Religious None

My dad says he remembers the moment he gave up on me being a surfer. It was summer on Long Island, and the waves, he insists, were “tiny.” I was about 9, and a strong swimmer, but the ocean felt big and scary and unpredictable. I learned early in life that Dad’s idea of what was safe and fun didn’t always match up with mine. But, with some convincing, I climbed onto his back and held his shoulders while he paddled us through the whitewater on a longboard.

We got knocked off, or maybe just took some froth to the face, and I got spooked. I wanted to turn around, but he assured me everything would be fine once we got past the breaking waves. When we finally did, he found me, his usually spirited daughter, shivering, terrified, and seething with rage—at him, ostensibly, but probably also at myself, for not being as brave as I wanted to be. I told him, categorically, that I was done.

“And I thought, ‘Well, I guess that’s it,’” he tells me. “‘It’s just not for her.’”

Over the course of my adolescence and early adulthood, surfing became symbolic of the ways that I did and didn’t fit into my family. My parents and brother would disappear in the mornings, returning hours later vibrant and elated, bound by some sublime, untranslatable experience, speaking an alien language. I found myself both annoyed and dejected.

The message that surfing wasn’t “for me” became more deeply ingrained over the years, thanks to mainstream media, machismo, and my own trepidation. In theory, I was welcome to try it anytime. Only the stakes felt too high, the intensity too fervent. If I didn’t like it, or I couldn’t do it, or it scared me more than other people thought it should, that would really mean that I didn’t fit. So I avoided it altogether.

*

Dad’s prophecy held true for 20-some years, until, on the heels of a dark period in my life—a time of isolation, depression, and purposelessness—a friend invited me to go surfing. I needed to be outside. I needed something to hang on to. So I said why not.

We took two or three lessons—enough to get a little momentum and a few helpful tips. I discovered that surfing didn’t need to be taken so seriously. Apparently, it was actually fun. I started spending most of my days patrolling the coastline of the East End of Long Island with a longboard sticking out of my truck. Slowly, I got better and more confident. I made friends with other surfers, and we shared in each other’s joys and failures—long clean rides, sets taken on the head. Soon, I realized I wanted to structure my life around riding waves. There were things I was better at, things that were more likely to pay off in a material sense, but nothing that felt as important.

I also found myself preoccupied by the idea of god and religion for the first time in my life—something that initially felt unrelated when it surfaced a few months after I’d started surfing. Raised agnostic, I’d always been skeptical of religion and its attending institutions, all that destruction and oppression. But was it possible that it wasn’t all empire and tyranny? That it was also community, devotion, connection? 

I became obsessed with the question of how we “Religious Nones” (someone, like me, who checks “none” on a list of religious affiliations) could pursue a spiritual path outside of a formal religious organization. Six months after I’d learned to surf, I found myself applying to graduate school to study theology, intending to comb through the annals of religion to find some morsels that might help me navigate life as a nonaffiliated but “spiritual” person.

Many religious-studies experts consider secular modes of belonging, like patriotism or a 12-step program, to be worthy sources of meaning, purpose, and even transcendence. So when people quip about supposedly secular things being their “religion”—like surfing, which people often half-joke about as their “church”—I am inclined to take them seriously. 

The deeper I waded into the pool of divinity studies, the more I started to notice that the way surfing operated in my own life—as well as in my family and in my broader community—was actually closer to a spiritual pursuit than a “sport.” It could provide a framework for orienting one’s time and lifestyle, a central axis around which everything else rotated. It involved ritual, reward, and a set of principles. 

I knew, too, that surfing had a holy history, as a sacred custom in Hawaiian culture. Though it was seized, commodified, and transformed into what we think of as mainstream surf culture today, many Hawaiians still consider it a spiritual and cultural practice. What would it look like for me, as someone who isn’t part of that legacy, to take surfing seriously as a method of seeking awe, to treat it with sanctity?

*

Some of my classmates at divinity school had grown up in religious households that felt oppressive or limiting and were pursuing their studies in an effort to detangle their own relationships to spirituality and redefine god for themselves. Many of them were finding that parts of the religions they had felt alienated by actually resonated with them once they were able to take ownership of their faith rather than just accept what they’d inherited. I didn’t relate to that experience, in terms of institutional religion. I did, however, recognize it when it came to surfing. 

Like my classmates rewriting their relationships to god and religion, I had to come to surfing in my own way, on my own time. Why I rejected it for so long, when it was so embedded in my family culture, is the subject of much inquiry. I usually just joke: When you have cool parents and you try to rebel, you end up being kind of a loser. The truth is a little more complicated. Maybe it’s a stretch to call my family’s approach to surfing truly “dogmatic,” but I think it’s fair to say that I resisted surfing the way some people resist their family’s zealous faith.

Unlike most religious sects, core surf culture isn’t looking for new members. Surfers, infamously, often can be gatekeepers. Most are not in the business of evangelism and recruitment. For a time, my sweet, well-meaning dad had a T-shirt that read in block letters across the chest, “Don’t Surf.” When I pressed him about it, he pushed back: “There are too many surfers,” he said. “It’s ruining the thing I love.” I knew the message wasn’t directed at me, exactly—just other people like me, ones he didn’t know. He tossed the shirt when I told him it stung, agreeing that he didn’t want to be part of making surfing even the slightest bit more territorial or unwelcoming.

When I eventually got back on a surfboard—two decades after that day on my dad’s shoulders—I instinctively kept it quiet from my family. People who have had profound spiritual transformations are often advised to keep their experiences private for a while before sharing them with the world. Being too fast and loose with something so intimate can weaken its potency. Revelations, mystical encounters, transcendence—these are delicate, precious transmissions that need time to develop and sink in, to become real. Subjecting them to critique or scrutiny, or simply articulating them too soon, can feel like giving them away before they can stand on their own. 

It’s funny that I came to surfing—which took such a swift and unexpectedly powerful hold on me, and which in time would come to feel like part of my spiritual path—at the same sort of dark-night-of-the-soul moment when many people find faith. I took it up with all the fanaticism of a convert, adopting the obsessiveness that I had renounced for so many years. I began to recognize something in surfers’ voices that I hadn’t heard before. What I had always interpreted as mania, the frenzied anticipation of an oncoming swell, or the breathless analysis and re-analysis of tides and forecasts, I now saw was all in service of something I hadn’t understood. 

The path to enlightenment, I’m told, is not a straight line but a series of never-ending loops that operate on their own timeline and logic. That’s also part of the essential momentum of surfing, at least for me.

I started to hear that ardor in my own voice, too. Part of me wanted to drive straight to my parents’ house and recount every detail, to announce that I finally understood what they’d been banging on about for all these years. But I resisted. I told them I was surfing—the log on long-term loan from my dad’s quiver required as much—but I requested they not ask me about it. I avoided surfing with them, which was quite a feat in our small town. I wanted my relationship with surfing to develop on its own—not secret, just low profile. I didn’t want to answer questions about it or give reports. I wanted it to be only mine.

I could feel myself becoming “a surfer,” though I was nervous to admit it and to square my enthusiasm with my mediocre talent. I felt, somewhat ridiculously, like I’d found a purpose. When I finally, sheepishly admitted that to my dad, he replied solemnly that he knew exactly what I meant. He told me about his first barrel, at 14, and how he’d thought, This is one of the most important things I’ll ever do.

*

Rates of religious affiliation have been plummeting for decades, and “Religious None” is now the fastest-growing category in the US. The thing is, we Nones aren’t necessarily uninterested in the things religion has historically provided. In fact, within this population, there is huge diversity and a fair share of what could be called spiritual belief. 

A 2012 Pew Research Center study found that among the religiously unaffiliated, “two-thirds of them say they believe in God…while more than a third classify themselves as ‘spiritual’ but not ‘religious.’” Forced to turn to new sources of meaning, Nones are tasked with the simultaneous burden and freedom of forming their own systems of purpose rather than following a prescribed path. 

The mystic Trappist monk and social justice activist Thomas Merton said that “our idea of God tells us more about ourselves than about Him.” Surfers worship a complex, awesome God: unfathomably powerful, indifferent to our mortality, unbelievably amusing and joyful, surprising, mysterious, vast, ever-changing. Surfing forces us to be immersed in the moment, deeply attentive, and in awe of something immeasurably bigger than ourselves. It rewards patience, subtlety, and just the right amount of recklessness.

I don’t usually mention God when I’m out in the lineup. But I often look around and reflect on the community that I find myself a part of, people who for much of recent cultural history have been thought of as heathens. We get up before dawn to commune with the ocean. We travel to fabled sites, seeking the sublime. We pore devotedly over buoy data, wind direction, and storm predictions, committing it all to memory. We do this not just in pursuit of a fleeting rush of adrenaline or a bit of exercise, but to feel alive—at home in our bodies and firmly rooted in the world.

I eventually got comfortable enough to surf with my family. In fact, they’re my favorite people to surf with. But it can still spontaneously conjure a complex adolescent combination of indignance and desire, an endless friction between the warring needs to both belong and individuate. Most days I delight in the four of us arriving at the beach together, piled into a truck with boards protruding at all angles. Most days I don’t mind being the novice of the group.

But then sometimes I pearl a few times or get panicky on the paddle out, and I freeze up at the thought of my family watching me flounder. That old feeling creeps back in, the anxiety of not being as confident as I’d like to be, the shame of not belonging. I beat myself up for feeling bad, which only makes it worse—what Buddhists call “the second arrow” of suffering. I often wonder: If I have this intense connection to surfing, or if this is supposed to be part of my spiritual path, shouldn’t it all be a bit…easier?

It’s an appealing idea, that we can expect our spirituality to be rewarding, satisfying, and pleasurable. But powerful spiritual encounters can be terrifying and painful and disorienting. There is no faith without doubt, so they say. And the path to enlightenment, I’m told, is not a straight line but a series of never-ending loops that operate on their own timeline and logic. 

That’s part of the essential momentum of surfing, at least for me. There’s the sublime feeling of being transported to that singular state where the lines between you and nature and time all blur. Then there’s the struggle, the days when you feel like you’re back to square one and everyone around you seems to be walking on water, and the exercise of sitting patiently with the struggle, in the hope—not the expectation, but the possibility—of transcendence.

My relationship with surfing is far from settled. It causes me more anxiety and frustration than anything else in my life. I have threatened to quit hundreds of times. And yet I return to it again and again, instinctively, humbly, sometimes despite myself. 

Since I started studying religion, I’ve read the works of theologians, mystics, and philosophers through the ages. I’ve learned Tantric Hindu meditations, and read the diaries of anchoresses who had themselves entombed in stone rooms for their whole lives so they could devote themselves to God. I’ve experimented with various borrowed practices from different traditions that were fascinating but didn’t feel like mine. I keep finding myself back in the ocean.

When I told my dad I was writing about my evolving relationship with surfing, he assumed I was writing about regret. And sure, I’ve flagellated myself for not learning when I was first given the chance. Sometimes I see someone cross-stepping gracefully or emerging from a tube and can’t help but think, If I had just started when I was 9, maybe I’d be able to do that. But, as frustrating as it is, surfing makes sense for me as a practice not in spite of my mediocrity, but because of it. It is, as Timothy Leary said, “a non-productive, non-depletive act that’s done purely for the value of the dance itself.”

In Ram Dass’ new-age Eastern spiritual classic Be Here Now, you’ll find a drawing of a dancing Shiva (the Hindu deity sometimes referred to as the “cosmic dancer”) with the head of a longhaired, stereotypical surfer, balancing gracefully on a longboard. “Surfing,” the page reads, “either you do it like it’s a big weight on you, or you do it as part of the dance.” 

Not many of us will reach the heights of surf enlightenment, where every time we ride a wave, we feel in tune with the rhythms of the universe. But anyone who surfs has experienced at least one brief, beautiful moment of letting the big weight down and feeling the divine dance, that numinous union of mind, body, and nature. Every time we paddle out into the ocean, we know that, if we’re lucky, there might be a moment like that.