, ‘equanimity’ (in psychological terms), ‘releasement’, ‘yieldedness’, ‘submission to the will of God’ and, in modern German, ‘tranquillity’ and ‘serenity’ – all meaningful definitions in our context.

Krabbe goes on to note a couple of other observations, by way of two quotes from American philosopher John Caputo, about gelassenheit which I think have interesting threads to (and extending out from) our discussion. In the first quote, Caputo says that ‘in religion [gelassenheit] is called grace’. This puts me in mind of Paul’s triple prayer for the ‘thorn in his flesh’ to be removed. The response he receives from God is, ‘My grace is sufficient for you…’ (2 Corinthians 12:7-9), which effectively leaves Paul in a state of ‘infinite resignation’ (to go back to Keirkegaard’s term). In the second quote, Caputo says, ‘Gelassenheit is a certain transgression of the ruling power plays which dominate our world.’ It is, as Krabbe elucidates, ‘by no means an impotent idea/disposition’. If we consider gelassenheit / infinite resignation to be in some sense a state of rest, then this puts me in mind of Walter Brueggemann’s ideas about the ‘Sabbath as resistance’ to the ruling ‘totalism’ (see Sabbath as Resistance: Saying No to the Culture of Now, Westminster John Knox Press, 2014).

17. Buechner, Frederick, Telling Secrets, HarperOne, 1991, p.92.