By Neil Foley
We don’t often think about water. Unless maybe the nagging reminder to drink more each day to stay hydrated. Or maybe that dripping tap that you keep putting off fixing. Or when rain spoils the lovely outing that you had planned. I remember once trying to source a plumbing leak in my house and water was about all I thought about for a couple of days until I traced it! But beyond these everyday things we also know, at a deeper level, that water is essential to our lives and wellbeing.
But what is water? We may remember from school that it is composed of just two hydrogen atoms and one oxygen. A very simple yet very complex little molecule. It can exist in its three states here on Earth – solid, liquid and gas – allowing it to complete its life-giving cycle. Evaporating and distilling from the sea, falling as rain to give life to the land, being held as ice and snow in our mountains and poles, and eventually returning to the sea to repeat the cycle again. A “miracle molecule,” driven by the energy of our Sun, sustaining all life as we know it. It is so essential to life that NASA scientists once remarked during their search for life on Mars that they were “following the water” because where you find water you find life.
This essential nature of water was not lost on our ancestors. Here in Ireland, we have an abundance of holy wells, sites that unite water with the sacred. The early saints blessed what were originally pagan places of nature worship and used the sacred water for baptism and healing. Each holy well in Ireland is still associated with a patron saint and people continue to visit the sites for prayer and for the blessing and healing properties of the water. Everything from toothaches to sick cattle was once treated at a holy well somewhere in the country. While the modern world may scoff at such practices now, even today we cannot deny the life-giving and healing power of water itself.
Is it any surprise that water features so strongly within the scriptures? In the very beginning of Genesis, God’s Spirit hovered over the waters. The great prophet Moses delivers the Israelites through “walls of water” in the Red Sea and strikes a rock in the desert for the people to drink from. Once we get to the New Testament, John is baptising in the River Jordan, a new deliverance through water, echoing what Moses had done before. And Jesus fulfils the sacred symbolism of water when he tells us that he will give us “living water” to drink and ultimately in His sacrifice of blood and water on the cross. All this shows us that water is the very essence of God, a creative force and gift, and a means of our redemption.
For me, a Christian and a scientist, water is not only life-giving it is sacred. NASA scientists may know the importance of water to possible minute creatures on a dusty red planet, but Jesus points us to the sacredness of water. Not only as a life-giving gift from God but even more as living water through which we pass into new life beyond this material world and back to the hovering Spirit of the Creator.
Neil Foley is a lay missionary with the Redemptorists in Ireland. He lives in Wexford with his wife, Helen, and twin girls Zélie and Martha, where he also works fulltime as an environmental scientist.
This article originally appeared in Redemptorist Publications 2023
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