No Escaping H2O

It was one of those literary works dubbed "classics" that high-school students in my day were required to read and study, even though we ourselves would never have chosen it for our reading entertainment.  It was the exotic, multi-page poem "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" by Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834).  Even today, literary critics recognize Coleridge as having been one of the most insightful minds of his time.

The dead albatross hangs from the mariner's neck.

We high-schoolers, knowing we could not escape from the Ancient-Mariner poem, set our minds to finding some intriguing elements in that famous literary work.  We latched onto the bizarre plot development of the sailor in the poem having a dead albatross hung around his neck as a punishment.  We tried to enjoy Coleridge's rhythm and alliteration in some of the stanzas we memorized. For example, here is the description of the plight of the thirsty sailors when their sailing-ship becomes stranded on a windless ocean of undrinkable saltwater, the boards of the ship's deck even shrinking under the hot sun:

              "Water, water everywhere,
           And all the boards did shrink;
               Water, water everywhere
                 Nor any drop to drink."

Those lines popped into my head when I was reflecting upon some of the disturbing news events during the summer of 2022.  In Kentucky, freak floods occurred day after day, killing many.  At the same time, in the southwest of the U.S., the level of the Colorado River -- which several states depended upon for water -- had reached a record low.  Affected by climate change, the news about water was either "too much" or "too little."

There thus has been no escape from being concerned about water.  Even astronomers were searching for signs of it on far-off planets as evidence of the possibility of life elsewhere than on Earth.  Along with biologists, astronomers know that the common denominator of all forms of life we know about is water -- that remarkable liquid formed when atoms of the gas hydrogen and the gas oxygen bond together.

The common interest in water during the summer of 2022 (from the people of Kentucky to those living in the Southwest to even astronomers) was a contrast to most of the sentiments expressed publicly during that year.  More common had been polarized views that suggested that half of the population of people in the U.S. had nothing at all in common with the other half.  But water -- in some way -- became a common concern

Mariner shoots
the  albatross
with his crossbow

Why had the mariner's ship become stymied on a windless ocean?  The answer goes back to why that albatross had been hung around the mariner's neck as a punishment.  He had, for no reason, recklessly shot that great white bird that had been accompanying the ship for several days "for food or play."  The mariner had disregarded the fact that the presence of an albatross had traditionally been considered by sailors to be a good omen.  The poem suggests that there are moral laws to the universe that set limits which humans cannot pass without ensuing consequences.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge wrote at a time when poetry tended to moralize more than it does today.  Nevertheless, if he were writing his tale of the mariner today, I would hope he would still include in its final stanzas another set of lines we memorized in high school. 
They go like this:

"He prayeth well, who loveth well

Both man and bird and beast.

He prayeth best, who loveth best

All things both great and small;

For the dear God who loveth us,

He made and loveth all."

~ ~ ~

(Do any of the lines of Coleridge spark any thoughts or feelings in you?)

(All quotations are from Coleridge's "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner"
 taken from The Norton Anthology of English Literature, edited by M.H. Abrams, et al., ©1968.)
(Both pictures are in the public domain.)

Knowing Water

All of us have known water since before our earliest memories of anything.  Maybe that first taste of water was from a nippled bottle, maybe from a small cup.  But we encountered water long before we could have thought about it.  Water is basic.

Despite its being so basic, there are many ways that we know water.  Thus there are many ways -- all valid -- of answering the question, "What is water?"  And they demonstrate the variety of ways we know this world.

On a beginning chemistry exam, if I am asked what water is, I know to answer that water is composed of two atoms of hydrogen and one atom of oxygen -- H2O.  I understand water chemically as I understand that formula, along with knowing what a molecule is.  But that is a very abstract type of knowledge.  Long before modern chemistry, humans knew what water is when they were refreshed by drinking it or bathing with it.

Writers of the Bible knew those immediate ways of knowing water.  They also knew how those ways of knowing water are not confined to the human race but are also experienced by other

animals. The writers of the Bible knew how experiencing water’s life-giving properties could open a person to remembering and re-encountering God.  As a typical psalm of creation, Psalm 104 (1--11a, NRSV), puts it, speaking to God:

"You make springs gush forth in the valleys;

they flow between the hills,

giving drink to every wild animal."

We can know more about water as we come to know it through our religious traditions. As a Christian, I understand religiously what water is in several ways:  By attending baptisms. By singing hymns and hearing scriptures containing the word “thirst.”  And by joining with other people of faith to see that homeless people are provided water.  Christianity and Judaism are not unique in their integration of the theme of water into their theological reflections.  In the Islamic tradition, the Qur’an (Koran) states:

"In the water that Allah sends down from the clouds and quickens therewith
the earth after its death and scatters therein all kind of beasts,
and in... the clouds pressed into service between the heaven and the earth,
are indeed Signs for a people who understand."

Scientists, in their own way, know which planets might have had forms of life by finding indications that the planet has had water -- water being essential for life.  If I pause to reflect upon water, which I often take for granted, I can re-discovery my commonality with all of life.  A commonality not just in needing water, but also a commonality in yearning, longing, and striving. Also, it is through a recognition of types of striving in other kinds of living beings (animals and plants) that we intuit that they are alive too.

Gabriel García Márquez's novel One Hundred Years of Solitude is set in a town in a tropical jungle. In a memorable scene, the protagonists' encounter with a new form of water becomes an encounter of a miraculous kind.  A gypsy opens a chest, revealing to the protagonist and his father José Arcadio "an enormous, transparent block with infinite internal needles in which the light of the sunset was broken up into colored stars."  José  Arcadio ventures a guess as to what it might be:

" ' It's the largest diamond in the world.'

'No,' the gypsy countered. 'It's ice.' "

~ ~ ~

(Can you recall a particular occasion when you had no water handy, and recall how it felt to take that first drink when you were so thirsty?)

(Qur’an quotation is from sura 26, trans. Muhammad Zafrulla Khan, quoted in Matthew Fox's One River, Many Wells, p. 38.)

(Quotation from Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude, © 1970, p. 18.)

(Photographs are in the Public Domain.)

A Flow that Courses Beneath Our Lives

Rivers.  Every continent on this planet has at least one major river that forms a backbone of life. There is the Nile of ancient Egypt.  The Mesopotamian Tigris and Euphrates of Biblical proportions.  The Mississippi.  Not to mention the Ganges, considered sacred, so important is it to India.

I remember once in my very early adulthood looking out a railway-car window at night as the train I was on crossed over the Mississippi River.  Even though I had read Adventures of Huckleberry Finn growing up in school, only then, as I saw that river's serpentine twists in the moonlight, was I able to truly understand how Huck and Jim were able to experience that river as both a source of safe places to hide and as a treacherous place for navigating in the fog.

celebrating the Festival of Lights
by floating lamps on the Ganges

Obviously, rivers are composed of water, and as such participate in all the symbolic meanings of water, no matter which shape the river takes.  However, because rivers are massive and flowing, they have carried additional layers of symbolism -- ones that draw upon the aspects of depth and of time.  (As the early 20th-century author Thomas Wolfe knew when he titled one of his novels Of Time and the River.)

The story of humankind has been filled with tragedy and comedy, mischief and virtue, chaos and order.  Through it all, rivers have been not only a physical means for life-support, but also a way for faith-traditions and writers to find a way of supporting the fragile boats that our lives sometimes become.  Rivers have thus served as symbols that penetrate into the often hidden continuity of our existence amid all of life's flux.  Amid all the twists and turns of life.

contemporary ferryman in India

I do not know of any novel where this layer of
symbolism is used to better effect than in Hermann Hesse's Siddhartha (1922), in which the author fuses Eastern Buddhist thought and Western psychological insights.  That book follows the life-course of a man from early adolescence through his middle years and into his later years -- as he struggles to find an integrity and meaning for his life.  Both as a young man and as old man, he crosses the same river, while that ever-flowing body of water and the ferryman provide a continuity. During one of their encounters later in life, the ferryman guides him with this lesson:  "The river has taught me to listen; you will learn from it, too.  The river knows everything; one can learn everything from it.  You have already learned from the river that it is good to strive downwards, to sink, to seek the depths."

The 14th century Christian mystic theologian Meister Eckhart had a gift for spiritual teaching. Part of that gift lay in his ability to speak of the Eternal in ways that helped his students discern God not as an abstract concept but as a Force underlying their own ordinary lives.  Eckhart drew upon many metaphors to do that.  Once he wrote:

"God is a great underground river

 that no one can dam up  and no one can stop"

~~~

Have you found a continuity in your life that helps sustain you?  What is it?

(The Hesse quote is from Siddhartha [1922], trans. by Hilda Rosner, © 1951.  p. 86.)

(The Eckhart quote is taken from Wrestling with the Prophets by Matthew Fox, © 1995.  p. 13.)

(The first photo is by User:Pradeep211, used under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.)

(The second photo is by Steffi, upload by Herrick, used under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.)

Loving Rain

The last half of the 20th century and first part of the 21st saw many spiritual writers who were widely read:  Thomas Merton, Henri Nouwen, Thich Nhat Hanh, Kathleen Norris, and others. Although Thomas Merton is not my favorite (just a personal taste), there is part of one essay of his I like so much that I can return to it every few years.  It is that part in which he describes his experience of rain while he is alone in his cabin in the woods.

Merton's description of the rain is as good as about any nature writer's, but he puts a slight twist on his experience by interpreting the sound of the rain as being like speech:  "It fills the woods with an immense and confused sound.  It covers the flat roof of the cabin and its porch with insistent and controlled rhythms."  The heart of the significance of rain, as Merton understands it, is that rain is a gift, in contrast to a human society that has become increasingly commercialized.  Merton makes that point in the opening words of his essay:  "Let me say this before rain becomes a utility that they can plan and distribute for money.  By 'they' I mean the people who cannot understand that rain is a festival, who do not appreciate its gratuity, who think that what has no price has no value...."

A "gratuity."  A gift.  To use a theological word, grace.

Many years ago, I noticed how in the U.S., weathermen on TV almost invariably described predicted sunny weather as "good" and predicted rainy weather as "bad."  What a narrow, city-centered viewpoint, I realized -- one that thought of rain mostly in terms of the inconvenience of driving on wet city streets.  Or temporarily avoiding them until the rain subsides.  (Only when droughts have been occurring in some areas do we have weathermen looking forward hopefully for rain.)  But any farmer knows that what is really needed are alternations of sun and rain.  And all our human lives depend on the farmer's success.

Thomas Merton depicted the rain he experienced as "a festival."  His use of that word made me remember a photograph I saw in Life magazine when I was a boy.  It was of children and youth in a city in India, dancing about outdoors, completely drenched by the first monsoon. They had been parched for so long that they knew rain was a gift, and knew how to celebrate it as a festival, even to the point of bathing themselves in it.

More than that, as I've come to celebrate rain, I can also celebrate it as being ecumenical. That fact was expressed well by one second-century Jewish Midrash (commentary) on a Biblical psalm.  To appreciate this statement about rain, we need to realize that in the Jewish faith-tradition, the central written teaching -- the Torah -- is celebrated as a great gift because it enabled people to create a community together.  Nevertheless, there is, as this Midrash, explains, an even greater divine gift:

"The sending of rain is an event greater than the giving of the Torah.

 The Torah was a joy for Israel only,

 but rain gives joy to the entire world, including animals and birds."

~~~

Do you have a memory of an occasion in which you experienced rain as a gratuity?

(The Merton quotes are from "Rain and the Rhinoceros"

 in Raids on the Unspeakable by Thomas Merton, © 1966.  pp. 9-10.)

(The Midrash is Midrash Psalms 117 and is taken from The Green Bible, © 2008.  p. I-99.)

The Message of Water

Over the past few years, there have been two words frequently heard in national news reports: The words "flood" and "drought."  Less frequently heard has been an integrally related word that has religious connotations:  The word "water."

The words "flood" and "drought" speak of fears.  The word "water" speaks of life.  (I wonder if we, in our frequently urbanized lives, would appreciate Nature more if the news media more often talked about water itself.)

As I said, water has religious associations, and they are rich.  As examples from the Bible: Water is the very source of life, is associated with the water of birth (and of being re-born through baptism), is a symbol of fertility, and is a means of cleansing, both physically and symbolically.

In only the first four chapters (about one-fifth) of the New Testament's Gospel of John, the word "water" appears sixteen times, thus demonstrating its power as a theological symbol.  A few decades ago in the U.S., when the northern and southern branches of the Presbyterian Church re-united, the baptism liturgy became inordinately lengthy because there were so many Biblical references to water that both branches of the church (with their separate liturgical wordings) wanted preserved.

In the most famous book from Taoism, the Tao Te Ching, water becomes an important feminine symbol of the unnameable Ultimate.  The ironical ability of water to change even stone over time also turns water into a metaphor for ideal human behavior.  Such as in this passage:

"Nothing in this world seems softer and more yielding than water,

but nothing can compare with water

for defeating the hard and strong."

                              -- Tao Te Ching (Chap. 78)

In our lives and society today, do we know where the rivers and bayous that wind around and through our cities run?  Can we trace their paths in our minds?

The Hindu tradition contains in the Rig Veda a prayer that is perhaps the oldest written prayer in the world.  The prayer uses the cycle of water back to the sea in order speak to the unity and purpose of all of life:

"May the thread of my song

be not cut

before my life merges

into the sea of love."

~~~

Where do you see water in the world around you?  What is it like?  What is the water doing?

(The passage from the Tao Te Ching, by Lao Tzu,

 is my own rendering based on several translations.)

(The Rig Veda translation is adapted from that of Eknath Easwaran, in God Makes the Rivers to Flow, © 1991.)