A Comment to "A Place of Broad Rivers and Streams"

Clare Krishan sent me a comment by e-mail because Typepad would not post it.  Probably because of the number of links, the website seems to mistake it for abuse.  I couldn't post it in comments either, so I am posting it for her as a separate post.  It has many good sources and images.  (I looked last night for a good video of a river that I could use and was surprised to find nothing of the kind I was hoping to find.  So I added a photo to the earlier post today similar to the type of river video I was looking for.).  Here's Clare's comment and the images she found (click for full size images):

Beautiful post to reflect on the early scrutinies of the living water (the Samaritan woman and the man born blind healed at Siloam) and encourage us to pray for those folks being received into the Church this Easter! As Ezra interpreted the scriptures for the exiles on their return from Babylon amongst the ruins of the city walls at the Water Gate.

We too drink from the source when we have occasion to participate in a Liturgy of the Word, where the scriptures are unpacked for us in the homilist's preaching. Chapter 8 of Nehemiah tells of the Israelites reinstating the Feast of Tabernacles or Sukkoth, commemorated in rites involving four species of plants, all known as being "thirsty" ie only grow in sufficiently irrigated places, a prefigurement of the New Covenant evangelists...

Our Byzantine forefathers represented this aspect of exegesis in visual form in their mosaics and frescoes (conceived as what we now call the dogma of the Immaculate Conception, she who is full of grace, ie the channel in which the spring is brought to the surface for us to drink) in the theme of the Annunciation to Anna and Joachim, the names of Mary's parents tradition records in the apocryphal canons:

(a) in the Daphni mosaics, near Athens, of the Comnene period (1025-1204)

(b) Kariye Camii mosaics, Istanbul, of the Paleologan period (1261-1453)
(c) Panagia tou Kikko mosaics, Cyprus
(patient, Quicktime movie slow to download)

(d) modern Greek Orthodox icon (on right)

A later interpretation ties Exodus's four rivers of Eden to the four Gospel evangelists, to Jesus through Mary as vessel of grace (a model of Mother Church ministering to our parched exile in sin outside Eden).

(same idea also featured in the earliest Cross in the Vatican's collection, a gift to a Pope of the 6th Century, known as the  Crux Vaticana from Emperor Justin II in Constantinople, with four teardrop jewels representing the four rivers of grace of the New Testament Gospels.

What's really neat is that the image the ancients depicted perhaps was based on real places that pilgrims would perhaps have been familiar with before the Arab conquests. I posted a response along these lines to Mike Aquilina's blog back in January, when he reported on excavations to aqueducts along the Western Wall in Jerusalem.

Here's the source of the water carried in the aqueducts:
Solomons Pool near Bethlehem, in an old etching, and modern snapshots (scroll down to latter half).  More here.  And here's a page describing the destination, the Pool of Siloam in Jerusalem.

And note the direction of water flow - like an arrow pointing north through the temple, to Golgotha, where the font of mercy poured forth on the cross. Neat, eh? Let us pray fervently for peace in the Holy Land that these holy places may be made more widely known through pilgrimage tourism, and serve a deepening appreciation for the four senses in Catholic exegesis: two addressing "things below" or man's relation to man (history in real spatial relationships of place, and tropology the moral of the tale); and two "divine and heavenly things," or man's relations with God (allegory, mystical themes of unveiling deeper meaning as in flow of water in rivers, wells and vessels etc, and anagogy our final end post-eschaton) that may bring our Separated Brethren closer in common understanding, ut unum sint!

God Bless

Comments

[Clare Krishan]

Glad you liked the links, sorry Typepad was a pain!

[Clare Krishan]

Do let us know about the events if yod attend - my husband and I sat in on a panel on Catholic blogging last night at St Joseph's U. here in Philly and met Amy Welborn from OpenBook. As a biochemist, both of the topics - law and science - interest me. How can we lay Catholics promote and defend the natural law and encourage more confidence in logical discourse from our trust in the Truth?

[Herold]

This is a nice article. River and streams.