Surfing Through the Lies Landing in The Chaos of Truth

A while back I watched a documentary that focused on the amazing surfing ability of a teenage boy.  At the tender age of fourteen he took his surfboard out into the ocean and conquered waves that would swallow up a grown man.  Clearly, he possessed a gift, a skill bestowed upon few.  Still, his father who was a surfer as well, worried.  How could he not imagine losing him to the tremendous power of the sea? Yet he watched with pride,  his son taking on the ocean not to battle with it, but to assimilate himself into it, bend himself to its will, humbling both himself and the sea, leaving both the powers of the deep, conquered  surrendered.  The ocean bowing to his will, his spirit overcome with grateful respect for the power on which he glides. His father, though filled with anxiety and anticipation never hinted at discouraging his son from the danger that awaited him upon every tall wave.  His eyes bespoke a heart overflowing with pride  at the bravery of his child.   It does take brave kid to set out to conquer the ocean.  I think though, that his father's bravery may far outweigh the son's.   He wears it with humility, but with a fierceness of spirit rarely found the world over. He gives his son over to his dreams, releasing him to the deep, never knowing whether one day, the deep will claim him for good.

Experience is a fine teacher--a better one than any other I know.  And those of us who come at life without it often find ourselves facing walls of adversity that rival those 40 foot waves under that fourteen year old's surf board; only less equipped to ride out the wave until they reach the safety of the shallows, where their feet can finally touch the sandy ground.   I am often one of those people.  I often think I've weathered every kind of enormous wave that life could roll over me, but just like the endless undulation of the sea, life remains ever-changing, and I find myself sometimes under the swell.

A few days ago, I found life coming at me at speeds that rivaled the enormous Hawaiian wave you may recall from the memorable show of the 70's, "Hawaii 50."  I remember the intro music, the drums in the background, a quick clip of a hula skirted girl swinging her hips, and then, the Wave.  I only caught glimpses of it as  my mother hurried me off to bed as a child, but I recall that for some reason, it set a kind of terror in my mind that rolled through my dreams often.  I dreamed of being engulfed by it--lost inside a tunnel of water, unable to catch my breath or scream for help.  I suspect that my near drowning experience at Lake Murray when I was seven conjured up some of those ephemeral images.  I was probably 12 years old before I saw the ocean for myself, and never swam in it until I was 20.  I always imagined it as one roll after another of those big Hawaiian billows that haunted my childish dreams.

When I think about the vastness of the ocean, the ships that sit buried beneath its surface, the life that teems, deep below the tumult of those humongous waves, the lives it has devoured and the lives that through time and tribulation, were borne across it seeking safer shores, I am left in awe.  We live on a planet made of water, it swirls around us, affecting weather patterns and  fueling storms that devastate  the modest slips of land that we like to think we own and command.  But we really possess so little in the way of power; the reach of our control extending no further than the ends of our own noses, if we find the wisdom to ever acknowledge the truth.

All this talk about water.  Sometimes, I don't even know where I'm going when I start to speak of the things that tumble around in my brain.  But this time my life drew me to the water--or to the way it behaves and expects us to keep our footing as it continues to morph and move, forcing us to comply or suffer the consequences.

Over the lasts few weeks I feel like life threw me a surfboard and said,"hop on, we're going for a ride."  I had no choice, of course, but to oblige.  There were days when I knew my need to control came in second to other things.  Sickness, injury, end of school ceremonies and beginning of summer chaos took over my life there for a while, and I had no choice but to ride it all out.  In some ways I'm still riding--I might have never made it to my feet on that surfboard but I can belly surf with the best of them through the extraordinary struggles of life.

Then again, I find myself in a state of overwhelm often.  I find that social media's wealth of misinformation and the strong opinions of my acquaintances flood my mind and my emotions to the point that I want to shut myself down completely.  I am confused by much of what I see there--the blind followers of a party, a leader, or a belief system they've never taken one second to examine or test or dig deeper into--they fill me with a sense of familiar shame and dread.  I recall that I used to be one of them, someone who wanted to be told what to believe and who happily accepted what I was told as the truth.  Ignorance is bliss, they say, but when life comes at you with a reality as big as a 40 foot wave, ignorance makes a poor life preserver.

Once in a while I try to speak my own truth, but it falls on ears that are stuffed with bias and dogma and fear of finding they lived an entire lifetime believing a lie. Perhaps to them, the nightmare of allowing their beliefs to be challenged is akin to my dream of that enormous wave swallowing me up.  What are we without our beliefs, and who are we if our beliefs get challenged and then changed?

So because of our deeply held beliefs, we live in a world of fear..  We fear anything different from what our mama's and our preachers teach us.  We fear anything that comes from the mouths or the hearts of the "other" that does not abide with us in our bubble of belief and separation.  Religion and politics aside, there seems to be so little space on dry ground for equality and and respect between mankind.  Our human spaces are filled with limp justifications of the atrocities done to our fellow man.  The Christian masses somehow stand on the side of persecution and merciless accusation while those they vilify as evil and ungodly try to unite in love and in defense of those who are downtrodden and looked upon with disdain.  Those who merely want to follow The Commandment--that we love our neighbors as ourselves, seems to apply only to the neighbors who look and live the way we do.

Folks, I grew up sitting with my skinned up knees showing past the hem of my Sunday dresses, sitting at the feet of my Sunday School teacher, Mrs. Sarah Davis, who taught me more about the Jesus many say they serve, than most high-minded Baptist preachers can even hope to know before they stand behind the pulpit screaming and sweating  railing at their congregations about the travesty of their sins and about the God who eagerly awaits his chance to dole out punishments so severe you leave your church on Sunday never knowing that Jesus came to Love, not to condemn.  Sarah Davis taught me that Jesus sat down and ate with the undesirables.  He never sent the children away.  He spread grace and mercy everywhere he went--and example to us all, Christian or not, of how we should approach life, and how we should regard the welfare of our fellow man.

Never mind who Jesus was, or that we say we are his followers.  Our fear of being wrong outweighs our duty to Christ to be his hands and feet, to serve our fellow man as if we were taking care of Jesus himself.  We must find rationalizations for the evils we see perpetrated in the name of  the law.  Must we convince ourselves to believe the worst in others in order to feel better about the choices we've made?    How else could we sleep at night, knowing we have failed at the most basic and most important commandment Jesus gave.  We cannot love God with all our hearts and treat our fellow man with anything less than the love for our neighbors that he also commands.

I fear that instead of becoming experts at finding our own weaknesses and working hard to overcome them, the waves of truth are building momentum and as they gain speed, as they pick up momentum along the way, we will all find ourselves washed ashore beside our fellow human beings, moms and dads, lost children and the broken, life-worn elderly, the drug dealers and the addicts, each one as human as the next, each speaking their native tongues but hopefully, finally accepted, loved, understood.  For it is only in the darkest of times that human beings tend to come together to face whatever evil threatens to harm them all.  Right now we stand divided, but only now.

The tide is changing.  The waves grow stronger with every truth revealed.  We might all feel overwhelmed and heavy with the news of it all, but eventually, this turmoil will unite us.  It must, or we will find ourselves consumed by our prejudices, never to  embrace the entire human experience or richness with which it was intended from the beginning of time.