Shed the Wetsuit

The Gulf Coast took a moment in silent prayer over the last week. The water temperature is back over 70 degrees. For all the non-surfers; this is huge. The last few months have been a harrowing ordeal of swimming around in frigid water in skin-tight neoprene looking like something in between a B-movie Space Ranger and one of those yoga instructors that wear the unitards. Well, as of this week, they go back into storage until December.

Wetsuit, wetsuit, why do hate you so? You are tight and uncomfortable. You are constricting and have a seam in all the wrong places. You fill your cells with frigid water that no only sucks the life from me so that my body hovers 1/2 a degree from hypothermia, but you also add several pounds of dead weight and at my age it ALL counts.

However, it's more than that. Shedding the wetsuit is more than getting rid of a piece of uncomfortable clothing. It's the shedding of a false self. It is getting rid of a man-made skin that separates you from fully engaging the wave. Essentially, it's a barrier. There is nothing like the feeling of a wave washing over bare skin. There is nothing like the feeling of the warm sun on your shoulders after being washed by cool water. And there is also nothing like the feeling of the salt rubbing on your slightly sunburned back, and you know it absolutely worth it.

The wetsuit is our ego. It is a barrier, a false barrier, that prevents us from true intimacy with the wave. Our ego is false self that acts as a barrier to true intimacy with God and each other. Just as the wetsuit is a self-imposed isolation that keeps the water out (and keeps us stewing in our own filth), so does our ego isolate us from true surrender to the love of God and the love that we are called to extend to each of our brothers and sisters. So long as we insist on presenting a false self to the world we can never actually find intimacy with another person, we aren't really invested. We are always holding something back.

This Lent, my challenge to myself is to shed the spiritual wetsuit. My goal is remove the barriers that I have set up to protect a fragile ego that really isn't worth protecting. The potential is to be an walking, talking, moving, breathing manifestation of the Love of God. The reality is that so long as I cling to my ego I am only a manifestation of love of myself.