The very first verses in the Bible include an image of water. God’s creation begins with a description of darkness covering the deep, while the breath or spirit of God sweeps or hovers over the waters (Gn 1:1). Water is associated with God’s creation and from that moment on, water is a symbol for God and a metaphor for our relationship with God. Images of water are used throughout the book of Psalms, our most ancient and enduring collection of prayers, to express our relationship to God. From creation to the Psalms, water is a compelling yet ambivalent symbol. Describing the metaphor of water in the Psalms, William Brown writes,
One of the most evocative metaphors in all of Scripture, water is tapped by the biblical poets in various profound ways. Destructive and cleansing, formless yet sustaining, water can convey diametrically opposing nuances even within one verse or line of poetry.
Seeing the Psalms: A Theology of Metaphor
William P. Brown
Spiritual writers also recognize water as an evocative metaphor expressing our relationship to God. Cistercian monk, Father Matthew Kelty, discusses water as a metaphor for his relationship with God,
Though a son of the Archer and linked to fire, it is to water that I have a more natural leaning. Water is always an invitation to immersion, an immersion with a quality of totality, since it would accept all of me, as I am. Some primal urge invites me to return whence I came.
My Song is Mercy
Matthew Kelty
For Kelty, water is linked to creation and something deep within us knows this and when we draw near to water, we hear the invitation from God to give all that we are over to the creator and sustainer of all that we are.
I do not know whether the images of water in the Bible shaped my prayer life or if my prayer life shaped the way I read the bible, but water is often an image that stirs my imagination opening a way to deepen my experience of prayer, to draw me into contemplative prayer.
I sometimes begin praying by imagining I am sitting beside a stream and my thoughts are small white sail boats, gently drifting along the water’s surface. I don’t try to get rid of these boats but let them drift by as I gradually allow myself to sink down under the water to deeper places where I am still, calm, below thought, in a space of receptivity where I am unknown and unknowing. Occasionally my water fed imagination will shift and I imagine I am a seashell gently tossed by the waves, allowing myself to drift, to sink down into the soft sand on the ocean floor. When I am feeling troubled by life events and find myself unable to drift in the water, or find a quiet space beneath the stream, I picture myself invited to climb into a boat with Jesus. Jesus takes me out onto the bluest of lakes and I can feel myself floating, absorbing the warmth of the sun, calmed by Jesus’s presence. The images of water that come to me in prayer are images that speak of immersion and presence, a way to give myself wholly to God, and to allow myself to let go of my defenses and open myself to receiving.
Time devoted to contemplative prayer begins to shape life because if we allow ourselves the time to drift away from the shores of ourselves, out into the deeper waters of unknowing, if we hand ourselves over to these waves of uncertainty, trusting in God, we learn to hear, to see, to taste, to experience the world differently, from a deeper capacity of awareness within us. These times of drifting spill over and shape our daily work, our daily interactions, our ordinary lives.
We can spend days, weeks, months, and even years in prayer not knowing or recognizing how our prayers are effective, but inevitably if we continue to trust, to listen, to spend time allowing ourselves to be drawn into the depths, we will have moments of profound grace come upon us. We will know abundance and sometimes that abundance will overwhelm our hearts. Prayer simultaneously opens us up to the overwhelming love of God and our own mortality. It pierces the marrow of our bones with awareness of our fragility and dependence on the prodigal love and mercy of God. When we taste these moments in prayer, we yearn for more. Our capacity for looking and listening attentively for God widens and we find ourselves desiring not only to pray in moments set apart from our lives but to gradually allow our very lives to become prayer.
