The Water, the Earth, the Air
I chant this hymn to the Trinity of life and hope. In these three, we discover each other, ourselves, and find God. In Marc Gellman’s story, “Water All Around” in Does God Have a Big Toe? it is not the noble animals, lion, eagle, or elephant who discover God, but the fish who are wise. They guess that God is their environment, is everywhere, and then somewhere else too.
From the beginning, the Spirit brooded over the shape of God, the primordial deep well of being. Water and air, similarly composed and yet each held in symmetry so that there can be life. In the deeps, we feel the power and presence of that which is more than we can iterate, more than we can define, deeper than we can explain. The deep is both beyond us and all around us. Indeed the oceans that tirelessly ebb and flow against the edges of the shore beat that same rhythm in our veins, sustaining and making life possible. About the only time, we notice the ocean beating within and around us is when it stutters inside us or rages at the edges of our buildings and constructs.
The air we breathe, the winds that smash against our pride, our Babel towers, the breath of God that enlivens and quickens these bodies, works in concert with water to keep us alive. And the air that rushes through our lungs has rushed through so many others, has tickled the trees of other civilizations, other cultures. The wind in our hair is a lesson in the history of all living beings if we stop to listen to its song spinning around us.
We forget about the earth on which we walk, the place where Moses experienced God in an improbable bush. The earth, where Jesus walked and saw the holiness expressed in the plants and animals he saw, who showed his disciples how to discover the Beloved in the faces of others, who confronted them with the truth of their own being, who taught that dusty graves are for leaving, not being trapped in. In Jesus we are invited to walk the earth with love and purpose.
The Water, the Earth, the Air.
The fish are wise. God is not to be found only by our minds but in our ecstatic gratitude for life, in our devotion to this planet, in reverence and awe for all that lives. If God is everywhere, then everywhere is the place and the occasion for worship. All water is baptismal water calling to remind us that we have received a very particular gift. We have eaten from the tree and now we know ourselves as separate. If we want union with the Holy, we must find ways to cross the bridge to reconnect, to remember the Holy in our own bodies, to see the Holy around us and to be the lovers and healers that Jesus called into ministry with him. Like the woman at the well, we are discovering the water of life, existing naturally within and around; spiritually calling us into a wider perception of reality and consciousness.
Albert Einstein said, “We experience ourselves, our thoughts and feelings, as something separated from the rest – a kind of optical delusion of consciousness. The delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection to a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circles of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty. “
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