Drinking Water Read Online Free PDF Page A

the water, though, he ate the Salmon of Knowledge, which had gained its wisdom from swimming in the waters of a magic well.
    There is a Chinese variant of this tale involving the noted philosopher Huai-nan Tzu. It is said that in 122 BC he discovered how to distill the elixir of life. Upon drinking it, he was carried up to heaven. While ascending, he dropped his flask and spilled the waters. When his curious dogs and chickens drank from the magical puddle, they ascended to heaven as well.

    These legends of magical waters that bestow eternal life, youth, or wisdom can have religious overtones, often related as allegory. Indeed, water carries great symbolism throughout the Judeo-Christian tradition. Consider, for example, the story of the woman at the well in the Gospel of John. On a trip to Galilee, Jesus passed through Samaria. Tired from his journey, he sat to rest beside Jacob’s Well. A Samaritan woman came to draw water and Jesus asked her for a drink. She replied,
“You are a Jew and I am a Samaritan woman. How can you ask me for a drink?” (For Jews do not associate with Samaritans.)
Jesus answered her, “If you knew the gift of God and who it is that asks you for a drink, you would have asked him and he would have given you living water.”
“Sir,” the woman said, “you have nothing to draw with and the well is deep. Where can you get this living water? Are you greater than our father Jacob, who gave us the well and drank from it himself, as did also his sons and his flocks and herds?”
Jesus answered, “Everyone who drinks this water will be thirsty again, but whoever drinks the water I give him will never thirst. Indeed, the water I give him will become in him a spring of water welling up to eternal life.”
The woman said to him, “Sir, give me this water so that I won’t get thirsty and have to keep coming here to draw water.”
    On its face, Jesus is promising the same gift of eternal life as that sought by Ponce de León, the vizier Khidr, and the philosopher Huai-nan Tzu, but here the rebirth is spiritual, not physical. Simply drinking the well’s water will not save the woman or quench her thirst. She is not even thirsty. It is her soul’s thirst that Jesus offers to quench. Only full acceptance of his teachings, drinking the full glass of “living water,” will satisfy her spiritual needs. There is more than just intellectual understanding going on here. By taking the water Jesus offers into her body, her acceptance becomes visceral. Water thus becomes a source not of physical but metaphysical life.
    The symbol of living water is repeated any number of times inthe Gospels. Later in the Book of John, Jesus stands before a crowd and declares, “If any man thirst, let him come unto me, and drink. He that believeth in me, as the scripture hath said, out of his belly shall flow rivers of living water.” The symbolism appears in the Old Testament as well. In the book of Jeremiah, the prophet cries, “My people have committed two evils: They have forsaken Me, the fountain of living waters, to hew for themselves cisterns, broken cisterns that can hold no water.”
    In each of these cases, by drinking the water, by taking the holy message within themselves, the drinkers become infused with the Holy Spirit and are, themselves, physically connected to the divine by their deliberate acts. Such a spiritual transformation through taking a symbol of divinity within oneself is not, of course, limited to water. Communion at Mass describes the same infusion of divinity into the supplicant through the forms of wine and a wafer, which represent the blood and body of Jesus.
    Spiritual purification generally involves bathing or washing, rather than drinking, since this act symbolically cleanses the body of impurities. Christians do just this in the sacrament of baptism, which Jesus commanded his disciples to carry out following his resurrection. The significance of baptism varies among Christian denominations. In