Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of the Emerald Coast
“Our Sacred Story, Part II: Springs of Life”
Rev. Rod Debs
February 6, 2005
“As scientists, many of us have had profound experiences of awe and reverence before the universe. We understand that what is regarded as sacred is more likely to be treated with care and respect. Our planetary home should be so regarded. Efforts to safeguard and cherish the environment need to be infused with a vision of the sacred.”
–Union of Concerned Scientists,
“Preserving and Cherishing the Earth: An appeal
for Joint Commitment in Science and Religion”
Opening Words: Unitarian Universalists honor the Sacred Stories of many religions, the stories of Krishna and the Buddha, creation stories of The Turtle and of Genesis—creation in Seven Days. We honor Sacred Hebrew Stories of the Garden of Eden, Noah’s Ark, Moses and King David. We honor the Sacred Stories of Jesus and the Sermon on the Mount, and bring historical understanding to the Sacred Stories of birth and resurrection, the stable and the cross. What is more, Unitarian Universalists approach the nature stories of modern science with awe and wonder. They too are Sacred Stories.
“The natural world is the larger sacred community to which we belong. To be alienated from this community is to become destitute in all that makes us human. To damage this community is to diminish our own existence.” Thomas Berry, The Dream of the Earth
Guided Reflection: This morning I invite you to join in a Guided Reflection entitled, the Flow of Life. You may wish to close your eyes. Allow your mind to paint a picture.
After the Big Bang, immense clouds of swirling gases were drawn together by the attractive forces of their gravity. As they contracted, the cores heated until their atoms overcame the repelling electrostatic forces and nuclei merged—the nuclei of hydrogen atoms fusing to form helium, liberating immense energy. These thermonuclear furnaces called stars continued their nuclear fusions creating heavy metals out of the swirling gasses of the Big Bang.
As aging stars turned Super Nova and exploded, heavy metals were flung into the universe. Meteorites flew into orbit around younger suns and, by their gravitational attraction, became the smaller bodies called planets. Our planet, Earth, coalesced some 4.6 billion years ago of such star dust.
In the early life of Earth, the atmosphere was too hot for water to exist in liquid form. Volcanos vented water vapor, and in only tens of millions of years the atmosphere had cooled enough that clouds of water vapor could condense and rain water onto the rocks of the barren planet. Imagine the dry, lifeless rockscape that was then Earth: immense mountains pierce the sky; deep trenches scar the surface. As the rain falls, water accumulates in every depression, filling each one and flowing down towards the next containment. Pulled by gravity, water overflows the depressions, becoming creeks and rivers, dragging rocks along, scouring out channels, always running down towards lower places.
After millions of years, water covered most of the Earth. The relentless flow of water dissolved compounds out of rock and wore away minute quantities of elements, washing them away to the largest bodies of water. The salty seas were formed by this imperceptible accretion, an enormous change achieved by infinitesimal alterations over immense periods of time.
Life originated in the oceans, and the salty taste of our blood reminds us of our marine evolutionary birth. But, like many plants and animals, we cannot live on salt water. Our lives are made possible by the hydrologic cycle whereby salty water is transformed into fresh, by evaporation and condensation, redistributed around the planet.
Living organisms are active participants in the hydrologic cycle, absorbing and filtering water and breathing it back into the atmosphere. Plants play a particularly important role through transpiration, or loss of water through their leaves. A forest is an intricate device for catching, holding, using and recycling water. You might call it a living sponge, except that it is far more complex. Held in soil, in roots and trunks and branches, water is slowly meted out over days and weeks, and any excess is returned to the air.
When we look at the wonderful array of plants and animals on Earth, the overwhelming lesson is that plants and animals evolve to utilize both marine and freshwater environments. The oceans are filled with immense kelp forests and massive blooms of photoplankton that are the base of the marine food chain. On land, plants and animals alike have found strategies to flourish where water is abundant, and, where it is rare. Species are found in the ice of polar sheets, on arid mountaintops and in the heart of the desert. Eels and salmon have evolved life cycles that utilize both marine and fresh water environments, and many species inhabit air and land as well in their life cycles. But no species has evolved to do without water.
Protoplasm, the living matter of all plant and animal cells, is mostly water. The average human being is roughly 60% water by weight, nearly 40 liters of it carried in trillions of cells: intracellular fluid, blood plasma, spinal fluid, the intestinal tract and so on. Basically, each of us is a blob of water with enough macromolecular thickening to give us some stiffness and to keep us from dribbling away. Daniel Hillel writes (Out of the Earth):
“Though we appear to be solid, we are in fact, liquid bodies, similar in a way to gelatin, which also seems to be solid but is in fact largely water, “gelled” by the presence of an organic material.”
The water molecules that perfuse every part of our bodies come from all the oceans of the world, evaporated from prairie grasslands and the canopies of all the world’s great rain forests. Like air, water physically links us to Earth and to all other forms of life. This is another part of our story of life, our sacred story. (David Suzuki, The Sacred Balance, 1998, adapted; much of the following text is adapted from Suzuki as well.)
Message:
I’ve known rivers:
I’ve known rivers ancient as the world
and older than the flow of human blood in human veins.
My soul has grown deep like the rivers.
I bathed in the Euphrates when dawns were young.
I built my hut near the Congo and it lulled me to sleep.
I looked upon the Nile and raised the pyramids above it.
I heard the singing of the Mississippi when Abe Lincoln
went down to New Orleans and I’ve seen its muddy bosom
all turn all golden in the sunset.
I’ve known rivers;
Ancient, dusky rivers.
My soul has grown deep like the rivers.
–Langston Hughes
This morning I am offering you the second of a sermon series on Our Sacred Story. In December I spoke of Spiritus, breath and wind, the invisible something that animates all life, called “spirit” by ancient Hebrews and Greeks. Today I invite your attention to the visible and ever-changing substance of water which flows through all life and makes us one life.
It seems that human beings are landlubbers on this watery planet whose surface is 71% ocean, another three percent seas, lakes, glaciers and polar ice-caps. The landmasses above the surface are just bumps. We are island people marooned on dry land, surrounded by and dependent on an alien element, an old home we left long ages ago and yet carry within us still.
Water is the raw material of creation, the source of life. When the waters break, the child is born. Or as ancient gods parted dark waters above from waters below and fashioned the Earth. And the first land creatures struggled up out of the tide.
Water is at the heart of human ritual. Fertility libations bring forth life from death. Baptism welcomes the child from the depths of the waters into the human family. Purification rites wash away the past in a new birth. Especially among desert people, sharing the chalice of life-giving elixir is a rite of mandatory community hospitality. Literature is saturated with our uncertain relationship with this crucial substance–the water we come from, the water we cannot do without, the water that may drown us or sweep away our world.
One property of water, its high absorption of heat to change from a liquid to a gaseous state plays a critical role in regulating body temperature. Water passes to the surface of the skin by diffusion for sweat glands that are activated by the autonomic nervous system, functioning without our awareness. When it reaches the surface of the skin as sweat, water evaporates, using heat from the body as energy, thereby cooling the skin.
There is a remarkable equilibrium between your body and its surroundings. The inside and the outside of your body combine to manage the ebb and flow of water within and around you. Ambient humidity and air temperature, together with your level of physical activity, determine how much water moves through your skin into the surrounding air. In the same way, external and internal conditions regulate the water you imbibe and the water you eliminate. The same is true of all other creatures; this lifelong balancing act is part of a global circus, a performance stage-managed by the planet and its inhabitants together.
Water enters our bodies, circulates through it to the rhythm of the heart, ceaselessly carrying food, fuel, and cellular and molecular detritus to and from various organs of the body. Water seeps through our skin, escapes from our lungs as vapor and exits every opening of the body. It then reenters the hydrologic cycle, trickling into the soil, entering plants, evaporating into the atmosphere, entering bodies of water. In this way, water circulates endlessly from the heavens to the oceans and land, held briefly within all living things before continuing the cycle.
Water is so familiar that most of us accept its behavior as normal. But the physicist sees water as an anomaly. For example, water is liquid at ordinary temperatures. That is quite odd. And water has high melting, boiling and vaporization points. Particularly striking is the amount of heat required to raise the temperature of a unit of water, ten times higher than for iron, thirty times higher than for mercury and five times higher than for soil. This property makes water an effective “sink” for heat, absorbing large quantities of heat and then radiating it out.
Because of this property, large bodies of water, such as lakes and oceans, absorb a great deal of heat in summer and release it in winter, making surface temperatures more moderate. Ocean currents transport heat absorbed in the tropics to temperate regions where it warms the surrounding air. When water reaches the polar areas, it is cooled and then moves back towards the equator where it will lower air temperatures as it absorbs more heat. The whiteness of snow and clouds reflects sunlight back from Earth to space, whereas water vapor behaves as a greenhouse gas and reflects Earth’s heat back onto the surface.
Water’s special qualities are the result of the strong attraction between molecules of water. At the molecular level, made up of two atoms of hydrogen combined with a single atom of oxygen, the hydrogen atoms do not line up with the oxygen atom in a linear array as H-O-H. Instead the hydrogen atoms form a 105-degree angle to each other. The hydrogen atoms are on one side of the molecule and have a positive charge, while the other side has a negative charge. Thus a molecule of water is dipolar like a tiny magnet. This dipolar attraction between the hydrogen atoms of one water molecule for the oxygen nucleus on another is a kind of chemical affinity called hydrogen bonding responsible for the extraordinary formation of crystals or snowflakes.
Water molecules cling to each other, but unlike actual chemical bonds, the hydrogen bonds change constantly. A molecule may change hydrogen-bonded partners 10- to 100-billion times a second, thus linking adjacent molecules in a fleeting embrace. This constant shifting makes water liquid, and stable in its liquidity so that it requires a great deal of heat energy to enable molecules to break free as a gas.
The dipolarity of water molecules enables them to surround atoms or molecules at sites of electrical charge, thereby dissolving minerals and organic compounds. In the same way that water is an effective solvent, water is an effective agent of weathering and decomposing of rocks. As it percolates through the soil, it dissolves nutrients and materials and carries them with it. It makes cellular molecules soluble and thereby transports materials within living organisms. Jack Vallentyne makes this analogy:
“If water is the blood of Mother Earth and soil the placenta, river courses are veins, oceans are compartments of the heart and the atmosphere is a giant aorta.” (in Suzuki)
Jack Vallentyne’s metaphor describing Earth’s ecosystem as a maternal organism is a fitting introduction to my concluding observations, one biological and the second, metaphorical.
First, a biological observation. In recent years, James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis have stepped back to compare the macrocosm of the Earth to the microcosm of living organisms. The network of waterways across the continents resembles the circulatory system of a body. Patterns of rootlets, roots and branches; patterns of rivulets, creeks and rivers; patterns of veins and capillaries in living tissue–they all reflect the same physical realities and bind us all together in Earth’s vital processes.
Lovelock and Margulis observed that the self-regulating patterns of water flowing through earth and air that create homeostasis within the gritty slime of earth’s teeming surface is comparable to the self-regulating processes within plants and animals that define them as living organisms. Their Gaia Hypothesis is that Mother Earth, more specifically, Earth’s vital surface atmosphere and crust is a living organism. As a living organism, humans are presented with a choice, whether to live as a terminal cancer on our host, or to live in mutual and sustainable relationship with our Great Mother.
If this is the choice before us, our Web Theology of the sacred interdependence of life could be a critical development building upon and beyond Sacred Stories that are human-centered and self-serving at the expense of Mother Earth.
The second observation is perhaps metaphorical. I pointed out that a single molecule of water may change hydrogen-bonded partners 10 billion to 100 billion times a second, thus linking adjacent molecules in a fleeting embrace. This constant shifting makes water liquid, and stable in its liquidity.
Perhaps I should have named this Sacred Story of the flowing waters of life, Odo–after the Star Trek Security Chief Odo in the TV series Deep Space Nine. Odo is the grumpy shape-shifter who has reluctantly, temporarily taken human form. His race of Changelings are liquid in their natural form. On their home planet they intermingle, flowing together, merging with one another to form an ocean that covers the entire surface—except for a single rock. It is on that rock where any defiant members of the Changelings are hung out alone to dry. The rock is a kind of Alcatraz island where they have chosen to shun interrelations, withdrawing from the joyous dance, the fluid embrace. Rather than flowing in Changeling mutuality with one another, defiant members are a rigid, changeless rock. The rigid Changelings might sing with Simon and Garfunkel: “I am a rock, I am an island… for rock feels no pain, and an island never cries.”
Rather than resembling the invisible breath of life, the Spirit that we pass back and forth among us, perhaps the Changeling Odo is the shape-shifting hero of Generation X. We call the children who grew up post Vietnam war, an X generation because we can not pin them down to a single identity. They are constantly morphing like the little plastic toys, morphing like caterpillar-buterfies. Our children are the Post-Modern generation of Changelings who reject the rigid island isolation Odo called “the solids.” We Modernist “solids” fear their watery sea of chaos where we can’t get a grip on change.
At Boston University two decades ago, my Hebrew Scripture prof Bernhard Anderson, said that the writers of Hebrew Scriptures used water and flood imagery as a metaphor of social chaos. The metaphor of flood-water for chaos can be traced to the earliest humanoids who settled the flood plains of the great river deltas. Since we have just observed the tragic effects of a tsunami, it is not surprising that early humans experienced floods and tumultuous seas as wreaking devastation upon all that is planted and built and loved. For ancient Greeks, the moody and violent lord of the sea, Poseidon, was never at home, a restless god who loved to race the waves with his team of show-white horses in the shape of breaking waves. Oceans, tides and floods symbolized chaos.
In amazing contrast, the Changeling Odo merges and thrives within the flow of change, adapting to meet any challenge. The shape-shifter Odo is uniquely gifted to serve as Security Chief in the world of human “solids.” As Security Chief, like an immunoglobulin, he can travel throughout the lymphatic system of the body to search out invaders and create mirror antibodies that counteract and neutralize their destructive effects.
I may be over my head in the biological metaphor here, but the message is this. Our seventh Principle reads that we “covenant to affirm and promote respect for the interdependent web of all existence of which we are a part.” (UUA Bylaws) Our Sacred Story celebrates the organic unity and interdependence of life within the ecosystem and calls us to move beyond our comfort zones of rigid identities, and to flow like shape-shifting water, to absorb the heat and moderate the killing cold of toxic stories that abound around and among us. May we learn to be this Sacred Story, refreshing springs of fluid life.
The great sea has set me in motion,
set me adrift,
moving me like a weed in a river…
till I am carried away
trembling with joy.
–Inuit Shaman Uvavnuk