Faith Hope & Fiction

By Adrian Rosenfeldt

Author’s Note: Pambula is a small beach town in Australia, on the far south coast of New South Wales, and Lorne is located on Victoria’s Great Ocean Road.

            Pelicans and seagulls circled overhead, their white feathers shimmering in the bright morning sunlight. As I made my way through the ocean, a lot farther offshore than I should have ventured, I was struck by the clarity of my perception. That’s when I knew, with unsettling certainty, that none of this would change if I stopped swimming. Nature was indifferent to my fate. I would simply be absorbed into something larger than myself. This, I realised, is how people die.

            It was just a few months ago. While visiting my sister in Pambula, I went swimming in a wide inlet leading into the ocean. Realizing that I’d gone farther than I should have, I tried to turn back, but I was swimming against the current. My progress was negligible, almost illusory. My body began to gently convulse. The water was colder than expected and I wasn’t wearing a wetsuit.

            After more than an hour-and-a-half swimming, with the shore still a long way off, it became clear that I was in trouble. I kept swimming, turning in the direction of a small fishing boat and a few figures on paddleboards in the distance.

            With a great deal of effort, I was able to swim over to two young girls on a paddleboard. I swallowed my pride and asked them for help—my voice was shaky and unclear. They were also struggling against the current and the wind but were slowly able to paddle me back to the shore.

            Standing on the beach, I shook uncontrollably. One of the girls offered to walk me back to my towel. I was grateful, but reluctant to impose further. And so I sat alone in the sun, trying to warm myself. My throat felt constricted. I felt like I was swallowing the air, rather than breathing normally. A man nearby noticed that I was shaking and offered to buy me a coffee.

            Gratefully, I accepted it. I drank the coffee, waiting for my shaking to subside, then sat in my hot car. Finally, I drove slowly back to my sister’s house.

            My parents, who were also visiting, were concerned. But, since I had survived, they also expressed some amusement and a total lack of surprise. “You always do everything to the extreme,” they said. I brushed this off, as I had many times before.

            What I had experienced in Pambula did not sit easily with how we usually think of summer holidays. In our wider culture, summer is regarded as a time of rest and recuperation: a chance to reconnect with family, escape routine, and recover from work. Danger is treated as an anomaly to be managed—or, preferably for most people, something to be avoided by simply remaining safe.

            Yet in Australia, summer arrives with shark alerts, heat advisories, expert interviews, and the familiar injunction to “be safe this summer.” None of this is irrational, and much of it is responsible—thanks to this seasonal culture of safety and its language of vigilance.

            As creatures shaped by evolution, we recognise real threats, such as cold water and predators. When fear loses its object, however, it begins to disperse through everyday life as ambient anxiety. It is perhaps no coincidence that even amid unprecedented security, the use of anti-anxiety medication has risen steeply.

            To make better sense of this, I turn to Sigmund Freud, who introduced one of the most unsettling ideas of modern thought: the death drive. Freud proposed that human beings are not motivated solely by pleasure, survival, or self-preservation, but are also drawn toward destruction and death. He pushed this idea to its most disturbing conclusion, writing that “the aim of all life is death.”

            Freud was not suggesting that people consciously wish for death, but that they are unconsciously trying to escape the difficulty and intensity of living. This unconscious pursuit generates anxiety and with it a desire for relief, a pull toward non-being: an imagined state in which striving, risk, and desire might finally cease.

            Friedrich Nietzsche helps illuminate what is lost when this impulse toward safety dominates. He argued that flourishing cultures are held together by two forces: the Apollonian and the Dionysian. The Apollonian is associated with form, structure and control, including rules, procedures and lifeguards. It creates piers and pathways that make life navigable, and favours art that prizes clarity, proportion and idealised form.

            But this is only half the picture. Beneath the pier lies the Dionysian realm of danger and dissolution. This is where sharks lurk, and life and art reveal their indifference to human designs. Nietzsche contended that modern Western culture has become dangerously one-sided, clinging to Apollonian order while denying the Dionysian forces on which it rests.

            The Dionysian is not merely destructive or terrifying. It is also life-giving and creative: the source of renewal, transformation and vitality, the force through which rigid forms are broken apart so that new meaning can emerge. Nietzsche believed that cultures must periodically return to this Dionysian realm if they are to remain alive and healthy rather than safe, orderly and repressed, unwilling to confront the death drive.

            This tension Freud and Nietzsche describe is not abstract for me. When my parents said my near drowning didn’t surprise them, they were speaking from long familiarity.

            For more than two decades, I have taken part in the summer tradition of swimming from the Lorne pier back to the pub on the foreshore. Although this swim is associated with a public event, I developed my own version of it, which over time has acquired a fixed sequence.

            The day must be exceptionally hot. The drive must follow the same route, stopping at a particular service station where I buy iced coffee and an apple cake. As I drive along the Ocean Road, I play the same Beach Boys music, from 1962 to 1972. The same 1.2-kilometre barefoot walk to the pier precedes the pier-to-pub swim, which I do regardless of conditions. Afterwards, I walk up the same mountain path, swim in a rockpool, eat fish and chips on the beach, and drive home in the dark.

            On one such day a few years ago, I found myself in a position where I should have avoided the swim altogether, and yet it did not feel right to do so. I walked to the end of the Lorne pier in 100-degree heat. I was preparing to jump when an elderly Greek man fishing nearby said casually, “Saw a great white shark here early this morning.”

            Nodding, I thanked him and walked back and forth along the pier, trying to think. It would be foolish to swim now. But I had driven all this way. It was oppressively hot. Perhaps the shark had been attracted by bait earlier in the day. Perhaps it was gone.

            Before fully realising it, I was in the water. It was shockingly cold. I swam away from the pier, occasionally glancing over my shoulder, aware of how absurdly exposed I was. If I saw a fin, there would be little I could do. And I was wearing red bathers. The colour of blood.

            Despite my trepidation, I could not help but take in the disarmingly beautiful scene all around me. The water was emerald. The sky was azure. The green hills behind Lorne shimmered in the heat. When I finally reached the shallows and passed through the breaking surf, I felt an overwhelming sense of elation.

            I was alive.

            As I reflect on these experiences, I have to ask myself: Why did I place myself in danger at Lorne? How had I found myself in such a predicament at Pambula?

            Stephen Lyng describes modern risk seeking as “edgework”: voluntary encounters with real danger that restore a sense of agency in environments otherwise governed by risk-management and expert mediation. These experiences are not driven by a wish for annihilation, but by a desire to feel fully present and alive at the edge of danger, where the body becomes intensely alert. In this sense, encounters with risk can function as a form of ritual, a way of returning to the world as something immediate rather than abstract.

            This was not always the case. For almost two thousand years, Western culture relied on a symbol capable of holding these tensions in check: the crucifix. At the centre of public rituals, churches, and shared moral imagination, this symbol did not deny danger, suffering, or terror, but placed them at the heart of human existence. Death was not bypassed but endured, and life emerged not despite suffering but through it.

            Only recently have I recognised that each summer at Lorne, and more recently at Pambula, I am taking part in such a ritual: a repeated, carefully structured encounter with a dangerous, unpredictable, and unforgiving ocean. The water remains cold. The currents remain real. What moves beneath the surface does not disappear simply because we build piers above it.

            Perhaps the deeper purpose of summer was never simply rest or recuperation, but the chance to take part in a ritual that helps us to feel dangerously alive. To deliberately engage in a difficult and disorienting situation is to return renewed rather than diminished, reminded of what life demands of us as both material and spiritual beings.

Dr Adrian Rosenfeldt is a writer and academic based in Melbourne, Australia. He teaches at the University of Melbourne and has written widely on culture, spirituality, and contemporary society. Adrian writes articles and hosts podcast conversations exploring spirituality and contemporary cultural life. His work is available at https://about.me/arosenfeldt

Adrian is also the author of the book, The God Debaters (2022). 

_{Note: The photo used to illustrate this essay was originally of a harbor seal off the U.S. West Coast. The picture has been intentionally changed using AI to create the image of a shark.}