The Belief Watch article in the December 17 Newsweek, “Bless This Bottled Water,” gives a new twist on “holy water.”
Ambitious entrepreneurs are bottling under labels like “Holy Drinking Water” and “Spiritual Water.” Labels of the Virgin Mary or Jesus, for example, adorn some bottles, along the Hail Mary, making this water help you “stay focused, believe in yourself, and believe in God.” Other water even claims to have good vibrations promoting a positive outlook. Interesting!
The Franciscan Sisters in northern Minnesota have launched a letter-writing campaign against large producers of bottled water. “Water is life.” Sister Mary Zirbes adds, “It really should not be a commodity to be bought” – presumably under any label, secular or religious.
A baptismal spirituality resonates with the line, “Water is life.” God, who created water, uses it again in baptism for a new creation. In the process water blesses us twice, creation and re-creation. If you’re baptized, it’s harder and harder not to appreciate the wonder, the beauty, and the life-power of water. And water links us with the whole world, connecting us to people everywhere by its free-flowing movements and wind-blown rain clouds. If Christian baptism creates separation by making us part of a new community of faith, the church, we still need to remember that the baptismal water forever links us to the people of every place and race. Water is baptismal spirituality’s truth of interdependence: our lives are always intertwined with others on earth.
Sister Mary sounds the truth: “Water is life.” Water doesn’t belong to any one of us, any more than the air we breathe. (Like ranchers of the old west, our world may increasingly be drawn into fights about our “water rights.”) How we can increasingly love and care for the water of our interdependence is one of the great issues of our time. Could it be if we do a better job on this that we will be treating water as more holy than buying it bottled with a picture of Jesus?
