The frequent incidence and caution of worldwide drought this summer has caught my attention. While discernibly altering routine and causing regional crises, heat waves, water use restrictions, and the emerging peril of waterless river basins have transformed human lives and again directed our attention to changing climates and shifting, itinerant environments. The precious availability of clean and potable water cannot be understated. Our global population is growing and the expanding footprint of human presence is more pronounced. Easy, regular access to water is diminishing.
We should not think our plight is unprecedented and, importantly, religion is an entity that can offer counsel. Water is sacred; to see it as such would begin to resolve some of the societal moral conundrums that we face. As with many of the world’s global dilemmas, a unified human society, seeing ourselves in others and recognizing our shared lived experiences under one greater collective moral endeavor can better address the problems of the day than a disparate and siloed approach.
We would do well for the world to embrace the sacred perspectives of water. The plight of the Colorado River has pitted multiple states and two nations against each other in a saga that edges beyond the pale. This forecast — of diminishing water levels — had been predicted decades ago and it is a contingency for which insufficient planning has exacerbated the problem. Rather than seeing the river as a commodity, we need to reclaim its sanctity as it relates to our common humanity.
The library of water’s role in religion is encyclopedic and has many chapters. The most salient example of water’s use in religious observance is purity. The Hindu Puranas, which are ancient tales of the many deities of this timeless religion, speak of the river goddess Ganga, from which the Ganges River acquires her name, and in which human sins can be cleansed: “Mountains of sins accumulated by a sinner in the course of his millions of transmigrations on earth disappear at a mere touch of the sacred Ganga water. Cleansed will (they) be also, who even breathes some of the air moistened by the holy waters.”
In Judaism, ritualized bathing, called mikveh, purifies the body from a variety of acts or natural physiological experiences that might be recognized figuratively or plainly as impure. In Pure Land and Zen Buddhisms, both heavily formed and influenced by ancient Japanese traditions, water is recognized for its purifying properties, serving the purpose of extinguishing the desires and self-absorption that lead to bad karma. Christianity places profound importance on water, mandating baptism with water, an incumbent ritual for an adherent to be fully transformed toward the offer of salvation.
Water, spiritually, it seems, is the balm for all ills.
A coequal, scripturally based sentiment has water being offered to humankind by a divinity as a precious resource. Here in the United States, our American Indigenous traditions, though cacophonic in important ways, collectively lean on the understanding that our Earth is animate and living, and water is one of the gifts provided to humans and animal life alike. In Islam, God speaks clearly about divine intention in the offer of water: “We sent down water from the sky, blessed water whereby We caused to grow gardens, grains for harvest … sustenance for (Our) servants.” Islam, like other traditions, has miracles associated with the advent of water when it is most needed, and such an historical moment is memorialized in the annual pilgrimage to Mecca, where Muslims re-enact a frantic search for water that saved a matriarch and her son in a moment of desperation.
Perhaps in any one of these rituals or stories, given the limited resource of fresh water we find on our planet, we can see ourselves and recognize the call to come together on behalf of all.
Jan Flaska is the Dean of Spiritual and Ethical Life at Deerfield Academy.