Paddleboarding Over the Face of the Deep

I’ve been paddleboarding a lot this summer. With the combination of oppressive desert heat and the ever-present need for social distance, paddleboarding fills a lot of needs. In the mornings or evenings, I’ll strap my board to the top of my car and drive into the mountains to find a body of water. Depending on how long I intend to be, I’ll dutifully pack a drybag with snacks, my water bottle, and a hat. Otherwise, I really just need my body, the board, and deep waters.

While I love hiking through red rock deserts, mountains, and forests, where my heart truly lies is in water. When I was a kid, I remember standing on a chair, perched at the sink with the water running over spoons and utensils, watching how it would flow this way and that. I would run my trucks through puddles and generally not care about getting wet and muddy. And during the summer I would spend nearly every day at the local water park with friends. In a lot of ways, my life has been defined by my relationship to water.

When I arrive at my paddle location, I unstrap my board and carry it and my gear down to the shore. I throw my phone and keys into the drybag and clip it to the bungee straps at the nose of the board. Kneeling down, I push off with my paddle into deeper waters.

In the opening moments of Creation, after God has set his intention to create Heaven and Earth, he pauses for a moment before allowing light to flood the universe. Genesis 1:2 says that “darkness was upon the face of the deep, and the spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.” Before there was light, before there was Earth, before there were animals or people — God pushed off into deep waters — caught between the known world and the mystery of the abyssal deep.

What is this primordial ocean that God broods over? It isn’t until day three of Creation that seas and oceans appear. No, these waters are not the oceans as we know them. But perhaps something less organized, more chaotic, and wild in nature. Before speaking a degree of order to the universe, God breathed in mysterious wildness and meditated over chaotic, unorganized darkness.

Our inclination as humans is to be afraid of what lies just outside our field of view in the dark. As children, our most base fear is to be afraid of the dark. And how many of us, as adults, won’t wander too aimlessly into basements or caves without flutters of anxiety? Inside the archetypal darkness are the unknown mysteries of both the inner and outer worlds.

Every time I slide out onto glassy waters, I peer down as far as the sunlight will penetrate. Utah’s reservoirs and lakes get a lot of sunlight and so harbor a whole world of algae that obscures this light. Meaning you can’t ever see more than a few feet into the water before you’re peering into liquid emerald-darkness. I know that the only thing swimming in these waters are fish, crawfish, and waterbugs. But, as I paddle over abyssal waters, I will often give pause to the small flutters in my stomach. Our imaginations populate such places with Leviathans, Behemoths, and unknowable monsters.

In the book of Job, God describes such a Leviathan. “His teeth are terrible round about…his scales are his pride…his eyes are like the eyelids of the morning. Out of his mouth go burning lamps, and sparks of fire leap out. Out of his nostrils goeth smoke…as a seething cauldron. His breath kindleth coals, and a fire goes out of his mouth… When he rises himself up the mighty are afraid… He esteemeth iron as straw, and brass as rotten wood… Darts are counted as stubble, and he laugheth at the shaking of a spear… He maketh the deep to boil… Upon the Earth there is [none like him].”

These words are enough to conjure and justify any fear of the deep waters that the Leviathan is king over. But God describes himself as playing with the Leviathan as if it were a bird. That is powerful imagery. Envision it — God playing with and delighting in the presence of the embodiment of our shadowy abyssal fears. It is wildly disarming.

I think a lot of us struggle believing that God is inherently good and on our side. One of the fears I’ve encountered often in conversations with friends is that moment of meeting God. Their scrupulous obedience is a response to their fear of God, the Great and Terrible, finally turning his eye towards them and weighing their hearts. With white knuckles, they fight to earn God’s approval because, ultimately and whether they admit it or not, they believe God can’t love them and their mortal shadows.

And all of us have these shadows. Inside the dark places of our hearts lie our sin, our resentments, our wounds, and our deep sadness. Shame envelops the whole of it and blinds us to transformative faith and compassionate healing. But what this shame does is prevent us from believing that God is on our side. That when God’s eyes turn towards us, they will display utter disapproval. This shameful fear is corrosive to saving faith.

But that is not the God we have. Obviously, the image of God hovering over the dark abyssal deeps playing with Leviathans displays God’s power with Creation. But more importantly, I think that image speaks to God’s character and temperament towards monstrosities, darkness, and shadows. Not only is God fearless before the deep, but he’s also lovingly playful. I’ve learned that one of God’s superpowers is the integration and inclusion of things we might find frightening or abhorrent. It is no surprise then that we find Jesus among lepers, prostitutes, and those outcast by society. God works from within what we might classify as shadow to both heal and reintegrate the soul.

Is it any wonder that the most repeated phrase in the entirety of the Bible is “Be Not Afraid”? Somewhat miraculously, it appears 365 times, as if God knew we needed to be reminded every day of the year not to be afraid of him or the shadowy deep. While our shadow selves might scare us, God plays with the denizens of the deep as though they were birds. It is good to remember, as Richard Rohr says, “the separate self is the problem, not the shadow self.” At-one-ment, the reintegration of separated parties, the unifying of light and dark is what God is up to in this universe. And we can trust that.

Recently I went paddleboarding with a friend and was shown my shadow. In a previous interaction, I had unintentionally made her feel small and invalidated and didn’t realize it. I existed in a world where I saw myself as a friend who can create safe spaces for those in my life who are experiencing their own rough waters. And it’s not that this isn’t true, but my attachment to that story blinds me to the genuine relational moments in my life where that story is not true. My blindness to the pain I may unintentionally cause creates my shadow — the stuff about me that is hard to see and accept about myself.

During our conversation while paddling across cold abyssal waters, she steered me over the face of the deep —  my deep. With incredible compassion and gentleness, my friend peeled back my story and revealed to me the Leviathan that swims in my deep shadow.

Seeing your shadow is a lot of things. It is simultaneously embarrassing, saddening, and anger-inducing. Embarrassing because its a lot like being told you have a piece of food in your teeth. Saddening because I saw how I had in fact hurt my friend which is something I never want to do. And this friend has experienced a lot of grief in her life and I had become an ingredient in it — my nightmare. And obviously angering, but angering at myself for not being wiser, more self-aware.

These negative-dark emotions feel as though they well up from the dark abyss of the heart. They are both icy cold and fiery hot. In clumsier hands, I might have refused to recognize that I had misstepped and dug myself further into my story and further inflicted pain on my friend, driving us apart.

Instead, I cried. I was so embarrassed. And so sorry.

But in a real-life reenactment of God hovering over the face of the deep, my friend took my darkness and drew light out of it. With compassion, she took my shadowy Leviathan and helped me integrate it into my waking life. She had no spite, malice, or resentment, which again would have further driven us apart and created more pain. Over and over, she reassured me that it was ok. Wiping tears from my eyes, she sat with me and my shadow until I was at peace.

Then all those negative dark emotions were slowly washed away and replaced with love and admiration for my friend. The shock of pain had woken me up to my story and carved out space in my heart that filled with an onrushing love. Instead of separateness and dividing relational wedges, our relationship was brought together and mended — made one again.

Magic happens on every body of water, every night. Right as the sun dips below the horizon and the Earth’s shadow overtakes the lake, the water reflects the sky, still luminous with the sun’s light. The water calms as the wind dies and softens as it retains heat from the day. Silently paddling around sandy shorelines and across glassy bays, this is a sacred moment. A small but significant reenactment of the moments just before Light flooded the universe. Plunging my paddle into the water and pushing myself onwards, hovering over the face of my shadowy deep. I see silent movement below my board as the Leviathan in my shadow playfully twirls in the depths. I have no fear, only love as I strive to be whole — caught between the luminous sky above and the abyssal darkness below. Slowly, I make my way to shore.

The Biblical reenactment ends because I smell like a lake and need a shower before I get into bed.