Of Death, Life and Water

K got up early with the puppy this past Saturday morning. I heard a portentous moan from the kitchen....We have no hot water, the voice said....(we were told that hot water pipes freeze first because they are smaller...I have no idea if that's true or not) The outside thermometer read twenty degrees. By early afternoon the cold water pressure dropped to a trickle...I could hear water running under the house....sure enough a pipe had burst....We cut off the water at the street, called two different plumbers, and waited wondering about how and why our life had taken this not so pleasant turn.

Life and death, and the entire cosmic order for that matter depend so much on the elemental...the mysteriously mundane basics...water, a simple and basic compound...two parts hydrogen and one part oxygen...simple, mundane, basic.... we will die without it...life in any form, as far as we know, can't exist without it...and water can be our undoing....the sailor swallowed by the deep...the unreckonable floods of Atlantic hurricanes... "full fathom five your father lies." death and the inevitable rebirth, the creative artistry of water....shaping canyons and glaciers...bringing the new....over eons and in a moment.

Water has always been a powerful symbol in the human religious psyche...the earliest religions we know of practiced water rites...holding up as holy this unpredictable element...life bearer and death bringer...We say in our own water Rite...that in it we are dead to the world of sin, shame and indignity...and in it, alive as well, transformed for the way ahead...empowered and emboldened for the good of the whole...a sea change for the soul.... Water the mystic means of the death and life cycle...the universe cycling towards its marvelous completion to the tune and rhythm of H2O.

Water is both grave and womb....we are forever in and of that knowledge...and we must trust that knowledge and love it as well....for it speaks of a profound reality that holds the secret...a secret that has everything to do with life and death and love and hope...and at last, quite elementary.