Overthinking the Rain

I love the rain. Water is pulled from its environment and purified (via evaporation, sublimation, or transpiration) only to be reintroduced to the environment in the form of fresh rain (or some other kind of precipitation). This means that the drops which now beat against my window are not falling for the first time or for the last. The water pooling outside my door right now, running slowly down through the asphalt into various piping systems only to be dumped into some small river and evaporated, may end up being hurled as a snowball in Big Bear in the not too distant future. The same rain drop which floods a town today bringing death may end a drought tomorrow and bring life. The waves which pound the hulls of so many ships become the trickling streams which feed the roots of giant sequoias. The Iceberg which sunk the titanic may be the rain that hydroplaned my car on Highway 17.

This is a powerful image and can be used to convey any number of messages; it can be a message of hope or of hopelessness. For me, at least right now, it is a reminder of time’s absolution. I’ll explain. The water in my Dasani bottle may at one time have washed the blood from a murderer’s knife but this thought neither quenches my thirst nor negates my biological need for water. My indignation that this water may have been used to coerce false confessions from innocents cannot keep me from dehydration; the only way I live is to drink in the water and thus the history that it carries with it. With each sip I am affirming though not condoning the past; I am bowing not only to the idea that what has happened feeds what is happening but that the past, its evils and terrors included, is the womb from which the present is birthed.

This leads me to wonder, how much of this poisoned water can I drink without myself succumbing to the toxin? If a man drinks enough alcohol, is he not eventually drunk? As modern people we are sustained by poisoned water and becoming drunk on the horrors of the past and, as repulsive as this thought is, we can do nothing else; for this is the only way we survive. But what of my own horrors? What of the water which washed the blood from MY hands? Is it truly so repulsive to think that maybe my own mistakes and wrongdoings can be evaporated, recycled, and in their own right bring life to the future? Surely this is not redemption but something else completely; absolvitory grace.

The horrors past are not fiction. Their effects were surely felt then and surely are still felt today but we must all drink from this same well of history day after day and perhaps clinging to retributive justice is a bit like voluntary dehydration. It takes humility to lump oneself in with the worst but could it be that this separation of history from its evils and men from their sin is the hope so often misidentified by religion? Is it possible that a fresh rain could bring both hydration and absolution to the drinker? After all, how clean do I feel if I refuse to see my own bathwater as anything but the muddy filth from which it was probably evaporated?