Learning to Pray

My childhood did not take place in proximity to gatherings of fresh water such that they are woven into the fabric of the reveries of my youth. I grew up in Saint Louis on the banks of the Mississippi River, but even the near suburb where I lived was far from the Arch and the river’s vast muddy waters, and I cannot picture how they moved in concurrence with the affairs of the metropolis, participating in the imagination of the city dwellers. I knew best the salty waters off the shore of Miami Beach where we spent Passover, the Seder played out on the sands as if the Atlantic was the Red Sea and Pharaoh was chasing us into the waves. But Bachelard has well established the supremacy of fresh water as the choice substance in the construction of the imagination. What may I ask are the waters of your youth?

I learned to pray in the second grade at the Epstein Hebrew Academy. I can’t recall the name of the rabbi but he was large and disheveled, yellow splotches dotting the white shirt of his back and white religious garb. But I loved him and longed to be his chosen disciple. We were tasked with memorizing the words of the Amidah, the standing prayer of eighteen blessings, which encompasses the whole schema of prayer from praise and gratitude to confession, pleading and grace. If you say it you’re covered, and the nameless rabbi wanted it to flow from our lips. So he’d call out a phrase and the class would race through the pages of the prayer book, everyone hunting for the location of holy words. The first to find the words won that round of the game. Afterwards we stood and prayed, the fringes of the miniature prayer shawl under my shirt, sacred playthings to wrap around my fingers. Before long the words were fluent on my lips as water.

I learned to pray again after college. I was accepted to rabbinical school but a friend I’d just met staffing summer camp was going to India and what the heck, I deferred and hitched a ride. We quickly fled the chaos of Delhi for the foothills of the Himalaya, Rishikesh, the Beatles’ ashram enclave and the river Ganges. We stayed in a hostel atop the hill that looked out over the river carving its way down from the heights of the mountains to the valleys and plains below. Every morning I set out my miniature statue of Buddha, covered myself in a tallit and wrapped leather Tefillin, prayer boxes, phylacteries over my head, heart and arm. And there I sat, not with the mouthfuls of the Amidah pouring from my lips, just the four letters of the name of god, yud hey vav hey, one for each breath, inhale yud, exhale hey, inhale vav, exhale hey repeat. After an hour I’d open my eyes and the world glowed as if it had just been born. We’d walk down to the frigid green waters of the Ganga, the only river that flows from three worlds, Earth heaven and hell, and play and purify therein.

Somewhere within the research of this year where prayer was to be the center of our investigations, I forked into studies of water and followed the two tracks simultaneously like creeks whose watercourses run parallel sometimes touching. I didn’t question the intuition to pursue water, or think much of the sympathy of water and prayer beyond the notion that water is a substance of communion, a material capable of teaching us communion. 

Gaston Bachelard’s Water and Dreams, carries us through the whole range of symbolisms that we associate with water. The waters of Earth are speaking to us now. Rains have gone dry where before they were abundant. Bodies are coming up out of the absent waters of Lake Meade and Nazi warships are rising from the empty bed of the Danube. Frozen mountain ranges are boiling flooding the wetlands and our civilizations’ continental coasts. Water in Jacksonville, in Flint, in Sebring, in Newark is undrinkable. Pakistan and Puerto Rico are entirely underwater. As the world tilts on the edge of destruction, these demonstrations of water are missives and pleas of desperation. It’s critical that we are fluent in the language of the poetics of water. 

Bachelard begins with water’s quality of reflection. These days, more than mirrors even, we are watching our reflections in cell phone screens. But the original reflective material is water, for “The mirror a fountain provides, then, is the opportunity for open imagination … to dream profoundly one must dream with substances.” Narcissus, the Greek son of a water nymph and a river god, is disparaged for his captivity by the reflection of his own beauty. But Bachelard shows us how the reflections we see in water, and the way we allow love to pass back and forth within the reflective quality of the self, shape the qualities of our love-making in the world. “Thus, near the fountain an idealizing narcissism is born … Then Narcissus no longer says: ‘I love myself as I am;’ he says: ‘I am the way I love myself.’ ‘I live exuberantly because I love myself fervently. I want to show up well; thus, I must increase my adornment. Thus, life takes on beauty; clothes itself in images, blooms, transforms …’” (Water & Dreams, pg. 23). As we ask ourselves who am I, and look to water as a reflection of self and world, we hear, I am the way of my loving.

Water also carries a symbolism of sorrow and mourning, particularly during its storms, Bachelard calls water the suffering element. His substantiating images are drawn entirely from poetry, this one from 19th century French poet Alphonse de Lamartine: “‘I have never studied the murmurs, the moans, the angers, the tortures, the groans and the undulations of water so much as during these nights and days spent thus, all alone, in the monotonous society of a lake … Water is the sad element. Super flumina Babylonis sedimus et flevimus. (By the rivers of Babylon we sat and wept). Why? It is because water weeps with everyone.’ When the heart is sad, all the water in the world turns into tears: ‘I dipped my cup into the bubbling spring; it was filled with tears’” (Water & Dreams, pg. 91). These have been days where its felt as if mourning is called for unceasingly, so much desecration of the divine imprint which animates every living being. And maybe waters of sorrow spurned, mourning forgone a sign of who and what we hold dear, suffering waters scorned turn to waters of anger and destruction. Mourning can be one of the most exquisite pools of communion. Water weeps with everyone. We have all lost, we are all composed of our losses even more than we are made of our triumphs.

As kids we spent most of the time at synagogue playing outside the doors of the sanctuary, roaming the hallways and bathrooms, playing hide-and-seek, lazing in the technology free sanctuary of an orthodox sabbath. But whenever I entered the sanctum to wrap myself in the curtains of the prayer shawls of my father and grandfather, the whole room moved and swayed like the rocking of a ship on the waves, every man a column of prayer shuckling, heads bowing and ascending each at their own pace, shaking swinging forward back and side to side, the cacophony of movement perceived by my young eyes as one, like a hive of honeybees or a murmuration of starlings. They didn’t teach us at the Hebrew academy that the Baal Shem Tov saw these gestures as no different from the foreplay of lovemaking, where love is stirred towards its climax, prayer a union with the beloved. 

Water and prayer share the rhythm and gesture of rocking. “Of the four elements, water is the only one that can rock. It is the rocking element … it rocks like a mother … In his dreams the bather who is not looking for anything … loves and knows the lightness acquired in water. He enjoys it directly, like a dream-knowledge, that knowledge, as we shall see, which opens up an infinity for him … During long, calm, carefree hours, lengthy hours when, lying in the bottom of a lone bark, we contemplate the sky, to what memory do you give us over? All images are absent, the sky is empty, but the movement is there, living, smooth, rhythmic, in a movement scarcely perceptible and quite silent. Water carries us. Water rocks us. Water puts us to sleep. Water gives us back to our mother. (Water and Dreams, pg. 131)

The communions of our adulthood, both our love lives and our prayer lives, exist in dynamic relationship to our first communion, in the womb and then in the rocking arms and infinite love of our mothers. The lessons of attachment in those earliest days are our guide for all future cleavings and unions that we’ll pursue. And like gods, all mothers are perfect and flawed, the wounds of love an essential constituent of the medicine. But in the rocking of a newborn, in the waves and in the prostrations of prayer, are the humblest lessons of life. Nothing is static, the world moves through joys and sorrows with the pulsing tempos of the blood pumping through our veins. We are composed of this and that, with each bow and dip a chance for cry to turn to coo. Lost in the rhythm of bilateral movement, the simplest choreography, self poured away in love we taste the infinite which more than a body is our birthright.

Human consciousness in our generation is arriving at the realization that time is not linear at all. We are coming to recognize that the sins of the preceding generations do not die with those who committed them, they live eternally until the living attend to them with ceremonies of truth-telling, forgiveness and repair. The rabbis framed the concept with this language, “There is no early or late in the Torah,” a kind of healing possible that pierces the laws of time. Moses’ staff raised over the Sea of Reeds to part the waters of freedom touches and heals the sin of Abraham, generations prior, who held up his hand with a knife to slay his son. Human beings are deep in time and feeling and soul. Bachelard asks, “Is it really possible to describe the past without images of depth? And could an image of full depth ever be obtained without a meditation in the presence of deep water? The past life of the soul is itself a deep water. And then, after seeing all the reflections, the dreamer suddenly looks at the water itself. Then he believes he has caught it in the act of forging beauty. He perceives beauty in its volume - an internal, active beauty. A sort of volumetric narcissism permeates matter itself. (Water & Dreams, pg. 52)

Learning to pray may have little to do with god or religion, more to do with the science of hydrology, learning to converse in the poetics of water.  The world of 5783 is not good or kind, it is full of terror, violence, we have lifted the blinders from our eyes of the traumas that our bound up in our imperfect attempts at love. But the world is beautiful, imperfectly wondrously beautiful, children with beauty in their eyes as translucent rainbow bubbles come into being from their hands like worlds and die just the same. Furry red monster gods named Elmo, first deities of the pantheon, that teach love with every act of their being. The deep within us is the site where the beauty that goes forth from our fingers and souls is forged. We are each keepers of a holy of holies, the foundation stone at our surface covering a reservoir infinite in depth form which all the beauties of the world are born.