Monday, August 7, 2017

What Swimming Taught Me About the Spiritual Life: Part 1

“Let It Be Done to Me as You Have Said”
Competitive Swimming and Holy Obedience

#betyoudidn'tevenknow
thiswasathing
Over the course of my lifetime, I’ve worn many hats. Currently I’m working towards a beretta. (After all, nothing says manliness quite like a clerical pompom.) I’ve done everything from picking up after dogs on a beach as a lifeguard, to playing the piano in a hotel, to teaching high school in Yonkers, New York. In stark contrast (or perhaps not so stark) to my current pious occupation as a seminarian, I was once a swim coach, and before that a swimmer. I coached the Roosevelt High School swim team in the Bronx for three years and spent a year coaching the younger age groups (6-11 years old) at Coastal Maine Aquatics. I spent ten years as a competitive swimmer myself.

See? Told you I was a swim coach.
For those of you not familiar with the swimming world, that means from the age of eight to eighteen, I was in the pool five to six days of the week for two hours a day, eleven months out of the year. It was a significant part of my life. With the chlorine fumes finally out of my system and my hair finally turned back to its original dark color after the pool turned it blond (my mother didn’t recognize me when it first happened), I’m able to reflect on the lessons I learned in the pool. What is fascinating is that I am now realizing just how much swimming taught me about the spiritual life.

For those of you who swam with me or perhaps are swimmers yourselves. You might be tempted to scoff at this and blame it on lost brain cells from the chlorine fumes. Swim practice is not the most contemplative environment nor are the conversations that occur amongst teammates often the most edifying (those who swam with me know just what an understatement that is…) I grant all that. Even a week ago, I would have been shocked that I was ever writing such an article. But hear me out. I think you’ll agree that there are definite lessons that carry over.

The first I would like to discuss is the lesson I learned in obedience.

Yeah, more rolls than that.
When I started swimming, I was a porky little eight-year-old. Frankly I was a porky little nine-year-old too. And a porky little ten-year-old when I stop to think about it. I had more rolls than an Italian bakery. Come to think of it, this fact might have been the motivating factor when my mom called me in from playing with the neighbors and told me I was joining a swim team. Twenty minutes after that announcement, I was in the pool at my first swim practice…

For first few years of swimming, I wasn’t all that fast. I was basically in the middle of the pack for my age group, but I certainly wasn’t breaking any records and I didn’t expect to any time soon. Consequently, it was a big shock to me when at age eleven I did break a record. It was the state age group record for the 11-12 400 long course meter freestyle. It was a long course record (50-meter pool) and there are no long course pools in the state of Maine, so it wasn’t the most competitive record on the books. But still, this was the first of several state age group records that I would break over the course of my swim career, and it made me stop, step back and wonder, “How did I get here?”

The truth was, I wasn’t doing anything extraordinary with my training. Some of my teammates would work out on their own, go for runs outside swim practice, and do crunches every day when they got up. Porky ten-year-old me wasn’t about to do any of that. The extras that I associated with top notch swimmers weren’t part of my routine. So how did I suddenly get so fast? The truth was, I got fast by simply doing what my coach told me.

Slackers..
This is a bigger deal than it sounds and those of you who have been involved with sports know that. When the coach gives a set, you could respond in a number of ways. You could whine about it and demand an easier workout. You could complete the yardage but slack on your technique or not do the drills you’re supposed to. You could feign a cramp and get out of at least fifty yards. Or if the coach isn’t looking, you just make a U-turn in the middle of the pool and 25 yards are automatically cut out of whatever it was you had to do.

All this stuff went on and I can’t say I was never guilty of any of it. But at that age, I basically did what my coach asked me to do. If the set was hard, I did it anyway. If they asked me to change my stroke up, I tried to do it (with varying degrees of success mind you.) Not surprisingly, just by showing up to practice and doing what I was told, I got to be good at swimming. It was as simple as that.

If saying yes to what your coach asks of you makes you a better athlete, then you can imagine how choosing to always say yes to what God asks of you makes you a better Christian. If holiness is what you’re shooting for (and you should be since that’s what a happy, fulfilling life looks like) then all you have to do is just keep saying yes to God. It is no more complicated than that.

"Let it be done unto me as you
have said." - Luke 1:38
Of course, just as you won’t always like the advice your coach gives you, so too you probably won’t always like what God asks of you. It might require some sort of sacrifice, it may not be what you had planned on, it might even just be that it was His idea and not yours and so that’s why you don’t like it. Whatever it might be, saying “yes” can be tough.

In my own life, I could make a laundry list of things God has asked me to say yes to. Some of them were easier than others. Spending more time with Him in the Eucharist took some discipline but was pretty easy once I realized who it was who was in that tabernacle. Letting go of my ambitions and saying yes to a life of poverty, chastity and obedience was more difficult. When I saw that God completely paved (and paid…) my way to attend Fordham University, it was pretty easy to say yes to that. Saying yes to fasting on Fridays during Lent was more difficult. (Gluttony is my specialty vice…) Whether it meant more time in prayer, giving up some sort of vice or sin, or going to places that would stretch me and help me grow, all I had to do at each stage was just keep saying yes to Him. In time, I would become a humbler, more loving servant of God.

"Yes coach, right away coach, absolutely coach."
So as with your coach, you don’t have to do the creative thinking yourself. Your job is just to keep saying yes to Him. If you do that, He knows where you need to grow, He knows what will make you stronger, He knows what in the end will make you thrive and how He can use you best for the good of the team (i.e. the Church universal.) Your only job is to keep saying yes to Him.


More reflections on the spiritual lessons you can learn in the pool will be forthcoming, as soon as I get a chance to write them. Until then, practice hard and pray harder!

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