like footprints across a sweetwater
"Your way was through the sea; your paths through the great waters. Your footsteps were not known." — Psalm 77:19, World English Bible.
You would think with a reference like that found in Psalms Christians would put more fuss and importance about our destruction of these "sweetwater seas." After all, it is not everyone who lives at the shores of the world's biggest set of fresh water lakes and Michigan is, curiously, made up mostly of Judea-Christian stock.
I am not sure where I first heard the term "sweetwater sea," as reference to the Great Lakes. Perhaps it was something the early Jesuits called it. It sounds like something Father Baraga might have written back home about, as he hiked up and down the coast of Lake Superior, debasing the local populous. Regardless, he is gone but the name remains. It's too bad Judea-Christian belief does not honor all this sweetwater the way they honor the manifestation of the divine in human form. It's a shame that our monolithic sky-father religions do not hold water dear, especially since they came from the arid, desert parts of the world where water is scarce. Other peoples do:
Water, essential to life on earth, has occupied a preeminent place in religious thought and imagery, together with the land and sky. In many cultures it is considered procreative, a source of forms and of creative energy. The life giving property of water has been projected in its almost universal perception as fons et origo, "spring and origin," the element that preceeds solid form and is the support of all earthly creation. In this context, from remote times to the present, among peoples who have perceived the world in terms of sacred and profane phenomena, springs, ponds and lakes have figured importantly in the realm of water symbolism. In many regions of the world where lakes are major geographic features, they often have been the setting of cosmogonic myths and have been invested with many meanings, historical associations and ritual functions. (Townsend, 429)
I say it is a shame that our modern religions do not deify water. Not just these sweetwaters but any body of water since without some sense of piety to a deity we will continue to pollute and destroy our last sources of fresh water.
Yesterday I mused on Shintoism, the Japanese nature religion and the idea of finding the kami in Lake Michigan. That is, the god-like essence of the lake, both in the lake itself and the spirits that might still reside in it. One thing that bothered me about some of the supporters of Shinto was the insistence that it was a belief impossible to grasp by non-Japanese people. However, the veneration of nature is a common thread found around the world. The Inca People of southern Peru and northwestern Bolivia hold a similar theological belief:
In Andean religion the border between the notion of deities and the phenomena of nature was entirely open, with emphasis placed on direct communication with the elements of nature. The worship of huacas and major nature deities was a basic theme of Andean religion. A huaca was an object or phenomenon that was perceived to have unusual presence or power beyond the range of everyday life, where the sacred may have been manifested or where the memory of some past momentous event resided … This belief system was closely tied to the formation of sacred geographies and formed part of a cosmological religion with an array of gods associated with natural epiphanies. (Townsend, 430)
Is the concept of huaca so different than that of kami? With this nature ethos the Inca could personify the angry storm waters that covered their mountain lake of Titicaca into Copacti, a jealous lake goddess that would not tolerate the worship of other deities by her people; "she was known to have toppled temples or submerged them under the waters of Lake Titicaca." (Coulter, 132) But this current culture that holds sway over the fate of the Great Lakes has no such beliefs. To pollute the lakes is just that, a little more industrial run-off, a little more PCPs; and it shows as the level of pesticides, pollutants, poisons in the lake waters rises each year. Now it is no longer safe to eat fish from our lakes. We have made the home of these huaca foul and corrupt.
The storms have stopped, though the waves are never
still. In our wake an oily path shimmers
just like footprints across a sweetwater
sea. A few large clouds over the schooner's
two masts; somewhere near shore turkey vultures
spin, turn. That is the closest the divine
will show itself on these choppy waters.
There is nothing here malign or benign,
evil or good. The waves on this shoreline
just are. Like you just are, this boat, these storm
clouds. And though the little waves make a whine
in your ears, you cannot read them. Gnats swarm
over your face; and your oily boat's wake
hides the footprints that crisscrosses the lake.
Works Cited:
Coulter, Charles Russell and Patricia Turner. Encyclopedia of Ancient Deities. London: McFarland & Co. (2000)
Townsend, Richard F. "Lakes." The Encyclopedia of Religion, vol. 8. Editor in chief Mircea Eliade. New York, N.Y.: Macmillan. (1987)