Gospel & Universe ♒️ A River Journey

Deep Sea Rescue 

Drink all the water you can. San Pellegrino. From the tap. It doesn't matter. It all comes from the same place, deep underground, and from all directions.

The water from the holy Ganges is the same as the water from the reservoirs north of Vancouver. Beneath the crescent-shaped Mariana Trench (east of the Philippines), the subduction zone takes water deep into the earth, after which it comes back up through volcanoes.

Water is seeping and flowing beneath us and all around us, from the surface of the ocean to the clouds, from the clouds down in rain and snow, from the snow to the rivers and the seas.

From the deepest ocean trench, Mariana’s Challenger Deep, to the peak of Everest, its snowy cap blinking at the stars.

From crescent to star, water began its own meandering pilgrimage long before we slithered from the sea.

So drink all the water you can, and dip your body everywhere, it doesn’t matter where, among the vestments of Lourdes or the bikinis of Capri.

Sink into a hot tub in Hakodate, and lie under the mineral sands of Beppu.

Remember what it was like to be back in Grade 10 on a school ski-trip to Panorama. After a day of skiing, you’re in the big pool at Radium Hot Springs. You’re pressed together, chest to chest, on the edge of the deep end. The water is sparkling blue. Her breasts glisten and swell as the stream rises into the cold dark sky.

Stand on a spit in Rishikesh, and wonder at the size of the Ganges, still two and a half thousand kilometres from the sea.

Look deep into the Roman pool in Bath. See the history reflected in the green glass of Time.

Bathe in the mineral springs of Badenbaden, Black Rock, Banff, or Beppu. Or join the tens of millions at Prayagraj on the banks of the Ganges. Few places can match it for its mythical history.

At Prayagraj the sacred river Saraswati, Goddess of the Arts, becomes one with Yamuna, daughter of the sun and sister of Death. The two goddesses become one with the mighty Ganga, who flows through the strands of Shiva's hair past Benares into the Bay of Bengal.

But don’t get hung up on one place. Although the great sage Shankara is said to have started the Kumbh Mela tradition of pilgrimage sites, he also said that the spirit of Brahman is everywhere. In Greece, the Three Graces descended from Tethys and Oceanus, the Great River that circles the Earth, and from Zeus and Eurynome, who is worshipped at the confluence of the Neda and Lymax rivers in the Peloponnese. The rivers multiply like oceanids. The Three Graces become the Nine Muses, the daughters of God and Memory, who descend from the springs of Helicon.

What good are religions if they cannot unite? The Graces and the Muses dance with Saraswati, deep underground, where the Ganges River flows, rescuing Sagara’s sixty thousand sons from Death.

Beneath ground the Saraswati joins the Ganges and the Brahmaputra. They flow, like Saraswati in her underground poetry den of metaphors, into the Euphrates and the Congo, the Jordan and the Nile. They unite with the Seine and the singing Mississippi, that once carried Abe Lincoln down to New Orleans.

The mighty song vibrates between your ears as you dip your fingers into the baptismal font of the ancient sects. The water brings them into harmony, whether from Israel, India, or China they become one, the graceful muses singing to your soul as you dip your body in the sacred font of moving life. The philosophers debate endlessly while the phenomenologist, the yogi, and the poet concur that everything is one.

Everything moves as your body moves, as your body dips into the waters, from your fingers to your toes.

You stretch your legs restlessly in the pew. The preacher is talking like St. Thomas Aquinas about the proofs of God, and about how it can all be settled. Faith is the Rock that doesn't move, like the Still Earth of Aristotle and Psalm 104:5. Or like the positivism that numbers can prove.

So you walk out of the church into the moist mystical air, the dew and sparkled mist all about you

and the floating moon, which shines its Chinese light on the nearby river, and all the pebbles in its stream. The water flows over them. The crystal sunlight shines through them from the other side. Your body, from head to toe, swims downstream like Zhuangzi's fish.

No one knows what the fish thinks as he swims over the stones and rocks and boulders. He sees a Corinthian king on the other side arranging rocks on the banks of a river where he once told secrets about Zeus to the river god Asopus. The Corinthian king pushes one of the boulders up a hill. The fish watches it roll back, and swims downstream.

The fish follows the water, which follows the ever-changing channel of the river, which is determined by rocks and geological forces, by trenches ten thousand metres deep, by the curvature of continents, the currents of air, and the clouds. All these bring the water down from the heights of Olympus, Kailash, and Sinai to the oasis in the desert and to the baptismal font. The water flows over the river beds and into all living things.

The zygote and the tadpole grow into a fish who swims downstream into the delta, and feels the current of the sea.

♒️

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