Let's begin this morning with a little imaginary trip. Prepare yourselves: close your eyes; or think of traveling through a worm hole in space-time; or mutter your favorite magic word—I like Shazam. So Shazam, here we are. It's a strange place and a time past. Don't worry we're not lost: I know this place. We're standing on what was once the parade ground at Fort Hays in western Kansas, and the date is May 21, 1951. No place could conjure up more imagery of the Old American West than the place we now stand. In the nineteenth century Fort Hays and nearby Hays City were places of buffalo herds, Indians, cowboys, stage coaches, cavalry troopers, buffalo soldiers, gunfights, rattlesnakes, saloons, dance halls, bordellos, vigilantes, lynchings, Indian wars, and railroad building—a tough, hard and violent place in the early days.
Wild West personalities such as Wild Bill Hickok, Buffalo Bill Cody, Calamity Jane, and George Armstrong Custer were here in the post Civil War era. Custer's 7th Cavalry was here often. He first came here in the spring of 1867 when the fort was located east of here. Custer left his wife Elizabeth camping in their elaborate tent complex along the banks of Big Creek while he went off to pursue Indians. During Custer's absence, heavy overnight rains swelled the waters of Big Creek and a flash flood inundated the fort while the encampment was still asleep. Nine fort occupants were killed and Elizabeth Custer was left clinging to a tree for survival. Shortly after the flood, the fort was moved where we now stand. This is high ground that has a good view of the surrounding fields and short grass prairie. The woods surrounding the meanderings of Big Creek are easily visible just down the slope from where we stand.
Trees in this area grow naturally only along streams and in low places that collect precious rain water. Rain fall averages just 23 inches a year here, about half of the average in central Maryland. This is just enough rainfall to make wheat farming and cattle raising possible. If the rain doesn't come, crops fail, cattle die, and people lose their livelihood and their land. Rainfall is so precious that it is measured in hundredths of an inch; anything less than a hundredth is recorded as a "trace." Our view out over the prairie and fields is lush and green in May of 1951 because rainfall has been well above average this year.
Shall we take a walk? It won't be a long one, just a half mile or so. It's easy walking down the slope and into the woods along Big Creek. This area is a city park now with picnic tables and benches. We'll just walk along the meanderings of Big Creek. What an odd name, Big Creek, even now with the water up because of spring rains it's still a small stream. It's a pleasant walk on a mild day. We're headed mostly east here, but now we want to turn north and cross the creek. We can either cross using the narrow swinging bridge—perhaps giving a little nudge as we cross to set it swinging—or if we'd like to cool our feet a little we can go barefooted and wade across the top step of the "staircase" dam that spans Big Creek here.
Emerging from the woods on the north side of Big Creek, we're almost done. Soon we come to a city street, East 4th Street. Crossing the street we find ourselves standing in front of number 109. It's a modest one story house with a traditional front porch and stuccoed all around. This place is precious to me even in the mind's eye. It's the home of my grandparents, my mother's parents. Hays is now a quiet college town. The Wild West desperadoes are long gone, and the bulk of the population is now made up of Volga Germans who settled in this area in the mid-1870s. My grandparents were second-generation Volga Germans.
Volga Germans are quiet, sensible, hard-working people, and their story is a remarkable one. In the 18th century they left their native Bavaria at the invitation of Catherine the Great to settle in Russia. Catherine promised them two things: freedom to practice their Catholic religion and no conscription of their young men for military service. For about 100 years they lived in Russia with these promises in tact. When the Czar revoked their military exemption in the 1870s they immigrated to western Kansas.
They settled in the area around Hays and kept their way of life. The Kansas towns they founded, Liebenthal, Schoenchen, Pfieffer, Munjor, Catherinstadt, and Herzog, were named after the villages they left behind in Russia. Their devotion to their God and to Catholicism was fierce and determined: where these people went, their God went. Within little more than a quarter century temporary houses of worship in these new settlements had been replaced with beautiful churches constructed of native limestone. The grandest example is the Cathedral of the Plains in Victoria, Kansas. You can't miss this church as you drive through western Kansas on I70. Its Romanesque steeples rise 140 feet above the prairie, and its nave can hold over a thousand worshippers.
All was quiet on May 21, 1951 when my grandparents retired for the night. Continuing a trend, rain fell during the dark hours. But this was rain in over abundance: it poured down hard on the already saturated prairie and didn't quit. The waters in Big Creek swelled and when the stream could no longer hold the torrent, the water roared over the banks and flooded the area before anyone could sound the alarm. My grandparents were trapped in their house with the water rising rapidly. There must have been a few moments of alarm when they first realized their situation. Acting quickly, my grandfather pulled a small table into the dining area, placed a chair on the table and helped my grandmother up and got her seated in the chair. In 1867 Elizabeth Custer had also briefly sought refuge on a table to avoid flood waters from Big Creek. My Grandmother's name was also Elizabeth.
Then, with what I've always imagined as a cool deliberateness, my grandfather went to the kitchen and poured himself a glass of his favorite "Morgan David" wine. A sober, hard working man in his mid-sixties, the wine had been recommended by his physician as a palliative for heart problems. Perhaps the sight of rising flood waters had caused his heart to act up. While sipping his wine my grandfather roamed around in the house keeping an eye on the water, shouted across the water to his son-in-law, and finally settled on the dining room window fame near my grandmother where he kept an eye on the water and finished his wine. I have no doubts that my grandmother, the saintliest person I've ever known, was praying throughout this ordeal. Their fear, no doubt, increased when the water rose above floor level.
By the time my grandparents were rescued by boat a foot of muddy, swirling water was rushing across their dining room floor. No doubt, my grandparents were relieved to get out and make it to high ground—as well they should have been. Every basement in town was flooded and six people were killed by the flood waters. Over 43 inches of rain fell in Hays in 1951, the maximum recorded since 1867.
But western Kansas is a land of harsh, even cruel, contrasts. The five years leading up to 1951 had all been above average in rainfall. In a kind of regression to the mean, rainfall fell below normal in the years following 1951. It was a drought. Crops failed, cattle were sold off, and water for human use was rationed. There was great distress everywhere. People wanted help. They turned to the Divine and soon all those Volga German churches resounded with the official Catholic prayer for rain, "O God, in Whom we live and move, and have our being, grant us rain, in due abundance, that, being sufficiently helped with temporal [needs], we may the more confidently seek after eternal gifts. We ask this through Christ, our Lord. Amen." Still, the rain did not come. For five consecutive years following 1951, the rainfall was below normal, and in 1956 rainfall in Hays reached its all-time minimum at just over 9 inches—low enough to qualify as desert. The drought finally broke in 1957.
As a young person I heard this rain prayer over and over again. It became a part of my psyche as much as the water it sought is a part of my body. You may be wondering how such a prayer can hold any meaning other than sentimental for a Unitarian Univeralist. The Reverend Kate Braestrup has evoked this sentiment. When asked to pray for rain to stop, she responded, "I'm a Unitarian Universalist. We don't do weather." I don't "do weather" either. Still this prayer holds some meaning for me. Rain is just a means to an end. For western Kansans water has a central immediacy that is not apparent in our densely populated, well-watered urban environment. Yet there's a strong and somewhat surprising connection between these two very different human environments. To explore this connection, our little imaginary trip has to take us farther back in time to an even less familiar terrain.
Again, shazam. Now we're in ancient Mesopotamia, the land between the rivers; and it's around 3500 BCE, some 5500 years ago. On today's maps we locate Mesopotamia in southern Iraq between the Tigris and the Euphrates rivers. You probably remember from some course you took in high school or college that Mesopotamia is called the "cradle of civilization." In 3500 BCE agriculture in this region is limited either by too little water outside the river basins or by too much water (flooding) within the river basins. Population pressures produced an urgent need for a more productive agriculture. Since it was the availability of water that limited crops, communities were formed to construct dams, dikes, canals, and other works to promote a more intensive agriculture. The ensuing agricultural successes led almost inevitably, it would seem, to rapidly increasing populations followed closely by centralized political authority and complex bureaucracies to regulate the production and distribution of water and agricultural products. The most visible, outward sign of the successful control of water resources in Mesopotamia was the creation of great walled cities such as Uruk, Ur, and Sumer with populations of 50,000 to 200,000. Scholars refer to this water-forced formation of civilizations as the "hydraulic hypothesis." Another way to put it is that water rocked the "cradle of civilization." And, oh, I guess I should mention ancient Mesopotamia's greatest achievement, the discovery of the pickled cucumber.
Now we've come to a little way station in our imaginary travels. We want to set out in a different direction. In our second reading today Brian Greene advised us that, "…human experience is often a misleading guide to the true nature of reality. Lying just beneath the surface of the everyday is a world we'd hardly recognize." On this leg of our journey I want to journey beneath the surface of the everyday, look at water as just "stuff." Although it's common to think that mere stuff is the antithesis of the spirit or religious thought, I hope that what will emerge from this journey is an appreciation of connection between stuff and religious principle. We've all learned at some point in our lives that the smallest bit of water, a molecule, consists of two atoms of hydrogen bound to one atom of oxygen. But where did hydrogen and oxygen come from? That's our goal for the next leg of our imaginary trip. Let's see what we can find out.
Shazam, shazam. It took two shazams because we needed to travel very far. We didn't go back quite 13 billion years to the very beginning of the universe but we're not far off. The universe is about 3 seconds old. Hydrogen, the simplest element consisting of one proton and one electron, emerges from the seething cauldron of the Big Bang's particles and fields at this time. It takes another 300 million years for gravity to pull together such huge clumps of hydrogen that hydrogen nuclei begin to fuse together. When this happens huge amounts of energy are released and a star is born. The fusion process creates an outward pressure which is balanced by gravity pulling the star stuff in and holding it together. Gravity can pull hard enough that nuclei of elements such as helium, lithium, beryllium … oxygen, … all the way up to iron are produced. So now we know where both hydrogen and oxygen came from.
Now, I know that you are all sitting on the edge of your seats wondering how all those nuclei more complex and heavier than iron—like copper, silver and gold, for instance—are produced. The answer is an explosive—actually an implosive—one. As the nuclear fuel burns out in the star, the outward pressure that the star can generate diminishes and gravity pulls the star-stuff in to smaller and smaller sizes. The end of the star comes when gravity wins out totally and the star implodes suddenly and spectacularly in a supernova. It's the extra energy in this implosive jolt that creates nuclei more complex than iron.
But gravity is persistent and relentless. It instantly begins gathering in the debris from a stellar implosion in an attempt to recreate the star that it's just destroyed. Nature recycles, reuses, regenerates constantly. Our sun and our solar system, including our planet, Earth, were produced as the result of such regeneration. It's the presence of all those elements more complex than iron on our Earth and in our solar system that tell us this is so. Perhaps you remember the song Second Hand Rose? In its words Rose laments her fate:
Even things I'm wearing someone wore before
It's no wonder that I feel abused
I never get a thing that ain't been used.
Poor Rose! The situation is so much worse than she imagines: even what she thinks is "new" is all made from secondhand stuff. The stuff in our bodies is all secondhand, including the water—and water accounts for about sixty percent of the weight of our bodies.
Sometimes it's said that human beings are "animated stardust." But we've seen that stardust is only part of the story. Hydrogen, principally in water, is stuff from the universe and the oldest stuff in our bodies. We can estimate that by weight about 93 percent of our bodies are stardust; the remaining seven percent is "universe dust." It's the water in our bodies that connects us to things in a special way. Water in the earth's environment is neither created nor destroyed; it's just recycled again and again through evaporation, condensation, and precipitation. This recycling has been going on for nearly the entire 4.5 billion years of our earth's existence. As far as living things are concerned all water molecules are the same, and we share and exchange them constantly. A water molecule now in our bodies could previously been in the body of an African lion, a polar bear, or a large python or in trees and plants or it could just have come up from deep in the earth. This linkage extends back in time too—we share water with dinosaurs as much as with each other; and forward in time to whatever life forms evolve from the present.
This morning we have taken three little trips in imagination to explore the role of water in our lives. Every human body contains an enormous number of water molecules—about 2 billion billion billion. It would be impossible even to imagine the journeys that each of these molecules has taken before they joined us on our journey. But we know for certain that water links us to the past, to the future, to each other, to all life, to our earth, and to the universe. Water is an actual, literal communion of our life with the universe—a gift whose only requirement is a small glimpse beneath the surface of the everyday.
Water is a powerful link in the interdependent web of all existence of which we are a part. Water gives us life, and life gives us consciousness—the ability of the universe to reflect on itself and look beneath the surface of the everyday world to get some fleeting glimpse of the universe's underlying reality. With all our rational knowledge, it's our sense of mystery that drives us to an ever greater understanding of this universe and our place in it. "… [T]he mysterious," according to Albert Einstein, "is the fundamental emotion that stands at the cradle of true art and true science." May we be granted wisdom in due abundance so that we recognize in its awesome fullness the connection that joins us one to another and to the reality and mystery of universe we inhabit. From this day forward, may we ever strive to make it so.
Copyright © 2010 Merrill Milham. All Rights Reserved.