Though I don't suggest you turn your aquatic bodywork sessions into baptisms, I've just enjoyed this fascinating recently released collection and thought I'd share a quote about the 'peak experience' that is water ...
Whether you have ever actually experienced a baptism or not, whether you are a believer or not, these pictures and the music that accompanies them transmit all the emotional information: the excitement and the serenity, the fellowship and the warmth, the wind and the water. They are about theatre, pageantry, holiday; inclusion, transformation, enveloping love and transporting joy. They show a great many people in the midst of one of the peak experiences of their lives. Even the calmest scenes are electrified by the ecstacy of the actors. You would have to have heart of tin not to recognize this as one of the happiest collections of archival photographs ever assembled.
From an Essay by Luc Sante in Take Me To the Water: Immersion Baptism in Vintage Music and Photography 1890-1950, Dust-to-Digital, Atlanta, Georgia 2009
A friend who is also a field music recordist recently lent me his copy. The quote really does capture the essence of this wonderful presentation of photography along with a CD containing songs and sermons. It reminds me that our relationship with water is a deeply emotional and spiritual one, and is expressed in many different contexts.
The significance of water manifests itself differently in different religions and beliefs but it is perhaps the following two qualities of water that underlie its place in our cultures and faiths.
- water cleanses. It not only purifies objects for ritual use, but can make a person clean, externally or spiritually, ready to come into the presence of his/her focus of worship.
- without water there is no life, yet water has the power to destroy as well as to create. We are at the mercy of water just as we are at the mercy of our God or gods.
