GODSTUFF

SOUL SURFING IN CHICAGO (THANKS TO THE FOLKS IN LAGUNA BEACH)

LAGUNA BEACH, Calif. — When Chicago lifted its decades-old ban on surfing the city’s beaches late last month, a cyber-roar went up throughout the surfing world, no more loudly than in Laguna Beach, Calif., my new hometown.

We moved to this seaside artist’s enclave that Timothy Leary once called home last month after living for more than a decade in Oak Park, the artsy village where Frank Lloyd Wright used to live and Ernest Hemingway was born.

A number of Laguna’s surfers, including professional surfer James Pribram, helped lead the charge to open Chicago’s beaches to surfing. The sport had been banned in the City of Big Shoulders, along with all flotation devices, in the wake of a deadly accident involving several young children and an inflatable raft years ago.

Now Chicago’s surfers legally can hit Lake Michigan at two beaches — Montrose and 57th Street — during the summer months (when, frankly, the waves are what one might expect in a lake, even one as large as Michigan) and from Labor Day to Memorial Day at two more — Osterman and Rainbow.

It’s an opportunity to expand the sport of surfing and Chicago’s love of outdoor activities and nature, as well as perhaps a chance for Chicagoans to learn something new about our spiritual lives.

Even though I grew up along the Atlantic on the East Coast, my introduction to surfing happened as a student at Wheaton College in landlocked DuPage County, where a couple of my friends — one a native of Grand Haven, Mich., and the other a California dude raised near Laguna Beach — used to throw on their wet suits and head to the North Shore to surf. The first time I heard about their adventures, I thought it was a joke.

But it wasn’t, and their love of the sport was contagious, even if it never got me out on a board in frigid Lake Michigan. When they talked about surfing, they often spoke about God and faith and how riding the waves was an awe-inspiring and humbling experience of the grace-filled hand of the divine.

Out here in southern California, surfing is no eccentric pastime for a few (fool) hardy souls (and their wet suits). Along the Pacific coast, surfing is a way of life.

Some say it’s a kind of religion.

Heck, even my pastors at the congregation we attend here in town, Little Church by the Sea (yes, really), surf and host regular Bible studies for surfers. There’s a “Christian” surf school in town, and many of the local surfers are people of faith (of various flavors) who find inspiration and communion with God among the waves.

Having spent more than 20 years in Chicago, a city as obsessed with and enlivened by religion as it is by sports, I find legalizing surfing is a welcome and historic development in the city’s spiritual-cultural evolution.

For early Hawaiians, surfing was both physical and spiritual training. They prayed for the waves and the water and performed rituals of thanksgiving for the trees that made their surfboards. Surfing, sometimes called the “sport of kings,” was a way in which Hawaii’s leaders kept their bodies, minds and spirits strong, flexible and focused.

Surfing’s religious connections were first examined in earnest (and in print) by a fellow named Tom Blake, a native of northern Wisconsin who fell in love with surfing through the early surfing movie reels, met the legendary Hawaiian surfer Duke Kahanamoku at a movie theater in Michigan, and later moved to California to pursue the sport. He believed (a lesson he gleaned through surfing) that “nature=God” and that surfers innately grasp the sacredness of surfing and the Creator by riding the waves.

Surfing as a religion is even a serious academic pursuit. In a recent article in the Journal of the American Academy of Religion, “Surfing into Spirituality and a New, Aquatic Nature Religion,” University of Florida professor Bron Taylor described surfing as “an evocative, ocean-baptized spirituality, capable of moving surfing enthusiasts who otherwise would have little to do with that which scholars construe as religion.”

Last week, I saw a sneak preview of a gnarly (to use the local parlance) new surf documentary, “Lost Prophets: Search for the Collective,” that follows several surfers from around the world — including a devout Indonesian Muslim. “These vagabonds are living their lives as examples that surfing is a spiritual reflection of yourself,” asserts the film, which should hit theaters this fall.

In a column titled “Is God a goofyfoot?” Surf Magazine writer Brad Melekian tried to answer whether surfing itself might be a religion by posing the question to a Christian minister, a surfing Orthodox rabbi, and a Buddhist nun.

Melekian’s conclusion? Maybe.

Even if it’s not going to give Catholicism a run for its money, surfing still has positive spiritual lessons to offer folks of all faiths and none.

Melekian says: “To be a surfer in the full sense . . . means being aware of your surroundings, and respectful of the people and places that you interact with. It means being patient, mindful, kind, compassionate, understanding, active, thoughtful, faithful, hopeful, gracious, disciplined and . . . good. It means thinking about things while you’re doing them, and trying to embody the universal truths that all of us — Christian, Hindu, Muslim, Buddhist, whatever — know that we’re supposed to live. Maybe you give up a wave here or there. You let someone go. You show a kid how to paddle through the whitewater and into the channel. You help people. . . . You try to make yourself the best surfer you can be, regardless of how much spray you’re throwing on your turns. And then, maybe, it becomes something closer to a religion.”

So hang loose, Chicago, and keep your eyes and hearts open to the God who brings the waves — even the small ones.

Lost Prophets-trailer 01 from Nathan Apffel on Vimeo.