The dominant theory of life’s abiogenetic emergence on the planet remains the idea that it took place in a watery womb. Certainly, prokaryotic, eukaryotic, and other forms of rudimentary life first most likely evolved in aquatic contexts, from which their distant descendants eventually made their way to land (though some eventually returned). That is why water, when we detect it or have good reason to suspect it on exoplanets and moons, makes headlines: in the search for extraterrestrial life and intelligence, water signifies the potential for an evolutionary history elsewhere parallel to our own. And yet this evolutionary history is only part of the story since, after all, the floors of our oceans remain unexplored. Water is a fundamental necessity for the majority of carbon-based organic lifeforms on our world: we ourselves are around 60% water, and if we do not consume some form of water within a span of about three days, we will ordinarily die. Historically, our civilizations have followed water: our nomadic migration patterns, agricultural seasons and cycles, community planting, city planning, expansionism, and political fortunes all frequently turn on regular access to water. And currently, water access, freshness, sanitation, scarcity, evaporation, and absence constitute a major global humanitarian crisis concerning health and the environment. How can people of faith bring a unique perspective both to water’s role in our biosphere’s history as well as the challenges we presently face regarding its conservation and use?
It might be a fair rejoinder to ask whether such a contribution is necessary in the face of what is clearly a set of crises which require scientific insight and political power to resolve. The drying waters of the Okavango, for example, require regular research as well as funding and the backing of government power restraining public and private misuse of the water and the ecosystems it gives life to. So, too, the desertification of Lake Mead and the American West generally is going to require some fairly severe government intervention to save natural water resources and ensure that water access for purposes of sustaining life are guaranteed to residents of places dependent on drying water sources (so as, for instance, to avoid the YA dystopia of Neal and Jarrod Shusterman’s Dry). Simply praying for more rain or refilled reserves will do nothing, of course, at least if it is not joined to real action. But the environmental crises that we face are cultural as much as they are scientific and political: they have to do with the way humans believe, behave, and belong, to invoke a familiar description of religion from the academic guild, and insofar as much of our relationship to the natural world is poorly shaped by culturally ingrained misinterpretations and misappropriations of religious traditions—especially Abrahamic and biblical ones—revisiting what our traditions have to say about the natural world can similarly reinvigorate our engagement with it today. Ultimately, it is not enough for scientists to describe a problem or for the government to act on it; ordinary people have to be convinced in their own lives of the importance of an act of repentance for it to gain the kind of intergenerational traction to constitute a real reversal of fortunes. (This is why, it might be noted, legislated moralities of whatever sort rarely go unchallenged over time when imposed by a minority on a dissident majority.) And so, as many have realized, the environmental movement will need religions as allies, for until the majority of people, who remain generally religious in some way or another (though trends are surely changing in America), come to see the destruction of the world as a religious issue, many will continue to be simply blind to that present sacrilege.
The Priestly creation story begins, like the cosmogony of Enuma Elish and other Near Eastern or Southwest Asian myths, with a watery chaos, across the span of which the divine ruach sweeps wild and unwieldy (Gen 1:1-2). In this story, Elohim—a plural noun with third person singular verbs, signifying some collective or summative sense of “God,” probably best understood as El and his cohort—creates by separating: light from darkness, waters above from waters below (potentially a hidden reference to the aquatic theomachy of the Babylonian epic), seas from land, and then filling the various cosmic regions with life: Sun, Moon, and Stars, birds and fish, plants, animals, and finally humans in the image and likeness of God (who now speaks in a first person plural exhortative; 1:26-28). Water is chaotic when there’s too much of it in this story, but appropriately restrained it is life-giving. The second, Yahwist creation story is a bit different, but water plays a central role there too: though at first a misty fog arises from the ground to water the land, in the Garden of Eden YHWH also causes to spring up four mighty rivers that water both Paradise and the world therefrom (2:10-14). As anyone with a mild grasp of Asian and African geography knows, these rivers could not possibly have a common fountainhead, nor do they have any uniform convergence, and one of them remains unidentifiable. Tigris and Euphrates, despite framing the Fertile Crescent of Mesopotamia (literally, “land between the rivers”), do not share a common source, but do both pour into the Persian Gulf. Gihon is in all likelihood a reference to the Gihon Spring in Jerusalem, which fed first the Jebusite settlement and then the City of David. That Gihon continues to have mythic significance in the Hebrew Bible, as it is allegedly destined to shoot forth from the threshold of the Temple Mount and flow towards the Dead Sea, bringing it to life (Ezek 47) and also the other direction towards the Mediterranean (Zech 14) in the glorified city. This is also the origin of the Johannine Apocalypse’s image of the “river of the water of life” flowing from the throne of God and the Lamb in the New Jerusalem (Rev 22:1). The Pishon has never been firmly identified, and for that reason has often been used to name many rivers of varying levels of cultural importance; my personal favorite is Josephus’ association of it with the Ganges (Antiquities I.3), though the Phasis, the Nile, and the Uizhun are also honorable mentions. Clearly, Eden is an axis mundi, a mythological cosmic mountain existing beyond time and space as we know them, but one which generations of readers took to be mythologically centrifugal enough to encompass the sacred rivers of many ancient peoples. We might just as well say that the Amazon also flowed from Eden, as did the Osun, the Urubamba, the Yamuna, the Okavango, the Whanganui, the Yangtze, and the Jordan.
If the waters of the Yahwistic creation myth flowed out from the new cosmic mountain of Jerusalem and its Temple, the chaotic waters of the Priestly creation story served as their counterpoint in the mythography of the Flood, the Exodus, and the crossing into Canaan across the Jordan. Just as God (Elohim) had, at the beginning, reined in the waters to make room for the dry land and the world, so now God (YHWH) parted the waters and permitted the children of Israel to cross on dry ground towards redemption, and a new created order iconographically signified in the Tabernacle. In that mobile sanctuary, the waters of the sea are present together with the rest of creation—they swirl in a great bronze cauldron in the outer court—but they no longer present a threat to the good, clean order of God signified (almost neurotically) in the sacerdotal protocol of the liturgy. Joshua recapitulates this event, in a smaller way, when the people cross over with him to Canaan through the Jordan (Jos 3). It would not be until the period of Early Judaism—the Persian or early Hellenistic eras, specifically—that we have any evidence for regular Jewish immersion in a mikveh to cleanse ritual impurities. The yachad at Qumran was particularly obsessed with these immersions, and practiced them with regularity; the connection between water and ritual cleanliness was obvious, and the necessity of the latter for a community which believed it was dwelling directly in the divine presence was paramount. Scholars debate, and it is probably impossible to say with any strict degree of confidence, whether Yochanan the Immerser—better known as John the Baptist—was connected either to the yachad or to the wider Essene community, but his habitation in the Judean desert, his self-presentation like Elijah, his culinary practices, and his apocalyptic reading of Jewish Scripture and contemporary events all might imply that he was an Essene, an ex-Essene, or at least recognizably like them. What is most notable about John’s practice is the permeability of categories between ritual and moral kinds of purity—that John’s baptism is “for repentance and the forgiveness of sins” (Lk 3:1-6), and not merely for ritual purification (though it logically includes that). John’s apocalyptic belief in the imminence of the Kingdom of God, the coming messiah, and the necessity of widespread repentance may well have precipitated his sensibility that the ritual capacity to draw near to God which water effects and the moral life that God demands were beginning to bleed into one another. Yeshua or Jesus of Nazareth, of course, was baptized by John and his followers, both during and after his lifetime, practiced baptism that they linked both to John and to Jesus, even as John’s own followers endured as a separate sect from the immediate Jesus Movement (anxiety about which can sometimes be perceived in the New Testament itself). To this day, Jews ritually immerse according to Mishnaic and Talmudic guidelines, while Christian baptism—now the product of its own internal evolution in the Christian community from Jewish rite to Christian sacrament—remains the fundamental rite of initiation into the Christian community and the primary means of salvific grace. For Christians, baptism effects ritual cleansing and the beginning of moral repentance, yes, but also provides, so no earlier and author than St. Paul says (Rom 6:1-11), sacramental participation in Christ’s death and resurrection, a sartorial “putting on of Christ” such that all the baptized are no longer divided by sex and gender, ethnicity, or social status, but are commonly sons of God and of Abraham by the gift of the divine Spirit, once more sweeping across the waters of creation (Gal 3:26-28). “Christ has appeared in the Jordan to sanctify the waters!” sing the Byzantines at Theophany, blessing the local waters in an act of communal proclamation that the divine manifestation of Christ in the Jordan has sanctified all the water of the world as a vehicle of divine grace.
But Jews and Christians are hardly the only baptists around. Mandaeans, for one, practice regular baptism in Yardna, “water,” in imitation of John, whom they take to be the ultimate prophet. Muslims must perform wudu, ritual ablutions, before prayer. Every fully initiated Sikh is an amritdhari, an “amrit-taker” or one ritually baptized among other ceremonies. Ardent Shintoists purify themselves with water in misogi. As in the Jewish, Mandaean, and Christian settings, where baptism imitates the activities of deities cosmic, mythic, and perhaps historical, Hindus immerse in the Ganges to enjoy a similarly auspicious transition to the next life as that gained by the ancestors of Bhagiratha. Ganga Ma is herself is a goddess: once a heavenly river, passing through the hair of Adiyogi Shiva on her way to earth, and likewise, divinities of water are some of the most ubiquitous and fundamental spirits of any animistic cosmos. Olokun, Anuket, Hapi, Nu, Yam, Tefnut, Leviathan, Tiamat, Okeanos, Poseidon, Nereus, Proteus, Thetis, Tethys, Naiads, Volturnus, Ahurani, Haurvatat, Damona, Brigid, Njurd, Danu, Hebo, the Dragon Kings, Hanzaki Daimyojin, Indra, Dakuwaqa, Namaka, Sedna, Eingana, whoever they are and whatever aspect of water they oversee, benevolent or monstrous, kind or fierce, such gods are often Titanic forces of nature or simply more recent personifications of antecedent cosmic principles within which or upon which are draped our water-dependent existence.
Water gives life and takes it, makes things grow and drown, offers refreshment and scald, cool and humidity. We should not ignore that water often causes as much pain as its absence creates; tsunamis and hurricanes can be annual reminders of the threatening, primal force of water. Thales’ famous theoretical suggestion that everything comes from water is true at an archetypal level even if not at the level of literal fact: from a not terribly uneducated perspective, we are merely temporary, peculiar forms of the water cycle that momentarily appear and recede back into the great flux of all things, as though so many transient undulations in Heraclitus’ River. Indeed, water, seen precisely from this angle, has offered many Buddhists a classic image for expressing the concept of impermanence (anicca/anitya) and no-self (anatta/anatman): the phenomenal world, which our conventional language does a useful job of describing, is like the wavy surface of the ocean. The wave does not really possess independent existence as something unique; we only think it does when our attention is drawn to it by the skandas. Instead, the wave is simply the ocean in the act of being a wave: it is empty of essential content and is merely an existential state of various impermanent aggregates. So too the self, or at least—if we want to hold on to a more classically theistic, Hindu, and Neoplatonic sense of “self” as a useful category—much of what we habitually mistake for the self. Water is a great philosopher, and time spent around it—tanning beside its shores, standing waist-deep in its rapids to catch fish, sailing on its currents or, in the pastime of my home state, floating down them—have been and continue to be profoundly educational experiences for anyone looking to know something about how the world really is. It is not accidental that we love baths, showers, pools, jacuzzis, hot tubs, grottoes, waterfalls, and koi ponds; it is not for nothing that beachfront property remains exorbitantly expensive pretty much everywhere. Water slakes, cleans, and teaches us, but it also makes us happy.
The Spirit, as the ubiquitous life-giver, imbues all things with life, intentionality, and meaning: not just the animal and plant worlds, not just humans and their many religions and scriptures, but also the world that we habitually misperceive as “inanimate.” That Jews or Christians should ever have embraced the mechanistic kosmos of modernity is puzzling if one considers their Scriptures and liturgies at any length. That they should have done so with regard to water is tragic, especially as we now live in a world that is experiencing partial desertification in many places due to frivolous and unsustainable human use. Whether we ourselves observe the rites of any local nymphs or river gods or grandmothers Ocean in our practiced religion, our religious sensibility ought to include the recognition of water as a spiritual substance, not merely a material resource. It is simply too vital to everything, too basic behind every lingering dissension, too unavoidable a question mark over the current praxis of our global civilization. Those bemoaning a seeming return to paganism—a religious revival of questionable actuality, but never mind—would do well to reckon with whether the natural world and all its creatures, including the human, would not be better off pagan than whatever they are, and water is an easy metric for this. It is not that pagan societies universally treated water with sanctity translated into their actual water use—far from it. But they never came close to the kind of rapacious, materialistic use of the Earth’s lifeblood as we have. In the West at least, and in Western-impacted societies (so, everywhere), that rapacious use of the natural world and its water is doubtless rooted in the abusive reading of the imago Dei as a license to steal, kill, and destroy (Jn 10:10). If we are Christians, let us reckon earnestly: for there to be baptisms, there must be water in which to be baptized, and to drink, that there might be anyone to be baptized.
The water crisis is just one of many pressing issues whose resolution we all depend on; I do not pretend to offer real solutions here beyond advocacy for those already identified by scientists and conscientious public figures to conserve and better serve those in need. Instead, as with the other articles I have recently penned and yet intend to on the natural world, my hope is simply to inspire with something of the way that our traditions—especially my own Christian tradition—encourage us to think lovingly on the world of God’s creation, which has its ultimate destiny only in him. Doing so may well render us ready and willing to join in whatever cultural transformations are necessary to bolster the impact that intelligent conservation and wise use of power will have on our collective well-being, empowered by a sacred mentality. With water, our religious traditions might make us the sort of culture that would never think to waste the most precious, divine gift of Yardna on something as meaningless as a golf course when, somehow, a place like Flint, Michigan has still not been able to celebrate a complete resolution to its water crisis. Fresh takes (or salty ones, perhaps) on our traditions might make us the sort of people vigilant enough to take action to stop the overuse of the Colorado River, or the deterioration of other necessary reservoirs. They may even simply make us the sort of people ready to see in drinking and bathing in water sacramental acts of union with the divine rather than merely temporal necessities, worthy of reverent and frugal use. Religion, as a nexus point of the human experience, is as water-dependent as humans are; people of faith are obligated to perform this essential act of tikkun by choosing to embrace fresh (or salty, as it were) takes on the importance of the natural world, especially when their own communities have been historically guilty of abuse. The world is not our object, but, as Stephen RL Clark has argued (look for a review on his new book sometime), its own subject and collective of subjects; refusing to see that is a spiritual aridity that, if incurable through the fertility of gentle rains, may require instead thundering torrents or mighty swells.