I can’t remember if it was fall, summer, or spring, but I do remember which jetty and sandbar we chose. I was six years old, living on Pawleys Island, and my brother—nine years older—was pushing me into waves on a foam bodyboard. We were out deep, where the water was well over my head, past the breaking waves. Eventually, he gently pushed me into a wave right as it broke. I rushed down the face, popped up onto my feet, rode the foam as it went over the sandbar, and then stood in fabulous awe, gliding on the water as if I were flying. The sensation of being carried by a wave is, of course, remarkable even when you stay on your stomach. But when standing, it becomes something altogether magical, disastrously addictive, glory-ridden, and indelible. Most people never forget their first wave. I got my first surfboard the next Christmas and have been lost ever since.
The journalist and playwright Alexander Hume Ford once wrote to Jack London from Honolulu, describing surfing as “the sport of kings.” He used this description largely because the ancient Hawaiians used it, but surely also because of his experience with its power and mind-numbing beauty. He loved it, as did most who first encountered it. From Captain Cook’s late journals to the letters of Agatha Christie, and even in recently discovered photographs of Edward VIII, collected by the family of Duke Kahanamoku, we find that the sport of kings holds the capacity to enrapture and console. To be introduced to it, particularly at an early age, is to flirt with ecstatic obsession, and recent history bears witness to this.
In the 21st century, it’s easier than ever to see how surfing has captured all manner of personalities and persuasions. Back in 2016 President Obama touted the long-form journalist William Finnegan’s surf memoir, adding it to his summer reading list. Philosopher and Christian intellectual Peter Kreeft has written three books about the beauty of riding waves. New York Times journalist Ellis Avery poignantly observed how surfers cannot not be surfers and how they always seem—somehow—to be happy. I am not yet 40, and I have surfed with professors, surgeons, construction workers, attorneys, Olympic athletes, Harvard graduates, tech bros, New Yorkers, rednecks, Austrians, dozens of Brazilians, and an astounding number of Christians. I’ve made friends with people, briefly over a short trip, whom I could email today, and I know with near certainty that they would find a place for me to stay in Lisbon, San Salvador, Southern California—and I could go on.
As a theologian, I can’t help but drift into the nagging questions about why, questions of purposefulness and fundamental significance. Most surfers do as well. There is a glut of material written and filmed about the overall meaning of the activity, much of it patently obtuse. But I get it. When I was in high school, I rented The Endless Summer II from Blockbuster so many times that eventually the employees simply handed over the VHS. I still have it sitting on my shelf above modern theology and fiction.
Years later, when I couldn’t calm down after staying up writing term papers in college, or working on my dissertation in my early 30s, I would listen to the soundtracks of favorite surf films. They would console instantly. Once, while I presided at a wedding in Bermuda, a hurricane swirling well offshore was producing swell so high that the waves were jumping the shallow outer reef, making rideable peaks right on the beach. I begged a guy in a golf cart to let me use his board for just one wave. After that single dip into the ocean, I had a glow of gratitude in my heart for days and days. Why on earth is it so inconceivably satisfying? What does it mean? Is it different than other things? Why does it feel the way that it does?
Without spiraling into pseudo-spiritual overstatement (as surfers are wont to do), it’s worth simply pointing out how, biblically speaking, the ocean existed even as God created the world (Gen. 1:2). It was somehow already there in the beginning. The waters of the Deep have thus always been associated with both God and chaos. The ocean is a stratified symbol of raw power that is consistently associated with God’s bidding.
The water of baptism, for instance, continues this metaphor as a symbol of death that leads to life. Some of the disciples were fisherman, and Jesus builds on the theme, calling them fishers of men, drawing people out of sin and into abundance. Jonah was thrown into the ocean, where God brought repentance out of abject disobedience. Even the great flood of Genesis 9 involved both catastrophe and cleansing.
We can even see this quality at play in the early Christian tradition. The Didache, an anonymous Christian treatise written around A.D. 70, advises: “But concerning baptism, baptize in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, in living [running] water. If you have no living water, then baptize in other water, and if you are not able in cold, then in warm. If you have neither, pour water three times on the head” (7.1-4). The preferred state of baptismal waters is cold and moving. What kind of water might that be exactly? We can only guess. But to be baptized into the life of Jesus is to throw oneself into the life of God, the only one who can control the primordial forces of the world to his salvific ends.
Years ago, when an offshore low sent a huge run of swell to the coast for days, I drove to several different spots to see where I might paddle out. It was big enough that I knew I wouldn’t make it out in time to avoid a dangerous estuary several miles down the beach. After a while I became desperate. A pier, which was private and patrolled by a security guard, went far enough out that you could jump off and almost get past the breaking waves. It had to be timed right, but people sometimes did it.
The main thing I remember—not the leap into the ocean, or how hard I hit the water—was the wood of the pier creaking and swaying under the tremendous force of the waves as I ran toward the end. I did eventually manage to make it out to the deep water, but just barely, and I only caught one wave, enormous and dark from all the silt and sand being sucked out to sea. It carried me halfway to the shore and then I got caught in a kind of undertow washing machine that carried me far down the beach.
I finally washed up two or three miles from the pier and had to make the long walk back. The day was certainly not one of lighthearted delight, but rather held a kind of purgative satisfaction. I felt as if I’d seen the backside of God from the rock. And then the next day the wind calmed, the water became clean, the sun came out, and the waves were pure bliss—peeling lines of absolute glee.
In effect, a rider of waves is given the capacious opportunity to receive the terrifying grace of the Almighty with every inch of her bodily skill and volition. The ocean represents God, and the surfer must receive the movement of her maker with coordinated response—with dance, perhaps the most fundamental act of worship. The entire thing is beautiful—the ocean, the wave, the colors, the movement of the human body, the movement of the water, the board the surfer rides (typically shaped with human hands), and the whole thing only lasts a matter of seconds, then is gone. A surfer can watch surfing for hours.
To ride waves well is not only gorgeous, but also extraordinarily difficult. The surfer must move in coordination with a force of strength, chaos, and beauty in way that receives it, trusts it, depends on it, and ultimately bows to it. Surfing well means recognizing that the ocean is finally in control, and the rider does her best to come underneath its energy while letting it support every fluid trim and arc. When it is done properly, it results in an astounding collision of raw power and fluid artistry, in which the human body becomes a real-time sculpture playing in counterpoint to the majesty of the ocean.
Even a bad surfer can begin to feel this happening, this lively dance performed in accord with the splendor of creation’s greatest metaphor to the Almighty, in its own way, a kind of song. And when you receive such a grace, boy, can you feel it. With a very good surfer, anyone can see it happening. Once again, it is a beauty that cannot well be described in words but is self-evident when observed. You can see it in the open-hearted, even gleeful candor of the Australian surfer Torren Martyn; in the surgical precision of the G.O.A.T. Kelly Slater; or in the smooth jazz of South African Mikey February.
Theologically speaking, I have little to offer in the way of an apologia or defense of surfing. All surfers understand how selfish it can feel—trotting off in the predawn light to play in the ocean while your kids sleep, ditching out on work or school to do basically nothing classically defined as productive; chasing hurricanes; camping in the dirt; selling your belongings just to buy a plane ticket. I once drove several hours and slept in an unfinished building just to be in the right place for a hurricane swell.
There are certain activities that are so deeply involved in the glory of God’s creative goodness that they easily become compulsive, and to pursue them is to walk that fine line between receiving a great gift and idolatry. It has certainly been both for me. Still, to reject it outright is to reject a very serious offering of riches.
In C.S. Lewis’ best-known sermon, he described the experience of perceiving glory as being on the wrong side of the door and longing to get in. “We discern the freshness and purity of morning,” he writes, “but they do not make us fresh and pure. We cannot mingle with the splendours we see.” Then he concludes, “Some day, God willing, we shall get in.”
Lewis’s idea of seeing through the glories that surround us (taken from Augustine and Plato) has long been helpful for me in understanding my infatuation with such a gratuitous activity of play. And while Lewis’s fundamental point—that things can be windows (but not more) into the ultimate good—I cannot help but push back. Perhaps there are levels of entry into the various glories that surround us. Surely surfing offers nothing less than “mingling with the splendors we see.” The surfer may not have come through the door permanently, but she has flirted with it, maybe even had some of the light drench her body and illuminate the long forgotten prelapsarian splendor of the relationship between creature and creature. It makes you believe that God must truly be good. And that is quite a resource.
I remember my first wave in Hawaii. I was 15 or 16 and it came rolling in out of the deep water of the Pacific. The wave was relatively small, but big enough that when I went gliding down the face of the wave, I could look into the wall of water and see the colors of the reef below refracted into a thousand glimmering distinctions. It went on and on, much longer than any of the beach break waves I’d ridden in the Carolinas and Florida, and so I could take it all in—the tropical green of the mountains, the gentle offshore breeze, the color of the water. How could it all be real? I paddled back out past the breaking water, and simply sat there, looking at the perfectly blue sky and the thousands of miles of open ocean. I knew then, as I know now, that I had captured a moment—a good moment—that I would hold onto for years.
Looking back at all the hours I’ve spent floating in the ocean, I’m not prepared to defend each one. How could we accurately calculate the true value of how we use the time that is God’s? Certainly, as Augustine’s Confessions taught us, not in retrospect. What I can say, however, is that all the time I’ve spent riding waves and enjoying the ocean has forced me to stare at God’s creative power and his goodness conjoined. Being in the ocean can convince you to believe that he is good even while you experience his power.
Thus, in the necessary solitude of the activity, there is the abundant, almost requisite opportunity to contemplate our place in the Creator’s power and goodness, and then to respond to him with our whole bodies in dance. “You are my God, and I will praise you; you are my God, and I will exalt you. O give thanks to the Lord for he is good” (Ps. 118:28-29). A good wave begs you to sing! One could certainly have such an opportunity of praise in dozens of other contexts. But in the manifest diversity of ways to glory in his glory, to be jubilant in his creative jubilation, or to be ecstatic in his consumptive ecstasy, riding waves in the ocean must be one of the most rapturous ways to do it. I don’t plan on stopping.
A year or two ago, I returned to Pawleys Island to celebrate a wedding. I got up early one morning, checked the waves by the pier (it was flat), then drove to a coffee shop to catch up with my oldest childhood friend, a very serious surfer who had run surf camps for years in Central America. I hadn’t seen him in over 20 years, but I recognized him at once—long sun-bleached hair, lanky build, the corners of his eyes slightly strained from a condition called Surfer’s Eye, a result of years spent in the ocean.
We hugged. Then we went inside and chatted for a good long while. We talked about kids, the woman he’d married from Costa Rica, our families, jobs, and, of course, surfing. We talked about waves all over the world, trips we’d dreamed of, and what it looks like to enjoy the ocean in our now more committed lives. And then we headed out. But right before I got into my rental car, he called out, “Hey man, I forgot to tell you.” I thought he might say something about his family or a trip.
“I still have your old board.”
“That first one I had with the four fins?”
“Yeah, man. I’ve got it in my basement. It’s always there for you.”
The Rev. Dr. David Barr is associate rector at St. George’s Episcopal Church in Nashville, Tennessee, and received his Ph.D. from the University of Toronto (Wycliffe College). He is married to Caroline, a physician assistant, and they have a son and a dog.
