On the Movement of Water
When I was in elementary school, 2nd grade I think, I used my recesses not so much to play with friends as to wander the grounds in search of Details. God is in the details, Lady Schrapnell is fond of quoting, and in my case it was quite true: if some hooligans broke one of the tinted school windows, I collected the shards as if they were diamonds, and squirreled them away home or in my desk. I searched the squeegee stones in the playground area for gems, and the grasses for four-leaf clovers, and took them away as well. I narrated my solitary adventures under my breath, surveying my kingdom, little minding the other children who played on the same grounds I did. Perhaps this was odd, perhaps not.
One day, I don't remember exactly when, I discovered that runoff from the rains had created a runnel, a rivulet, a spring wadi in the slope of grass down to the chain-link fence. I still don't have a word for this, but then I decided to call it My Valley. I loved the way the water had carved shelves for itself all the way down the slope, little hidden rooms of soft flat dirt stairstepping half-hidden in the long green grass. When recess came I took to haunting the valley, crawling up and down the slope, loving the shapes the water had left behind, feeling as though I were in the presence of the numinous. I was so taken with it that I made the mistake one day of pointing out "my valley" to a teacher's aide. "It's not yours, you know," she said, "it's the school's." I shook my head in disgust. I wasn't using the
possessive "my", for heaven's sake: if it wasn't mine, it certainly wasn't the "school's", as if the school even bothered to know of its existence. If anything it was the other way around; it wasn't my valley, I was its girl. Adults, I thought, were often so obtuse.
Ten years later, when I was asked to write about an early spiritual experience for a course on spiritual autobiography, I couldn't think of anything for a moment. I dumped out the whole abandoned filebox of details of my childhood religious life and couldn't find anything the least redolent of spirituality -- of, to ground the term in something real, contact with the numinous. God, apparently, was not in those details as far as I could tell: children's Bible books, apostle playing cards, Sunday school dresses. They weren't mine, and I wasn't theirs. If I'd thought of it, I might have told the story of how I attempted to get the family to have home Communion with Oreos and water, since we had no bread and grape juice, going on the supposition that Jesus would have us use whatever was to hand when communing in His name. But I didn't think of it; instead I cast my mind back to my valley and its numinous simplicity. It seemed odd to me, to think of the valley as part of my "spiritual development," as if it were some milestone rather than merely being itself; but I duly wrote the paper, and even a while later learned to connect it with what Lewis describes in
Surprised by Joy as his childhood experiences with Nature as conduits of God's fertile imagination and beckoning.
It's ten years after that now, and even yet I wonder what it is about the simple carvings of water that never fails to move me; why I wind up singing while doing dishes, a chore I hate; why I'm fascinated with, and equally frightened of, baptism; why I'll go any length to get within sight of a river; why even without getting all Jungian about it I still feel the pull of running waters even when I can only hear and not see it; why I think the sun on water makes better diamonds than diamonds. God is in the details, and I suppose water is pregnant with details.
And twenty years since my valley I sit and sing the opening verse of Psalm 63:
O God, you are my God; eagerly I seek you; my soul thirsts for you, my flesh faints for you, as in a barren and dry land where there is no water...
