Water

You and Tobias are hopping around in the sprinkler.  The sprinkler is a magnificent invention because it exposes raindrops to sunshine.  That does occur in nature, but it is rare.  When I was in seminary I used to go sometimes to watch the Baptists down at the river.  It was something to see the preacher lifting the one who was being baptized up out of the water and the water pouring off the garments and the hair.  It did look like a birth or a resurrection.  For us the water just heightens the touch of the pastor's hand on the sweet bones of the head, sort of like making an electrical connection.  I've always loved to baptize people, though I have sometimes wished there were more shimmer and splash involved in the way we go about it.  Well, but you two are dancing around in your iridescent little downpour, whooping and stomping as sane people ought to do when they encounter a thing so miraculous as water.
          --from the novel Gilead, Marilynne Robinson

Christ is being baptized.  The one who is Christ is there, and the one who is John, and the dim other poeple stadning on cobbles or sitting on beach logs back from the bay.  These are ordinary people--if I am one now, if those are ordinary sheep singing a song in the pasture.

The two men are bare to the waist.  The one walks him into the water, and holds him under.  His hand is one his neck.  Christ is coiled and white under the water, standing on stones.

He lifts from the water.  Water beads on his shoulders.  I see the water in balls as heavy as planets, a billion beads of water as weighty as worlds, and he lifts them up on his back as he rises.  He stands wet in the water.  Each one bead is transparent, and each has a world, or the same world, light and alive and apparent inside the drop; it is all there ever could be, moving at once, past and future, and all the people.  I can look into any sphere and see people stream past me, and cool my eyes with colors and the sight of the world in spectacle perishing ever, and ever renewed.  I do; I deepen into a drop and see all that time contains, all the faces and deeps of the worlds and all the earth's contents, every landscape and room, everything living or made or fashioned, all past and future stars, and especially faces, faces like the cells of everything, faces pouring past me talking, and going, and gone.  And I am gone.

For outside, it is bright.  The surface of things outside the drops has fused.  Christ himself and the others, and the brown warm wind, and hair, sky, the beach, the shattered water--all this has fused.  It is the one glare of holiness; it is bare and unspeakable.  There is no speech nor language; there is nothing, no one thing, nor motion, nor time.  There is only this everything.  There is only this, and its bright and multiple noise.
          --from Holy the Firm, Annie Dillard