Article
Culture
Sport
Wildness
4 min read

The surfers seeking the stoke of cold water enchantment

The reverence of waves breaks over beach-bums and ancient monks alike.

Riley is a writer and journalist, originally from Oregon. 

A sufer carries a longboard into the waves
Surfing Oregon's coast.
Megan Nixon on Unsplash.

Long before Malibu or the post-industrial North Shore of Oahu, surfing held an integral role in Pacific Island societies. As Ben Finney and James Houston explain, surfing was a religious practice for ancient Hawaiians. With stocks of morning glory, they lashed the ocean’s surface, chanting “Arise, great surfs from Kahiki.” This compelled the spirits - animating the swells - to foster good waves, therefore good “stoke” (to use a modern idiom). 

When I first started to surf, I detected such enchantment. Almost nothing brought me closer to transcendence. On good days, my Sabbath rituals would be galvanized by peeling waves paired with a cold saltwater plunge, somewhat like those Russian Orthodox plunges on January 6th (minus the ice).  

And despite the rapid secularization of the West, surfing remains a precious religious ritual. For Christians, Buddhists, New Age spiritualists, etc.—anyone who meets the ocean on her own terms. All speak with reverence about the waves. 

Surfers tend to be deeply serious people, distanced from their hash-smoking, dread-headed depictions in pop culture. Some might argue that they take themselves too seriously, one day conducting American counterculture and the next protesting the Vietnam War on the grounds that war disrupts the proverbial Tao. 

  Such is the genius of Francis Ford Coppola’s iconic surfing motif from the film Apocalypse Now. Here, Lieutenant Colonel Bill Kilgore, trying to find a rational explanation for the Vietnam War, declares “Charlie don’t surf!” with an odd tone of vulnerable bravado. Somewhere in this declaration, we find a longing for peace and transcendence, despite the chorus of machine guns and napalm that inevitably follow. For him, surfing was an antidote to chaos—a sort of victorious peace ritual following the horrors of battle.  

Despite the chaos––constant chorus of swells and seagull cries––the ocean remains noiseless in a spiritual sense. She quiets anyone nearby.

Jaimal Yogis, author of Saltwater Buddha, forthrightly connects surfing to enlightenment. In Hawaii, he studied dharma and traditional philosophy, living like Jack Kerouac and Kelly Slater combined: “[mastering] all the waves (internal and external).” There exist many paths to enlightenment, Yogis adds in his follow-up A Surfer’s Guide to Buddhism. Surfing is just one route through the ocean of suffering, albeit more appealing than ancient asceticism. 

Surfing, Peter Kreeft claims, is akin to Buddhism in that they both contain unique words for their unique “highs”: ‘stoke’ and Nirvana. In a little book called I Surf, Therefore I Am, Kreeft regards surfers as Aristotelian disciples, chasing life’s greatest good (happiness) before anything else. In that respect, surfers live truthfully to the Ethics.  

The activity of surfing, he says, transports a person into timeless happiness. ‘Stoke’ is a mystical ebullience, ecstasy of a sacred kind because ‘stoke’ is not a fleeting thing. It sustains itself both during and after the activity which creates it––a pure and lasting joy. “Maybe surfing brings us back to the timelessness of Eden,” Kreeft says. 

Ancient Celtic monks found the seashore ideal for spiritual refuge, regarding their pilgrimage to the sea as following Christ into the desert. Visiting the ruins of one of these seaside monasteries, Dr. Ed Newell (author of The Sacramental Sea), felt himself overcome by its solitude. The ascetic life on the isle of Papa Stronsay seemed spiritually claustrophobic, he says.  

These monks were not surfers (to our knowledge). They were beach bums. They recognized a simple, solemn truth about the sea: its intense solitude. Despite the chaos––constant chorus of swells and seagull cries––the ocean remains noiseless in a spiritual sense. She quiets anyone nearby, leaving them, as Kierkegaard puts it, silent and “nothing before God.” If we can learn from the lilies and the birds then surely waves and pelicans offer similar wisdom. 

When I moved away from the coast for school, this was the most intense realization. Now, my life is full of constant noise. I thirst for that vast silence that nourished me back home. And while Kreeft is right, that ‘stoke’ never truly dissolves, adjusting to life away from the waves has been a terrible trial. During the first week in the dorms, the thought of rolling swells kept me awake and staring at the ceiling. I would instinctively open my window, only to realize that there was no distant sound of crashing waves to put me to sleep. There was, and has been, something dislodged ever since leaving the sea. 

And so, today, I skipped class and stood at the edge of the Pacific Ocean. A fierce storm – bearing the name La Ninia – raged across the Oregon Coast. Sideways rain pelted my face. Though coated in a 5mm wetsuit, my fingers were already painfully numb before stepping into the sea, which was probably 5°-10°C. 

I paddled past the breaking waves and rediscovered what was missing. The part of myself that never made it to university. I ditched my nine-foot fiberglass longboard for a moment and thought about nothing: floating, staring into the blankness of the gray sky. My body went numb and became weightless, the existential burdens vacating with each rise and fall of the swell. Once again, I was alone and silent before God. And despite losing myself in the vastness––the overwhelming silence––of that moment, I found myself entirely. 

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Snippet
Culture
Film & TV
Sport
3 min read

F1 feeds our need for speed

The high-speed life isn’t just on our screens

Imogen is a writer, mum, and priest on a new housing development in the South-West of England. 

Brad Pitt dressed as a racing driver stands with a car in the background
Brad Pitt stars in the F1 film.
F1.com

Our weekends between February to October are overtaken by a series of cars whizzing round a track. The Formula 1 season guides us through the summer months, taking us on a worldwide tour of cities. From Monaco to Barcelona to Las Vegas to Silverstone, these cars are steered onto our screens and hurtle through our comparatively slow lives.  

Before marrying Jon, I would have never dreamed of spending many hours watching those cars driving fast across our TV screen. It is true, they are going unbelievably fast, with track speeds exceeding 200mph. These speeds somehow mean nothing as they are so far beyond my capabilities – I feel shocked at myself and a little shaky if I hit a sneaky 75mph on the motorway. However, nine years into our marriage and F1 has sped into my life and taken up residence. I now know some of the driver’s names: Lando, Max, Oscar, Lewis, and Charles. I know some of the teams, although I always seem to get Williams and McLaren mixed up. I know some of the tactics, something about a hard and soft tyre and timing a pit stop to perfection. Jon and I have even graduated this year to an F1 wall chart on which we track our favourite driver's progress.  

Driving fast has always been of interest to sports fanatics. In fact, anything fast seems to pique our interest and catch our eye. F1 began with the world championship in May 1950 at Silverstone. And 75 years later, the celebrations include a new F1 movie with Brad Pitt in the driving seat.  

I wonder whether the pace of racing mirrors something of our lives. We run frantically from one pitstop to another. We love to be busy, to squeeze people in, and race from one appointment to another. Perhaps we even push others out of the way in order to keep our own track position or race intention. Perhaps we are drawn to speed because it stirs something within us - a worldly pull to pursue excellence, a need for speed, a competitive edge to work or home or social situations. Maybe all of us want to get ahead, go for glory, and at the end of the day stand on the podium and lift the trophy. Imagine a life where we would willingly waste all that champagne! 

Perhaps we more simply see something of ourselves in those crazy F1 drivers? We too are racers of sorts, navigating the twists and turns of life, taking the corners at speed and trying not to crash.  

Our fascination with fast has very ancient roots. Nearly 2,000 years ago, St Paul talked about racing too. He wrote of running the race of life with perseverance and fixing our eyes of Jesus. If we can accuse the F1 drivers of anything, then we can accuse them of perseverance. Most F1 races take about 90 minutes. An hour and a half of sweaty, restricted, pressurised driving at serious speed against terrifyingly good competitors. And behind the scenes, away from the wheel, these competitors put in thousands of hours of mental and physical training to race these machines. This is what it looks like to race with perseverance. Maybe we have things to learn from them after all. 

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