Today during daily Mass, the Genesis reading tied in perfectly with the posted Tarkovsky film shorts.  Coalesce, to grow together or into one body, synchronization, unification, the pulling together of tended ends.  Father Sam spoke flowingly of water in his homily.  Baptism, cleansing, thirst quenching—I thirst!—overflowing, a deluge, tears, rain, a river, an ocean, swimming in water, dreaming of water, submerged and intense, subtle and cooling—divinely ever present within iconography—beyond words, a flood.

At the end of forty days Noah opened the hatch he had made in the ark, and he sent out a raven, to see if the waters had lessened on the earth. It flew back and forth until the waters dried off from the earth. Then he sent out a dove, to see if the waters had lessened on the earth. But the dove could find no place to alight and perch, and it returned to him in the ark, for there was water all over the earth. Putting out his hand, he caught the dove and drew it back to him inside the ark. He waited seven days more and again sent the dove out from the ark. In the evening the dove came back to him, and there in its bill was a plucked-off olive leaf! So Noah knew that the waters had lessened on the earth. He waited still another seven days and then released the dove once more; and this time it did not come back. In the six hundred and first year of Noah’s life, in the first month, on the first day of the month, the water began to dry up on the earth. Noah then removed the covering of the ark and saw that the surface of the ground was drying up. Noah built an altar to the LORD, and choosing from every clean animal and every clean bird, he offered burnt offerings on the altar. When the LORD smelled the sweet odor, he said to himself: “Never again will I doom the earth because of man since the desires of man’s heart are evil from the start; nor will I ever again strike down all living beings, as I have done. As long as the earth lasts, seed time and harvest, cold and heat, Summer and winter, and day and night shall not cease.”