I leave the house today at about 7:15 with fully overcast skies.

Driving by Doheny over San Juan Creek, the water looks smooth and reflects a soft luminescent turquois sky. Did I just hear the ocean call my name?

I arrive at my favorite parking space at the Strand and I start down the stairs. I’ve got the usual pre-swim “I don’t want to get cold” jitters.

When the shore comes into view, I see the tide is pretty darn low. I can see what looks like a fishing tour boat off shore near Salt Creek point. It seems close to shore for a fishing boat but it is still well past where I swim.

No signs of the jr. guards. It’s probably too early for them to be setting up yet. However I’d say there are maybe a dozen walkers here on the beach. Regardless of the cloud cover, it’s a super serene vibe here. I’d say any time spent here right now is well worth one’s while.

When I go to set my pack down, I notice that the same rock that has been at my waist the last couple weeks is now at my knees. I get my stuff situated and head to the water.

There was a small set rolling in when I got here but looking out to the horizon right now it is as flat as can be.

I walk out further and get to a dip in the floor and now I am wading at almost chest deep. I see some larger rocks on the bottom just in front of me along with an incoming wave and I decide to dive and start swimming. Soon it gets shallow again and my finger tips brush the sandy floor.

It’s definitely not getting any warmer here. It still feels like it is in the same ball park but a touch cooler than yesterday. I find myself constantly needing to bring my attention to how my skin feels against this cold. That helps me put the cold into proper perspective and puts my body at ease and provides comfort. Still we are not even close to where we were in early April. I might as well be swimming in a sauna compared to that.

When I get to the south end of the swim, there are a lot more exposed rocks than usual. This is probably a joint venture between the low tide and calm conditions.

I keep thinking of the last couple of sermons I have heard at church. Both of them I heard yesterday - one in person and the other on YouTube. We have been going through the book of Romans. One interesting thing about romans is that it reads sort of like one of those tracts that are sometimes handed out to explain “the gospel.” It pretty much lays out the whole story of Adam and Eve’s original sin, Christ’s atonement, and how human’s can find salvation from the former because of the later.

The first couple chapters talk mostly of sin and the havoc that all wreaks and how God hates it. Most (who am I kidding, all) of the Christianity I grew up with through early adulthood read all of this literally. Probably most churches around here subscribe to this way of reading the bible. Basically the narrative is Adam and Eve disobeyed God and brought sin into the world. Sin is a bunch of stuff that is wrong and meets the judgement of God. Satan is a character that aided in this original sin and is constantly trying to get all of us to sin more. This sin must be atoned. Jesus, God’s son and also God, through the shedding of his blood on the cross provided the ultimate and final atonement for all sin.

So this was basically the topic of the last two sermons and it just leaves a very bad taste in my mouth. I left church yesterday feeling more spent than renewed and the more I thought about these topics over the day and night, the more I felt disconnected from God and the bible and just generally didn’t want anything to do with either. Reading Romans with this mindset just doesn’t make any sense to me. It feels backwards. It’s not how I look at the world. It totally feels like how a first century Jew would make sense of his world and build a spiritual cosmology to provide him a path to freedom. I don’t think Paul, the author of Romans, is an idiot or backwards. He is a product of his time and culture just like I am.

As I listen to these sermons, I feel like the subtext is, “we should all take on the mindset of Paul.” The message I am hearing is that his model of the world is the correct model and as we, a modern culture, have strayed from it, well, that just explains why these times are so gosh darn crazy and evil. If you feel otherwise, that is because Satan is leading you into a pit of lies.

One theme that I hear in these sermons is the existence of absolute truth. There is an absolute law that governs the spiritual (and physical) universe. That law is immutable. Any other teaching that is contrary like the teachings adhered to by the majority of other humans is absolutely wrong. Any teaching that does not profess the name of Jesus or expresses a different rendering of the spiritual realm is authored by Satan. Now that I have actually read many of these other teachings and have met and developed relationships with those who teach them, the idea that they are all Satan inspired is just unpalatable.

When I left the church at 20, the world opened up. This was both terrifying and liberating. I was no longer obligated to believe the teachings of the bible and my church upbringing. Everything was game for experimentation and exploration. It also meant that I had to take in the world around me an make my own decisions about right and wrong. I missed certainty so much. I missed the sense of purpose I received from believing the bible, knowing the truth and knowing how to behave in this world and how to judge the behavior of others.

Now I am coming into contact with other ideas that others claim have transformed their lives with the same amount of conviction held by my former Christian community. Well in a universe of absolute truth, someone has to be absolutely wrong. I’m looking at my old Christian life and now sensing that much that was taught there was indeed absolutely wrong. I’m also remembering holding those views myself and feeling absolutely right. So how can I now trust the absolute correctness of anything? That’s how I felt through much of my 20s and still to some degree today.

Eventually I found arguments about absolute vs. relative truth to be overly abstract and generally unhelpful. These conversations often devolve into arguing about murder and eventually even gravity and the laws of thermo dynamics. I do think even these things can be warped and bent but I don’t have the energy to really debate that. I just know that some are so convinced that such and such is the right model for reality and I know how it feels to share those beliefs. I also know that others, most others, disagree and I know how it feels to hold some of those different views.

I can’t understand why the vehicle of absolute spiritual truth would be a book. Something that not even the believers of this book can ever agree about. Something open to mis translation. Something written by authors who we can never understand what their cultural and political motivations are. A written text that could contain a form of sarcasm, innuendo and nuance that we would never catch. Imaging if our culture became lost and thousands of years in the future a bunch of our literature was found. Think of our use of “Mother Nature.” We walk around talking of Mother Nature in a very matter of fact tone but in fact no one believes in a literal Mother Nature who looks like the art we use to depict her. Most do believe in Mother Nature but with a small ‘b’.

Well that was a tangent! Anyways I just can’t seem to reason with these evangelical viewpoints and I honestly don’t even want to. It’s exhausting.

After my swim I walk up the stairs and hear the sound of the birds around me. I close my eyes and try to find a center in those sounds. They are a soothing balm to the dissonance in my head. If anything is absolute, if anything is true, it is the sound of these birds.

And the army of jr. lifeguards coming down the stairs that seem to compose a single chaotic organism unconcerned with the fate of anyone in their path.