I got a chance to swim in a private swimming pool recently, which was a real treat. And with the pool all to myself and no way to be seen, I could feel free to see if I even remembered how to do the butterfly. This is a fabulous stroke, and when Olympic swimmers do it, there’s something joyous about seeing them rise out the water, swing their arms forward and then flip the rest of their body back into the water as nimbly as a dolphin. I was pleased to find that I can still recall the tricky rhythm that goes into it. But the muscles to make it happen for any length of time were gone. And dabbling in the pool, thinking about the many people I know who are trying to get by right now, there seemed like a bit of a metaphor in figuring out if we’re swimming along or not.

Because of course, we don’t have to swim. We can choose to sink. This choice favors nature and natural laws the most — gravity will take its toll on an inert body, and we’ll simply drown. Not many make that choice, but some do.

Most try not to sink, but how they accomplish that can make a difference. It takes more muscles, more precision and some level of experience or instruction to swim efficiently. When I was 11 and learning how to swim the butterfly on swim team, I couldn’t get the rhythm of it down and did my own imitation, which consisted of splashing my arms out and down and kicking with my feet at the same time. It was an inelegant solution, but it did actually allow me to get from one side of the pool to the other. Competing against the other 11-year-olds, I didn’t fare too badly. And even after I learned how to do the moves in the right order (arms first, kick to propel you out of the water again), I tended to revert back to my panicky version when I’d get tired or when I was falling behind in a race.

It takes more muscles to do things correctly. It takes more intelligence, and it takes more nerve. When you’re lacking any of those three, you can do the stroke that just gets you from one side of the pool to the other. I see it in how I do my work for the day (or don’t), how I keep up my spiritual struggle (or don’t). Sometimes, it takes all I’ve got even to do that. But there’s a law at work, something I sum up by telling myself “If you don’t run the house, the house will run you.” If I let things go, cut every corner, say shorter prayers, eat whatever I can grab, pay no attention to my personal problem areas, it might feel like I’m keeping my head above water. But I’m also giving away energy and intelligence, and they’re hard to get back.

And to make it even harder, going through this life isn’t really like swimming in a pool, it’s like swimming in a river or ocean. All the time you’re reacting to the element of the water, there are other elements working either for you or against you. The currents and tides might take you where you want or where you don’t. A person who’d think they were going to swim some beautiful stroke like the butterfly in the ocean would be an idiot — you need to find something you can sustain, something that may not look that good but also doesn’t waste energy. You still need muscles, intelligence and nerve. The resultant hybrid might not look like anything that would win an Olympic medal, but the stakes in this event is quite a bit higher.

There is a fourth option, I believe, but it’s not in our control. We can be carried. It’s rather like the “Footprints in the Sand” poem that showed up on way too many greeting cards in the ’80s. But I think it became a cliche because there was truth in it. At the very worst of times, God carries you. When we feel like we’re going down, we all want that to happen, but it’s not for us to say.

When we’re swimming, there’s only one way to do it — you keep your eye on a focal point and don’t look away, not if you get tossed, not if you want to see how far you’ve come. You keep your eye on Jesus Christ as Peter did when he walked on the waves, or else you sink as Peter did when he feared the tempest.

That’s trite-sounding. It just happens to be true. And we’re lucky as Orthodox, because our worship services give us more than enough to ponder if we want to enter more deeply into faith. For instance, below are the words to a troparion that we’ll all hear tomorrow; most of us won’t even hear it. What would our days be like if we really considered the words to the services?

Well, I don’t know whether our stroke would be elegant or clumsy, efficient or inefficent. But we wouldn’t be sinking, that’s for sure.

Troparion of the Resurrection, Tone 4

Having learned the joyful message

Of the resurrection from the angel,

The women disciples of the Lord

Cast from them their parental condemnation,

And proudly broke the news to the disciples, saying,

“Death hath been spoiled! Christ God is risen,

Granting the world great mercy!”