Taking the Spiritual Plunge

 

                                                    Crazy Canucks Swimming in Winter...Why?! 

During our two weeks in Newfoundland during August we went for a swim in the Labrador Sea, the third year in a row. When we lived in Outport Newfoundland, my settlement ministry charge of five congregations more than 40 years ago, no one swam in the ocean for recreation. The water was far too cold, frigid, at any time of the year. Sad to say, climate change has made a difference, although the experience is still breath-taking. I have to admit that we waited until our last day to swim in Wiseman's Cove and it was so exhilarating that we regretted doing so earlier in our stay. 

This has been a swimming Summer for us, taking the plunge at least a dozen times, maybe more, nearly all of them in lakes, including Lake Ontario (brrr) along with the one occasion in the ocean. We've enjoyed a couple of pool swims as well but there is something about the "baptism" into a body of water that's a spiritual experience for us. 

We went to a Lake Ontario beach last week with one of our daughters and two grandchildren. The kids swim regularly in pools but it was their first experience of a beach swim, at least of one they can recall, and they loved it, as did our daughter. 

I was pleased to see this past Labour Day Weekend, often the last hurrah for such activities in our northern clime, that the Globe and Mail offered an editorial on the pleasures of swimming, and even going a few strokes farther. Here are the first few paragraphs: 

Wading into a cool lake on a hot summer day, stretching your arms out in front of you and diving in, then coming up for air and gliding through the open water. It’s always a transforming experience. A new element. A new world. The mind freed by the meditative rhythm of each stroke, each breath.

Or staring up at the clouds, daydreaming as you do the backstroke in an outdoor pool, hands raising as if to ask a question before sweeping down and through the water. Or cruising across the water’s surface with the playful, frog-like kicking of the breaststroke. Or simply diving deep as far as you can, turning this way and that like an adventurous deep sea explorer or mythic mermaid. Returning to the surface out of breath but renewed.

No matter the stroke, no matter if you are in a pool, lake or ocean, the fundamental experience is always the same: delighting in what the neuroscientist and writer Oliver Sacks once described as the “essential rightness” of swimming. His father, when Mr. Sacks was a boy, called it “the elixir of life.”

It is a pleasure every Canadian should be able to enjoy. Along with our long winters and vast prairies, we are also a nation of oceans, lakes and rivers. Many of us are drawn to the allure of water.

Elixir of life indeed. How could we not say "amen!" to this? It is certainly evocative and downright spiritual. Little wonder that one of our Christian sacraments is baptism, although I would not recommend immersion in today's Jordan River. 

                                                                 Baptism of Jesus -- Pheoris West