Larkin's religion - a meditation theme

Water
If I were called in
To construct a religion
I should make use of water.

Going to church
Would entail a fording
To dry, different clothes;

My liturgy would employ
Images of sousing,
A furious devout drench,

And I should raise in the east
A glass of water
Where any-angled light
Would congregate endlessly.
        
                          Philip Larkin

Science can define its molecular structure (H2O I believe) and point out that it is unusual in existing on the planent's surface in solid, liquid and gaseous forms simultaneously. Also, it's the stuff that makes up most of you and me.

Our imaginations and our senses can tell us more, if we stop taking it for granted because it is so ubiquitous. 

In our culture, we spend a lot of time and energy in emphasising our individuality. Consider how long we spend choosing between relatively trivial, if pleasurable, things, so that we feel different from everyone else. 

We are thus seduced into thinking each of us is a fixed item in the universe, a self which feels as though it could and should go on for ever (though - gulp - we know it can't and won't.) This fixed ego perception is, science suggests, an illusion. 

In the face of this painful cognitive dissonance, our desperate chase after trivia, our anxiety about the fact of mortality, we need to feel connected. Not just to each other, though certainly that - but to the universe, to "everything." 

Two absolutely wondrous substances unite us with the planet around us. Air, that passes in and out of each of us every second - we share it, like it or not. And water, of which we mostly are. 

Larkin's insight, seemingly so simple and so lightly expressed, is profound.

Water - a theme for meditation, I suggest, and maybe even a kind of worship!