Drinking Water (5 page)

The waters come from places we cannot venture, are transported by forces we cannot see, and cure through means we cannot understand. How did these waters become sacred? Even today, with medical discoveries seemingly an everyday event, many people still attribute special powers to holy waters. Where do their special powers come from?

From the earliest wells until recent times, the answer has been found in divine origins. Some stories attribute the waters’ existence to gods demonstrating their power or bestowing gifts on their followers. In the earliest of Greek legends, it was thought that rainwater came from Zeus while spring water issued from the female earth goddess Gaia. Thus spring water was used for rituals because it was imbued with sacred properties. In another Greek myth, Poseidon, god of the sea, challenged Athena over who would become the patron god of Athens. Striking his staff on the ground, Poseidon created a spring. In response, Athena created an olive tree. Poseidon’s spring, however, poured out useless salt water and the Athenians chose the goddess of wisdom.

As religions and local gods changed, the mythic nature of the wells endured. As R. J. Stewart has written about Celtic traditions: “The therapeutic power of wells remained into historical Christian times, with saints taking over but never quite disguising pagan functions. Rituals were preserved in folklore deriving from pagan worship; these include processing around wells, making offerings … and ceremonies involving drinking from skulls.”

On the other side of the world, an ancient Hawaiian legend speaks of Ka-ne, the “water finder.” Like Poseidon, he struck his staff against the ground. The crushed lava rocks revealed a large pool of pure water. The natural springs around the islands were called Ka-Wai-a-ke-Akua, “the water provided by a god.” In other stories, divinities act through chosen people, such as when Moses strikes the rock at Horeb. God commands Moses to “strike the rock, and water will come out of it for the people to drink.”

Bernadette Soubirous, 1844–1879

These are all ancient stories. But the allure of holy wells and their sacred waters remains strong today, exercising a powerful attraction on believers. And nowhere is this clearer than in Lourdes, France.

Lying in the foothills of the Pyrenees in southwestern France, Lourdes was, for centuries, merely a small market town. Dominated by the fortified castle rising in its midst, the town’s population counted a modest four thousand people through the middle of the nineteenth century. On February 11, 1858, though, this all changed. A poor fourteen-year-old girl, Bernadette Soubirous, was walking through the town’s untended outskirts, looking for firewood and bones within an area commonly used as a garbage dump. Pausing to cross a stream beside a small cave known as the grotto of Massabielle, she had a vision of a dazzling light and a beautiful woman. Her companions saw nothing.

Returning to the grotto a few days later, she had another vision. In all, Soubirous experienced eighteen visions of the white-veiled
lady, who later described herself as the Immaculate Conception. This figure was interpreted by the villagers as the Virgin Mary.

The mystic lady’s messages were different each time, calling for penance, for a chapel to be built on the site, and, later, for Bernadette “to drink of the water of the Spring, to wash in it, and to eat of the herb that grew there.” This seemed impossible, since the only water to be found in the grotto was in the moist mud. Following instructions only she could hear, Bernadette clawed in the mud and tried to drink the dirt-filled water. She seemed crazy. The next day, however, it was reported that clear water flowed from the grotto. This spring later became the source of the famed water of Lourdes, drastically changing the town’s future.

Needless to say, there were many skeptics at the time of Bernadette’s claims and since then. She was first denounced as deranged or a fraud, but after multiple interviews church officials became convinced, finding her story credible both because of her unwavering conviction and because they concluded the poor, uneducated girl could never have known about the theology of the Immaculate Conception.

Soubirous died in 1879 and following her death the fame of her story only continued to grow. A group of admirers soon began to push for her canonization as a saint. Her body was exhumed three times to seek evidence for sainthood, and each time it showed remark ably little decomposition, seen as proof of her incorruptibility. Having satisfied the Church’s requirement for three miracles, she was officially declared Saint Bernadette by Pope Pius XI in 1933. Her body has been on constant display in a glass coffin in the Sisters of Charity Convent in Nevers, France, since 1925.

Visitors started coming to Lourdes for its waters shortly after Bernadette’s claims. Some come in the hope that the waters will cure an ailment, others just for the chance to bathe in or drink such holy waters. The town now hosts roughly five million visitors a year with seven churches and upward of 270 hotels—incredibly, the greatest concentration of hotel rooms in France outside of Paris. Streets are filled with shops catering to the trade, with all manner of Lourdes-emblazoned statuettes, jewelry, and bottles of water. It’s estimated that pilgrims contribute up to $300 million to the local economy. The holy and mercantile exist alongside one another in an uneasy pairing. The English journalist Malcolm Muggeridge derided the commerce as “tawdry relics, the bric-a-brac of piety.”

Holy water bottles on sale in Lourdes, France

Nor is the commerce limited to purchases on site. The website
directfromlourdes.com
, for example, offers a range of Lourdes bottled water to those who cannot make the journey. The marketing pitch takes in both holy and practical concerns: “We are one of the only stores to sell bottles containing
fresh
water from the spring. Be aware that when you buy from other Stores that have imported the water, you may be buying stale water, that has been sat in storage for days, weeks or even months this water may not be fit to drink.” My personal favorite is the Lourdes bottled water key ring with a screw top, so you can have easy access to the holy waters while stuck in traffic.

The “pilgrimage season” runs from Easter through October. Upon arriving, pilgrims are met by volunteers who guide them to the grotto and nearby baths, one for men and one for women. Volunteers assist bathers by helping those who come for healing submerge up to their chins in the water. If a person is unable to walk, a volunteer will carry him or her. In addition to the baths, pilgrims may also visit the actual
spring, in order to fill containers to take the water home. The spring is covered in glass with spigots leading out of it. In 1990, due to heavy consumption, authorities had to ration Lourdes water.

Unlike the holy wells described earlier, where news of legendary cures was passed on by word of mouth, the Catholic Church has meticulously documented miracles at sites around the globe. Indeed, in 1883, the Church created a formal system to confirm miracles at Lourdes. Known as the Bureau des Constatations Médicales (Medical Verification Agency), the Bureau has reviewed a staggering 6,700 claimed cures and deemed 66 officially “miraculous.”

To obtain miracle status, the illness and cure must meet certain criteria set out in a rigorous, multistep review process. Pope Benedict XIV established these standards in the eighteenth century. An article in
The Economist
explains the core requirements:

The original disease must be incapacitating, with a sure and precise diagnosis. Any organic or physical ailment qualifies, but psychiatric conditions are, for the moment, excluded since diagnoses are too uncertain and recoveries too hard to assess. The cure, which should be sudden, instantaneous and without convalescence, must not result from medical treatment; and recovery must permanently restore the normal function to the beneficiary.

When a pilgrim initially claims a miracle, a doctor will consult with the patient and the patient’s doctors and write up a case history. Assuming the cure has lasted, the patient then returns a year later with the relevant medical records. For a further three years, up to 250 doctors making pilgrimage to the site review the record. If the case makes it past this comprehensive review, it is submitted to an international medical committee, comprised of twenty experts (not all of the Catholic faith), that votes on recommending miracle status to the bishop of the patient’s diocese. A two-thirds majority vote is necessary to confirm that the case cannot be accounted for by medical understanding. With increased understanding of disease, it may not be surprising that there has been a significant decline in the number of documented Lourdes miracles, with only eight declared cures since 1956.

While impressive in its rigor, such a detailed administrative process seems strangely at odds with the very idea of holy waters. Religious belief, after all, is often described as the ultimate leap of faith. This does not sit well with a rigorous examination to ensure objective verification of inexplicable events. Indeed, in 2008, the international medical panel of doctors, appointed by the Roman Catholic Church, stated that it no longer will approve miracles, leaving that decision to the Church officials.

The intense interest of Catholics in Lourdes and its waters makes clear that the allure of holy waters is alive and well. This remains true in other cultures today. Consider this assessment in a multivolume history of water:

People come from all over the world to drink and collect the water [at Lourdes], just like the Hindus, who over thousands of years have carried water from the Ganges across the Indian subcontinent. Or like the Muslims, who for hundreds of years have carried water from Mecca on their pilgrimages across the African savannah to Mali and Mauritania. Millions believe that this water can work wonders, that its miraculous properties can heal the sick, cleanse the soul, and ensure longer life.

And, while perhaps not as obvious, we see the veneration of drinking water in our own lives. Think of the New Age appeal of the town of McCloud’s water, attracting people from around the globe to meditate at the waters’ spiritual vortex. Or consider the mass marketing of bottled water. The “natural origins” of bottled water feature prominently in the marketing for some of the most important bottled water brands. Part of this is surely meant to demonstrate the purity of the water and the implication that it is safer to drink than tap water. But it may be getting at something deeper, as well—that drinking this water brings you closer to Mother Nature, to a purer place. As the historian William Cronon observed, nature “has become a secular deity in this post-romantic age.” Our relationships with drinking water have long been told through spiritual, sanctified stories, and they continue today.

S
HOULD WE DRINK EIGHT GLASSES OF WATER A DAY
?

We have all heard this at some point: To stay healthy, you should drink eight eight-ounce glasses of water every day. Not juice, not beer, and definitely not coffee. Water. While omnipresent advice, this turns out to be an urban myth. As a comprehensive 2008 review in the
Journal of the American Society of Nephrology
concluded, “There is no clear evidence of benefit from drinking increased amounts of water.”

No one seems to know for sure where this maxim originated. A 1945 report from the U.S. government’s Food and Nutrition Board recommended that people consume a milliliter of water for every calorie of food. This would work out roughly to sixty-four ounces for a day’s eating. The problem, though, is that this neglects to make clear an important point: much of the water we consume is not drunk. It’s in the foods we eat such as fruits, ice cream, and vegetables. The amount of water we should drink depends on how much water we also have eaten, not to mention how hot it is, activity levels, etc. And even if a standard rule did make sense, eight glasses a day is likely too many. Jurgen Schnermann, a kidney specialist at the National Institutes of Health, recommends half that amount, about a liter of water, to satisfy the body’s daily needs.