The Duck
Donald Babcock
Now we're ready to look at something pretty special. It's a duck, riding the ocean a hundred feet beyond the surf. No it isn't a gull. A gull always has a raucous touch about him. This is some sort of duck, and he cuddles in the swells.
He isn't cold, and he is thinking things over. There is a big heaving in the Atlantic, and he is a part of it.
He looks a bit like a mandarin, or the Lord Buddha meditating under the Bo tree.
But he has hardly enough above the eyes to be a philosopher. He has poise, however, which is what philosophers must have.
He can rest while the Atlantic heaves, because he rests in the Atlantic.
Probably he doesn't know how large the ocean is. And neither do you. But he realizes it.
And what does he do, I ask you? He sits down in it! He reposes in the immediate as if it were infinity - which it is. He has made himself a part of the boundless by easing himself into [it] just where it touches him.
I like the duck. He doesn't know much, but he's got religion.
Homily
Those of you who worship in churches that follow the weekly lectionary cycle will remember that the gospel reading this past Sunday was Mark's account of John baptizing his cousin, Jesus, into the Jordan River. (The Greek text emphatically says ‘into,' not just ‘in' the river).
So Jesus was plunged into the Jordan:
And just as he was coming up out of the water, he saw the heavens torn apart and the Spirit descending like a dove upon him: And a voice came from heaven, "You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased."
Mark is in a hurry to get Jesus out of the water and onto dry land - really dry land, it turns out -- so he doesn't elaborate on the scene, but of course, later Christian tradition developed a rich array of images depicting this very moment. Piero della Francesca's famous 15th century painting, e.g., shows Jesus standing prayerfully on the dry river bottom, the waters of the Jordan having reverently receded, while John discretely dribbles a little bit of water from a dish over his head. In my own fantasy-picture, I imagine Jesus bursting up from the depths in a cloud of bubbles, snorting and splashing, strands of wet, curly hair plastered on his cheeks, eyes wide and blinking in amazement. And then - in my imagination, at least -- he swims to shore, gliding gracefully, powerfully, propelled on his journey by the very buoyancy of the river's water. After all, Jesus did seem to be quite at home around water: near it, on it - why not in it?
The Babylonian Talmud, which is several centuries later than Jesus, but which no doubt preserves some authentic ancient traditions, gives a list of those things which a Jewish father was obligated to provide for his son, namely: to circumcise him, to redeem him if he is a first born, to teach him Torah, to find him a wife, and to teach him a trade. Others added: to teach him how to swim.... And what is the reason for that, one rabbi inquired. The answer: his life may depend on it."
I have been asked to speak today on the topic of faith, and to make it personal, not academic. That's an appropriate assignment, because faith, like learning to swim, is a practical matter. And there is a sense in which our life does depend on it, a sense that is well conveyed in a little story often told about Nasrudin, the sacred fool of Turkish tradition.
Nasrudin, it seems, was ferrying a religious scholar across a piece of rough water, and in the course of their conversation he said something ungrammatical. 'Have you never studied grammar? scolded the professor.
‘No,' admitted Nasrudin.
'Then half of your life has been wasted.'
A few minutes later Nasrudin turned to his passenger. 'Have you ever learned to swim?'
'No. Why do you ask?'
'Then all of your life is wasted, for we are sinking!'
Faith is a preeminently practical matter, a lived experience rather than a set of doctrines or beliefs, however logically watertight and sophisticated those intellectual structures may be.
I grew up in northern Minnesota, on the shore of Lake Superior, which is way too cold for swimming, so I didn't pick up this skill until relatively late in my childhood, and then it was not my father who taught me, but my cousin, Guy, who was about my same age. I was staying with his family for a week one summer when I was about eight or nine years old. They lived near one of Minnesota's ten thousand lakes, a relatively shallow one that warmed up to a tolerable temperature for a brief period in the middle of the summer. The town where my cousin lived had a municipal beach, with a large dock extending into the water, shaped like a capital ‘H.' The enclosed area nearest to the shore was for ‘minnows' like me, and the area out beyond the horizontal crossing-dock was for those more advanced swimmers, like Guy. The rule at this beach, though, was that everyone had to swim with a buddy. Every so often the lifeguards would blow their whistles, which meant that you had to quickly locate your partner and join hands overhead so you could be counted. If you got separated, and couldn't link hands within thirty seconds or so, you were banished to dry land for a period of time. So Guy and I were going to be buddies. As we were walking across the middle dock, I confessed to him that I didn't really know how to swim. Now, do you think that my cousin volunteered to splash around in the shallows with me? No, he simply pushed me off the dock into the water on the deep side, which was well over my head. I came up in a panic, choking, sputtering, a terrible wet burning sensation in my nose. I flailed away in a desperate dog-paddle, trying blindly to find the edge of the dock. I spent the rest of the afternoon clinging to that dock, making brief, experimental forays out into the water, never more than an arm's length from safety.
It took me a long time to get over this "baptism." Of course, I did eventually learn to swim in my junior high gym class. That is, I learned to propel myself with great effort and determination across the surface of the water from point A to point B. As long as I kept moving, like a hungry shark, I was ok. But I never really learned to trust the process, and I certainly didn't enjoy it!
Many years later - long after I had learned to swim by sheer force of will - I finally learned how to float by a willingness to surrender, by a sheer act of faith, or rather, a gift of faith. I was attending a meeting of my denomination's Continental Young Adult and Campus Ministry Working Group, of which I was the chair. At the end of a long day of work, we all retired to the conference center's swimming pool to relax. One of the young adults in attendance was a water safety instructor, and when I told her that -- perhaps as a result of my early traumatic experience -- I couldn't float, she took me on as a special challenge. We wouldn't get out of the pool, she insisted, until she had proved to me that I could float. So we stayed there, long after all the others had left, chest deep in the tepid water, and practiced. Patiently, she tipped me back, again and again, into the pool, supporting my head with one hand, pressing the fleshy blade of her other hand up against the small of my back, lifting me gently and then letting go. Slowly, surely, I would begin to sink, feet first, until I was standing on the bottom. "See?" I would say, "I'm like a rock." "Try again," she would gently insist, "just relax. Spread your arms, relax your knees, and let your ankles drop." "Drop my ankles?" That didn't sound right. But although, like the duck bobbing on the Atlantic, I couldn't understand, I finally began to realize how it worked. I was willing to trust, not only my instructor, but to trust the elemental power of the water itself. And so, at that moment when I finally allowed myself to surrender, to "ease myself into the boundless, just where it touched me" and held me and lifted me up, I was able to float.
Faith, for me, is like that. ...it is a bodily disposition toward the whole of life. Before it ever reaches the level of articulated doctrine or belief, faith is simply - ah, simply! - the experience of radical trust in that which is profoundly, ultimately real. Faith is first and foremost an existential attitude. It is the ever-renewed willingness to trust, the continual surrender into the boundless and infinitely buoyant wave of the present moment, just where it touches us.
Let me close with a poem by the Hanover native, former Dartmouth student and professor, Philip Booth -- a poem which expresses this experience as well as anything I know, and better than anything I can say. Entitled, First Lesson, it is set in his adopted hometown of Castine, Maine, where he taught his daughter how to swim:
Lie back daughter, let your head
be tipped back in the cup of my hand.
Gently, and I will hold you. Spread
your arms wide, lie out on the stream
and look high at the gulls. A dead-
man's float is face down. You will dive
and swim soon enough where this tidewater
ebbs to the sea. Daughter, believe
me, when you tire on the long thrash
to your island, lie up, and survive.
As you float now, where I held you
and let go, remember when fear
cramps your heart what I told you;
lie gently and wide to the light-year
stars, lie back, and the sea will hold you.
