Article
Culture
Sport
Wildness
4 min read

The surfers seeking the stoke of cold water enchantment

The reverence of waves breaks over beach-bums and ancient monks alike.

Riley is a writer and journalist, originally from Oregon. 

A sufer carries a longboard into the waves
Surfing Oregon's coast.
Megan Nixon on Unsplash.

Long before Malibu or the post-industrial North Shore of Oahu, surfing held an integral role in Pacific Island societies. As Ben Finney and James Houston explain, surfing was a religious practice for ancient Hawaiians. With stocks of morning glory, they lashed the ocean’s surface, chanting “Arise, great surfs from Kahiki.” This compelled the spirits - animating the swells - to foster good waves, therefore good “stoke” (to use a modern idiom). 

When I first started to surf, I detected such enchantment. Almost nothing brought me closer to transcendence. On good days, my Sabbath rituals would be galvanized by peeling waves paired with a cold saltwater plunge, somewhat like those Russian Orthodox plunges on January 6th (minus the ice).  

And despite the rapid secularization of the West, surfing remains a precious religious ritual. For Christians, Buddhists, New Age spiritualists, etc.—anyone who meets the ocean on her own terms. All speak with reverence about the waves. 

Surfers tend to be deeply serious people, distanced from their hash-smoking, dread-headed depictions in pop culture. Some might argue that they take themselves too seriously, one day conducting American counterculture and the next protesting the Vietnam War on the grounds that war disrupts the proverbial Tao. 

  Such is the genius of Francis Ford Coppola’s iconic surfing motif from the film Apocalypse Now. Here, Lieutenant Colonel Bill Kilgore, trying to find a rational explanation for the Vietnam War, declares “Charlie don’t surf!” with an odd tone of vulnerable bravado. Somewhere in this declaration, we find a longing for peace and transcendence, despite the chorus of machine guns and napalm that inevitably follow. For him, surfing was an antidote to chaos—a sort of victorious peace ritual following the horrors of battle.  

Despite the chaos––constant chorus of swells and seagull cries––the ocean remains noiseless in a spiritual sense. She quiets anyone nearby.

Jaimal Yogis, author of Saltwater Buddha, forthrightly connects surfing to enlightenment. In Hawaii, he studied dharma and traditional philosophy, living like Jack Kerouac and Kelly Slater combined: “[mastering] all the waves (internal and external).” There exist many paths to enlightenment, Yogis adds in his follow-up A Surfer’s Guide to Buddhism. Surfing is just one route through the ocean of suffering, albeit more appealing than ancient asceticism. 

Surfing, Peter Kreeft claims, is akin to Buddhism in that they both contain unique words for their unique “highs”: ‘stoke’ and Nirvana. In a little book called I Surf, Therefore I Am, Kreeft regards surfers as Aristotelian disciples, chasing life’s greatest good (happiness) before anything else. In that respect, surfers live truthfully to the Ethics.  

The activity of surfing, he says, transports a person into timeless happiness. ‘Stoke’ is a mystical ebullience, ecstasy of a sacred kind because ‘stoke’ is not a fleeting thing. It sustains itself both during and after the activity which creates it––a pure and lasting joy. “Maybe surfing brings us back to the timelessness of Eden,” Kreeft says. 

Ancient Celtic monks found the seashore ideal for spiritual refuge, regarding their pilgrimage to the sea as following Christ into the desert. Visiting the ruins of one of these seaside monasteries, Dr. Ed Newell (author of The Sacramental Sea), felt himself overcome by its solitude. The ascetic life on the isle of Papa Stronsay seemed spiritually claustrophobic, he says.  

These monks were not surfers (to our knowledge). They were beach bums. They recognized a simple, solemn truth about the sea: its intense solitude. Despite the chaos––constant chorus of swells and seagull cries––the ocean remains noiseless in a spiritual sense. She quiets anyone nearby, leaving them, as Kierkegaard puts it, silent and “nothing before God.” If we can learn from the lilies and the birds then surely waves and pelicans offer similar wisdom. 

When I moved away from the coast for school, this was the most intense realization. Now, my life is full of constant noise. I thirst for that vast silence that nourished me back home. And while Kreeft is right, that ‘stoke’ never truly dissolves, adjusting to life away from the waves has been a terrible trial. During the first week in the dorms, the thought of rolling swells kept me awake and staring at the ceiling. I would instinctively open my window, only to realize that there was no distant sound of crashing waves to put me to sleep. There was, and has been, something dislodged ever since leaving the sea. 

And so, today, I skipped class and stood at the edge of the Pacific Ocean. A fierce storm – bearing the name La Ninia – raged across the Oregon Coast. Sideways rain pelted my face. Though coated in a 5mm wetsuit, my fingers were already painfully numb before stepping into the sea, which was probably 5°-10°C. 

I paddled past the breaking waves and rediscovered what was missing. The part of myself that never made it to university. I ditched my nine-foot fiberglass longboard for a moment and thought about nothing: floating, staring into the blankness of the gray sky. My body went numb and became weightless, the existential burdens vacating with each rise and fall of the swell. Once again, I was alone and silent before God. And despite losing myself in the vastness––the overwhelming silence––of that moment, I found myself entirely. 

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Article
Culture
Digital
Freedom of Belief
1 min read

Failure to report Nigeria’s massacres reflects a wider media evolution

The new reporters and the struggle to tell the truth.

Chris Wadibia is an academic advising on faith-based challenges. His research includes political Pentecostalism, global Christianity, and development. 

A man reads a newspaper called The Punch.
Muhammad-Taha Ibrahim on Unsplash.

The large-scale slaughter of any religious group deserves robust, stubborn media coverage. Merciless persecution of Christians in Nigeria is the most overlooked and yet most newsworthy story in the country’s media landscape. This violence requires immediate and significantly expanded attention from local media. So why is it not making headlines?  

Nigeria, a charmingly vibrant and dynamic capital of the Christian world with nearly 100 million believers, is paradoxically the deadliest country in the world to be a Christian. NGO Open Doors estimates that 12 Nigerian Christians die every day because of their faith – one every two hours. Between October 2022 and September 2023, 4,118 people died in Nigeria simply for identifying as a Christian. These numbers seem more appropriate to the medieval world. The sad reality, however, is that gory, gruesome, and family-destroying violence against Christians is indeed occurring throughout contemporary Nigeria.   

Some new media voices, like Truth Nigeria courageously report on these sinister, lethal attacks. It’s a Nigeria-focussed media entity backed by Equipping the Persecuted, a US-based humanitarian non-profit organisation, devoted to exposing avoidable losses of life in Nigeria.  A disproportionate number of these nightmarish attacks deliberately target vulnerable Christians living in communities easily accessible to any of Nigeria's many Islamist terrorist sects. New media like Truth Nigeria are filling the coverage gaps created by legacy media inaction. Why are its peers in legacy media not reporting on them too?  

Who are the most trusted voices in the contemporary world? For perhaps the first time in modern history, legacy media no longer have seniority in the coliseum of global thought. Popular disenchantment with it is growing globally. Billions of people worldwide no longer perceive traditional legacy media as a trustworthy and legitimate arbiter of information.  

Few Nigeria-focused media voices (legacy or new) calculate it as in their interests to speak out against the abuses. 

A key reason for the growing disenchantment is the increasingly obvious and frustrating political capture of legacy media voices. Channels and publications were once trusted for their popularly perceived independence, objectivity, and nonpartisanship. Now those politically unbiased legacy media have become an endangered species nearing extinction.  

Such media evolution is especially pronounced in the US. An American media landscape once led by legacy media channels like CNN, ABC News, and Fox News now includes new-kid-on-the-block podcasters like Joe Rogan, Megyn Kelly, Tucker Carlson, and Candace Owens, whose shows attract millions of views and subscribers. Independent, personality-driven new media voices like these regularly outperform their legacy media counterparts, the latter of which are being increasingly deemed by critics as too establishmentarian, out of touch, and unappealing to younger viewers.     

In Nigeria, like in the US, popular public perception apprehends the relationship between media and the state to be too close for the media to operate autonomously and impartially. A relevant factor is the federal and state governments hold the lion’s share of power. They are able to shut down or severely damage the operational capacity of the media that does highlight the kleptocratic industrial complex reinforcing infamous world-leading levels of inequality. Few Nigeria-focused media voices (legacy or new) calculate it as in their interests to speak out against the abuses so entrenched in the social and historical fabrics of Nigerian society. Mass and violent persecution of Christians is perhaps the most significant of these abuses.  

Like many other countries, Nigeria has no shortage of newsworthy stories marked by great abuse and violence. However, the fact that the ongoing slaughter of Christians is taking place in one of the global capitals of Christianity, the religion most responsible for building the modern world, suggests the refusal of legacy media there to report on local massacres is driven by political factors. Ones that differentiate it from the dramatic changes in the media industry we are witnessing in countries like the US. 

Many influential media personalities in Nigeria went to Christian schools and universities, and worship in Christian churches. However, they refuse to use their positions of power to draw attention to fellow members of their global community of Christians who are violently killed every single day in the same sovereign land on which they sleep at night.   

What’s driving the reticence? 

One of the distinctive factors contributing to Nigerian legacy media reticence to cover such killings is that Nigeria is the only country in the world that is home to both world-leading numbers of Christians and Muslims. The country has the world’s sixth largest number of Christians and the world's fifth largest number of Muslims.  

Reports on killings of Christians, especially given that many Muslims also die from radical Islamist violence in Nigeria, could be perceived by viewers as religious bias fanning flames of sectarianism in a country already notorious for such violence. A second factor is that legacy media coverage of these slaughters implicates the disappointing response of Nigerian state agencies charged with maintaining security. Proud state personalities would likely react to negative media coverage of their performance by becoming even less engaged with the media.  

Either way, the Nigerian government has built for itself an infamous global reputation for being dysfunctional when trying to serve its citizens. And in contrast, only achieving a semblance of normal function when serving the interests of its kleptocrats and oligarchs. Vulnerable Christians living in regions affected by religiously motivated violence who live to see another day (unlike their less fortunate friends and family members) bear the brunt of a disinterested government and the politically captured media that fails to report it.