Orchard Ridge United Church of Christ

If there is anything universal about living the life of faith – it seems to be that we also live with doubt. For most of us, faith and doubt coexist in a living paradox. Origen, third century Greek commentator on the Bible once said “God has put ….conundrums and paradoxes in so that we are forced to seek a deeper meaning.” As much as we may have been discouraged to doubt in our own religious upbringing, doubt and faith have co-existed for the entire history of faith. One of the dangers of our own education is that we often equate faithfulness with intellectual certainty. There are other ways to work through our doubt.

Poet and author Mark Nepo gets at this with the simple illustration of swimming. He writes, “When learning how to swim, it’s natural enough to resist the initial sinking in the water. We seem to be going down. And the more we struggle at the surface, the stronger the pull seems, wanting to take us under. But when we can relax into the water, we settle a few inches into the miracle of buoyancy. Amazingly, the unseen depths hold us up.

This moment in learning how to swim reveals the essence of faith. Forget all the definitions and debates. It’s as simple and difficult as swimming in the ocean of experience and learning how to trust the unseen depths of life to hold us up. We don’t have to name that depth or send messages to it or pray in the dark to it. We simply have to surrender to it enough to feel its buoyancy. Yet these are the most difficult two inches to travel on earth.”

All of my growing up, as my mom taught swimming in our backyard pool, she repeatedly proclaimed, “everyone floats.”

It came up because each year she had beginning level students. As she taught them about the buoyancy of water, she had to reassure students that they would not sink. To the obnoxious skeptics (usually her teenage children’s friends) she had a simple test. Our pool was 3 feet deep in the shallow end and 9 feet deep at the other end. She invited the skeptic to begin walking the length of the pool. Even if they could hold their breath to stay under water, they could not keep their feet on the bottom to actually walk. The buoyancy of the water would cause everyone to slowly float to the surface. As people repeatedly challenged her theory, she laughed with glee as they struggled to keep their toes on the bottom.

Of course, this isn’t literally true, although almost everyone can float. But my mother understood how important it was for new swimmers to trust the water. The more one fought against the water, the more likely one was to sink, get water in their mouth, become scared and panicked.

She also loved teaching adults because they understood that learning to swim was about much more than learning the crawl or backstroke. It involved “leaning into trust”. It involved learning how to trust the unseen depths of life to hold us up, and it was for her, I think, an exercise in faith – even though she didn’t use that language.

In these days of massive uncertainty about our jobs, our economy, our environment and our investments, we are being afforded the opportunity to lean ever more deeply into an attitude of trust. Trust not in what we know, but in the God who created the world from the chaos of the water. Ultimately this is not an intellectual stance, but a certain kind of acceptance or agreement with the love of God, even in the face of mystery. May our Lenten journey draw us deeper into such trust.