(RNS) According to a variety of ancient religious and philosophical systems, the world is composed of five elements: earth, air, fire, water, and a heavenly, intangible ether.
For thousands of years, humans have used the first four elements to try to touch the fifth, to mark life’s most important moments and connect them with a divine, or infinite power.
“The aim is to reclaim creation, so it is not just raw materials that serve our raw, selfish desires,” said the Rev. Russell Haitch, a United Methodist and associate professor of Christian education at Bethany Theological Seminary in Indiana. “Rather we experience creation as a gift from God, and we offer it back to God in worship.”
Here’s a quick look at how the four worldly elements are used in Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Buddhism and Hinduism:
FIRE: A watchful witness
A small fire burned throughout Sheetal Shah’s hour-long wedding ceremony last October at an Atlanta hotel. Rather than extinguish it, the Hindu priest who officiated fed the fire with ghee, a kind of butter, and with offerings from Shah and her groom’s parents. The happy couple circled the fire — contained in a small box called a “havan” — several times while vowing their devotion to each other.
Just as many Western cultures require witnesses at wedding ceremonies, for Hindus like Shah, fire serves as an essential divine witness; without the flames, a wedding is not considered complete or authentic.
“I don’t think I’ve ever heard of a wedding ceremony that hasn’t had a fire,” said Shah, who is director of development for the Hindu American Foundation. “If we’re not allowed to use fire, we’d change locations.”
People in India have revered the fire god Agni (the original source of the word “ignite”) for thousands of years, said Vasudha Narayanan, an expert on Hinduism at the University of Florida. Like the ancient Greeks, who composed the myth of the mortal
Prometheus stealing the fire from the gods, Hindus associate fire with the intellect and knowledge. Almost every major marker in Hindu life — from birthdays to funerals — can only be done in front of fire, Narayanan said.
Fire is considered an ever-watchful witness, present in the sun in the sky and in the hearth at the center of many Indian homes, and thus an apt element to watch over the wedding ceremony. Today, the wedding fire is sometimes also associated with the romantic spark that drew the betrothed together.
“That’s the beauty of these kinds of symbols,” Narayanan said, “they give room to be interpreted in many different ways.”
WATER: A cleansing rebirth
Nearly every major religion uses water for ritual cleansing, whether believers are readying a loved one for burial or preparing to enter sacred spaces. Some religions believe that water derived from a particular source, such as the Zamzam Well in Mecca, has healing properties. Others, like Catholics, believe that holy water sanctified by priests can confer blessings and even ward off evil.
For most Christians, water plays a particularly important role as the vehicle through which new members are baptized into the faith. Baptists, Catholics, and Eastern Orthodox believers may never agree on when and how proselytes should be submerged or sprinkled, but all agree that water is the essential element for washing away sins and saving souls.
“It isn’t just cleansing,” said the Rev. Russell Haitch, a United Methodist and associate professor of Christian education at Bethany Theological Seminary in Indiana, “it’s a way of being incorporated into the death and resurrection of Jesus. It symbolizes the total transformation of one’s life.”
When Christians are baptized, they are following the example of Jesus, who the Bible says was baptized by his cousin John the Baptist in the Jordan River. If Jesus hadn’t been baptized, it’s not likely that the ritual would have survived, said Haitch, author of “From Exorcism to Ecstasy: Eight Views of Baptism.”
At the time, John’s baptisms symbolized a moral cleansing and a turning of one’s life to God. John may have been following the example of contemporary Jews who baptized converts as “new persons” and used water extensively for cleansing rituals. After Jesus, baptism began to take on new meanings, however.
According to Genesis, “the face of the waters” was the first thing God formed on earth; for many Christians, water was the first element of the world redeemed by Jesus when he stepped in the River Jordan.
“This is the first step of taking back ground, as it were, from the enemy,” Haitch said. “The water of the Jordan is being reclaimed as a means of union with God.”
AIR: Inspiring mindfulness
Everybody uses air, of course. Not only is it essentially for respiration, it also carries sound: the peal of church bells, the bellow of a pipe organ, the whisper of a Muslim father calling his newborn to holiness. But Buddhists use air, or more accurately, breath, in a unique way: as a vehicle to mindfulness and liberation.
Thousands of years ago, the Buddha instructed followers to sit in the lotus position beneath a shady tree, keep their bodies still and straight and simply pay attention to their breath. Just as rain settles swirling dirt on a dusty road, focusing on the steady back-and-forth of our breath can calm an agitated mind, the Buddha said.
The meditation master actually devoted an entire sutra, or discourse, to the “full awareness of breathing,” in which he explained that breath meditation “if developed and practiced continuously, will give rise to understanding and liberation of the mind.”
Nearly every contemporary Buddhist sect now uses some form of breathing meditation, said Susan Piver, an author and meditation instructor. “In any kind of meditation, you are substituting your mind-stream for another object of attention,” she said. “In some traditions that is an image or a sound; in Buddhism the object is breath.”
Mentally following the breath forces the meditator to focus on the present moment and sharpens their powers of concentration and awareness, according to Piver, whose most recent book is called “Quiet Mind: A Beginner’s Guide to Meditation.”
“Your breath can’t be anywhere but the present.”
While the practice seems simple, it’s not easy, especially for modern minds accustomed to hyper-speed multi-tasking. But even non-Buddhists have begun to pick up forms of mindfulness meditation, using it to reduce stress, depression, and even chronic lower-back pain.
EARTH: The beginning and end
Whoever we are and wherever we go, everybody has the same final destination, according to the Bible. “All go to the same place,” the Book of Ecclesiastes says. “All come from dust, and to dust all return.”
Jews commemorate this dusty fate at funerals, when the deceased are buried in simple, bio-degradable caskets that allow the body, eventually, to “mingle with the earth,” said Rabbi Judith Hauptman, a professor of Talmud and rabbinic culture at New York’s Jewish Theological Seminary. In Israel, not even coffins are used, in order to speed up the body’s blending with sacred soil, she said.
For Muslims, being buried without a coffin is considered a parting gift to the world. “Giving your body back to the earth is seen as one of the last acts of generosity that you can do,” said Omid Safi, a Muslim scholar and author of “Memories of Muhammad,” a new biography of Islam’s founder. Islamic literature is filled with tales of flowers blooming from gravesites, Safi added.
Some Jews sprinkle the body with dust from Israel, placing it on the deceased’s eyes, forehead, heart, and, for males, the area of their circumcision, as a reminder of the covenant between God and Abraham, according to Samuel Heilman’s 2001 book “When a Jew Dies.” At grave-side services, mourners will shovel dirt, preferably from the Holy Land, on the coffin, using the convex side of a shovel to symbolize the difficulty of dealing with death, until the coffin is hidden from sight.
Tradition holds that when the Messiah comes, Jews will be resurrected on the Mount of Olives in Israel, which is one reason Jewish law discourages cremation, said Hauptman. “It’s a whole lot easier to put you back together if your bones are there,” she said.
When the End of Days arrives, souls buried outside of Israel will begin an arduous journey through underground tunnels to the Holy Land. Sometimes a little bag of Israeli soil is placed with the deceased in order to help them find their way. “If they bring a little soil with them, somehow it’s going to ease their journey,” Hauptman said.
