Maryland Community Newspapers Online
It's called anthropomorphizing – giving human characteristics to non-human or inanimate objects. It can really be seen and understood in the song "Old Man River" in George Gershwin's Porgy and Bess. Gershwin's Porgy compares his life to that of the Mississippi River and sings:
"Old man river, that old man river
He must know somethin', but he don't say nothin'
He jest keeps rollin', he keeps on rollin' along.
He don' plant taters, he don't plant cotton,
And them that plants them are soon forgotten,
But old man river, he just keeps rollin' along."
Compared with his hard life, Porgy looks at the Mississippi River and envisions it as a living thing and imagines it to be the way he wishes his life were one of ease and peace.
Porgy may be onto something with his wish and with the image he chooses. If you think about water, it is a fairly good metaphor for how our lives should be. What water is and the way it functions.
Water supports life. Life as we know it couldn't exist without water. Our bodies are about 60 percent water and we need about three quarts per day just to stay alive. It is so essential that charities and aid organizations spend billions of dollars every year to take water to drought areas, and NASA and the space organizations of other countries are spending significant sums of money in their search for water on the Moon and on other planets because they believe that if they can find water they will find life.
Water has a special characteristic called surface tension caused by the cohesion of water molecules. It is this characteristic that gives water capillary action and allows it to be absorbed by plants and flow in our bodies, and it is surface tension that allows the Basilisk, a Central American lizard, to earn the name it is known by to local people - the "Jesus lizard" because like some insects it is able to walk on the surface of water.
Water also does work. Canals with locks use water to raise and lower boats to great heights. The Rhine-Main Canal in Germany raises boats over 500 feet through a series of locks, and the Panama Canal uses stored rain water to move immense ocean-going ships from one ocean to the other. And in its work, water is effective through its persistence. The Grand Canyon, which is already a mile deep, continues to be carved out by the Colorado River.
Finally, water seeks the lowest level, the place of rest. It is almost as if water knows that it needs rest as a part of its life if it is to go on.
Becoming more like water would be a way for us to move closer to God. God is the giver and sustainer of life and calls us to do likewise. We need to care for life and for the lives of all of God's children by tending to their needs and be being peacemakers between people and nations. In this, we need to be a cohesive people, people who use their gifts for bringing and holding people together and for giving them the means to walk through life. This may even mean that we need to provide a means of support for them as they go through crises, something that all faiths call us to do.
Like water, we have work to do. We need to find our mission in life – our work – and do it, and having accomplished our task, we can then rest both physically and in God.
Dr. Benjamin G. Davis was executive director of the Religious Coalition for Emergency Human Needs in Frederick from 1996-99, teaches theology at St. Mary's Seminary in Baltimore and is president of the University of North America. If you would like to respond to his column, e-mail him at ben.davis35@ verizon.net.