Come to the water: we believers go way back with the wet stuff, and every year it reminds us who we are.

MY LITTLE SISTER COULDN'T BEAR TO GET HER face wet at the pool each summer. As much as she loved the water, she was afraid of it, too. The higher it rose above her knees, the more elevated the level of her panic became. Learning to swim was supposed to lessen the anxiety, but a residual fear remained. The plain truth didn't change: You can't breathe water. The fun of splashing around was always weighed with the possibility of going under.

Yet science tells us that we come from water and are, biologically at least, mostly water ourselves. Water is the essence of life, and without it we surely and swiftly die. Our relationship with water is therefore fundamentally conflicted: one of absolute dependence and necessary vigilance. No one who considers the droughts of the Sudan and the tsunamis and hurricanes of recent times can doubt that. Water holds the key to life and can bring death just the same.

Both science and Genesis agree on one thing: Life begins with water. As the Bible says, in the beginning there was water, lots of it. But the idea doesn't quite square with what many of us heard in Catholic school. We were taught that God built the material world from a kind of absolute zero. The technical term for this zero is ex nihilo--"out of nothing." When God spoke a word into this void, the divine idea immediately took shape and became a reality: light, land, creeping things, even human beings. The word of God gets its powerful reputation from its ability to act so dynamically. It doesn't hang in the air without effect, as human words often do. When God talks, matter listens. All of creation is the reply.

The term ex nihilo became important at the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215. Also known as "The Great Council," Lateran IV defined many important church teachings including the transubstantiation of the Eucharist. But the idea that God created the world out of nothing was not exactly new. A century before Jesus, an inspired author wrote: "Look at the heaven and the earth and see everything that is in them, and recognize that God did not make them out of things that existed" (2 Macc. 7:28). The doctrine that came later simply affirmed that God is behind all creation, every mute atom and living cell. If God created everything, it stands to reason that before God created, there was nothing.

BUT WHAT KIND OF NOTHING? "IN THE BEGINNING WHEN God created the heavens and the earth, the earth was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep, while a wind from God swept over the face of the waters." So says chapter 1 of Genesis.

This void is clearly not devoid of recognizable materials: darkness, wind, and water. The creation story does not deny that God is the ultimate source of existence. But the writers of Genesis were not unsettled by the idea that God had some primordial soup from which to work. The soup itself was not existence as we understand it, not the orderly and neighborly creation we would come to enjoy. The primordial soup may even have been another project of God's, a prequel to which we are not invited since humanity and the universe that contains us did not yet exist.

So in the beginning, we may say, there was nothing, if by nothing you mean nothing intrinsically worthwhile--just a dark watery abyss without life, organization, or purpose. It's the same sort of void that we mean when we say there's nothing to do this afternoon, nothing is happening in our lives at present, nothing is on TV, or nothing can save this situation. Endless options are available, but they may appear meaningless or ineffective or out of our hands. According to Genesis, the original state of chaos was never outside of God's control, as a "wind from God" blew over it to keep it in check like a cop patrolling the beat of Nowhere and Nada.

Other ancient cultures had creation myths about primeval battles between chaos and order, with flood stories prominently featured. But Israel's creation story stood out in assigning the starring role to a singular God who alone takes charge over chaos and shapes it into order and purpose. This original chaos, while menacing and potentially destructive, is never imbued with intelligence or autonomy as in other cultures. Like the orderly creation that would emerge from it, the chaos of Genesis is subject to God and not a rival to God's authority.

The creation story is a fundamental piece of theology in the Jewish and Christian traditions. It's not surprising that some believers would find the premise of their faith challenged by scientific explanations of origin that seem to diminish or replace the centrality of God's designing activity. Our profession of faith insists that God is the source of life and being. God did not choose an arbitrary design for creation but one that is meaningful and motivated in the direction of love. This love is the essence of God and also the matrix of salvation history. Love is where we come from and where we're going, if we have gleaned anything at all from the gospel of Jesus Christ.

Getting our origins straight is so central to Christianity that the Genesis story is the first one told each year at the Easter Vigil. When we gather around our Easter fire and tell the great story of salvation once more, we start with the watery abyss. We all know where this story is headed, of course: toward the grand waters of Baptism that save us from the menace of sin and its moral chaos. This sign of our Baptism is no less random than creation itself. Water is the sign precisely because the watery abyss once threatened and was then subdued. Water is now one of God's most obedient and fruitful servants, ushering us from death into life.

WHEN IT COMES TO THE EASTER VIGIL, WE MIGHT SAY that a river runs through it from start to finish. God takes the water of chaos and defines it. The endless dark and boundless waters are divided, contained, organized, and made useful. Now night is followed by day and land is separated from the waters above and those below. Rain will water the earth, and springs will bubble up from its surface. Water takes on a life-giving purpose, but it has not lost its capacity for menace. In scripture many psalms and passages from prophecy remind us that the threat of original chaos is as close as the nearest shoreline.

The firmament of Genesis, dividing the life-sustaining water from the death-dealing kind, becomes a metaphor for our mortality. Finite creatures need limits by definition. The firmament "out there" functions like the skin and tissue of our own bodies close at hand. Unbounded water, the kind that transgresses essential boundaries--whether levies or lungs--is a trespass our finite selves cannot survive.

So the river continues to flow through the Easter Vigil, past Moses and the nation at the Red Sea, who find themselves obliged to cross an unfathomable body of water and are able to do so because God, once more, contains the danger. The prophet Isaiah reminds us of the days of Noah and his salvation from the menace of water by the grace of God. Isaiah also beckons us to the delight of this river: "All you who are thirsty, come to the water!" Ezekiel invites us to another aspect of this element: "I will sprinkle clean water upon you to cleanse you from all your impurities, and from all your idols I will cleanse you." Psalms sing variously about the deer that longs for running streams, the clean heart only God can create, and the springs of salvation. Finally, in the Letter to the Romans, St. Paul makes his usual brisk way to the point: "Brothers and sisters, are you unaware that we who were baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death?"

The menace of water returns. But this time it wreaks its destruction according to God's purposes. Subdued and domesticated by God, water becomes the holy weapon of choice against original sin. The waters of Baptism banish original sin to its primordial home in the abyss. Chaos learns its limits once more.

IF THE CHAOS OF WORLD EVENTS MAKES YOU ANXIOUS, OR IF life seems to have lost its purpose, or if nothing ever seems to happen to you, consider celebrating the Easter Vigil this year. Come for the company of true believers and new initiates, for the Easter fire, for the music, for the childlike thrill of holding up a small candle against the dark. Come for the irrepressible joy that bursts out in alleluias long withheld from a world that could surely use them. Come most of all for the water stories, and our sacrament of water that flows through this celebration and all through our Christian life. If you are thirsty, there's no better place to be.

By ALICE CAMILLE, author of Invitation to Catholicism and Invitation to the New Testament, both from ACTA Publications.