Wednesday, August 18, 2010

Don't Drink That Water, Kid, Fish Pray in It

The way I heard the W.C. Fields story was that he is on a movie set with a child actor who is trying to get a drink from an aquarium, and he says, “Don’t drink that water, kid; fish f*** in it.” Other versions have it as his excuse for drinking alcohol—“I hate water; fish f*** in it.”

In either case, there is the sense of water as a foreign medium populated by creatures doing things so removed from human manners, custom, taste and biology as to be a total gross-out. It’s as if Fields as a child had been scarred for life by walking into his mother’s bedroom and discovering her having relations with giant squid.

We all have different ways of looking at the universe and our place in it. Fields looks like a guy who never found a higher power he didn’t hate. The man is wonderfully funny, but not terribly at home in his own skin, let alone the universe.

For my purposes, I have come to believe that people might get a better sense of God if they had to swim like fish in the ocean. On land, surrounded by nothing but air and making our way under our own power across a landscape populated by seemingly distinct physical objects, it is too easy to fall into an illusion of separation—from other people, other animals, other living things—from any other objects or forces, seen or unseen.

On land, all those animate or inanimate things present to us as entities that we have to be careful not to bump into, or get irritated, or dissed, or bitten, or eaten by. On earth, even a force as obvious as gravity seems less a connecting attraction between bodies than a definition of up and down. The effect of our connection to the earth beneath us is felt by most people as a nuisance that makes the ground just one more thing that we have to avoid crashing into.

For fish in the water, the effect of their surroundings must be entirely different. Gravity makes us fall, buoyancy holds them up. We feel surrounded by emptiness, not constantly moved by the waves. We don’t feel the earth shake when someone around the next corner walks toward us, but if anything stirs in the water the ripples go on forever.

Not only does the water hold fish up in their environment, they take it into their bodies to obtain life-giving oxygen. It must feel more like living in, swimming through and breathing Jello than existing in thin air.

If you could feel your environment everywhere around you like Jello, if you had to breathe your surroundings in order to stay alive, I think you’d be more likely to come to an accurate notion of what God is. Because, as far as I’m concerned, I’m a fish and God is the water I swim in.

Is the water intentional? No, not as a human would define intentional, but the water is sustaining. Does it love the fish or even care for them? No way to know. Does it provide eternal life? No, but while the fish do die, they don’t drown.

Does the water require that the fish bow down and worship it? No, but they do have to obey its rules in order to survive, and if they separate themselves from it they die. Do the fish have to understand what the water is? No, just how it works, how to move through it, how to adjust to its flow to get where they want to go.

How does a fish come to understand how the water works? By paying attention to the waves. By paying attention to what is around them.

All of us, in the water and out, are subject to unseen forces that are not understood by any man, but which connect us to everything around us, from bacteria to our fellow man to the wide universe.

For the fish, to know how the water works and flows is a given. All it has to do is pay attention. The same thing applies to us all.

No comments: