Dowsing for the Water of Life
Were you able to imagine yourself on the lazy river? Maybe a real river or maybe the one in a water park. I like floating on real rivers and oceans and lakes best, but at a water park, the lazy river is one of my favorite attractions. I like relaxing on my innertube, floating gently along, buoyant, effortless. I like wave pools, too–again, playing in waves at the beach is even better–but if I'm at a water park, bobbing up and down and splashing in simulated waves is fun.
What I don’t like so much at the water park is the huge, tippy, precariously balanced bucket that fills slowly with water until it tips completely over and drenches whoever happens to be standing under it with a sheet of cold water. Some kids and adults seem to like that. They keep a close eye on the bucket and when it looks ready to tip they rush over to get drenched. Not me. To me it’s like deliberately walking under the spot on the gutter where all the water that’s blocked from the leaf-clogged downspouts gathers and pours down in a cold gushing stream. Not my idea of fun–as much as I love being in the water most of the time.
When I started to think about this year’s Ingathering and Water Ceremony Service I thought about that big bucket of water. About overflowing gutters. About how much of life seems to backup from clogged spots in society and them come rushing at us, drenching us with anger, taunts, and misinformation, frayed nerves, and short tempers, bold lies, truths wielded as weapons and indifference donned as a shield. About how sometimes it feels like bullies, loud voices, unfair rules splash water all over us all day long. We’re soaking in this storm of cold, dirty water, day after day, and it doesn’t come at us from a deliberately placed and easily recognized bright red bucket perched atop a stripped pole that we can avoid simply by choosing other, more pleasant watery pursuits–the lazy river or the water slide or the tubes and funnels.
The polluted water of mean, uncaring voices and actions pours off our roofs onto our heads. It runs in our gutters, soaking our feet and shoes. It blasts out of our screens and speakers not just drenching us but knocking us back with the force of fire hoses. When I started to plan this service I thought of how life is often like that in the late summer, early fall 2022, and how we come, longing thirsty souls, to the Unitarian Universalist Church of Savannah, for respite from that drenching and chilling and fetid stream, to drink and be satisfied at the fountain of love, of acceptance, of community, the fountain of many truths and One Truth, the fountain of peace wrought by building justice, to be in a place where we can sort of splash around in kind words, with people who are happy to be with us.
It would have been a fine message. Appropriate to the morning’s occasion, in touch with the zeitgeist and self-affirming for a congregation of Unitarian Universalists who believe in the sacred refuge of this place. Then our music director David wrote his marvelous offertory piece, challenging me to rethink my metaphors.
Water, wash over me
Water, come and set me free
Water, come heal my pain
Cleanse me, make me whole again.
Water, so deep and wide
Water, crash upon the shore
Waters send me off to sleep
And wake to find myself restored
Water, wash over me
Water, come and set me free
Water, come heal my pain
Cleanse me, make me whole again.
Hearing his words I thought, perhaps it’s not just carefully controlled and dispensed water, flowing from fountains or pitchers that heal and restore weary, sullied, bedraggled and dirty-waterlogged 2022 souls. Perhaps we come to church not just to sip at the fountain of love, of acceptance, of community, the fountain of many truths and One Truth, the fountain of peace wrought by building justice, but to truly bathe in those waters. To let our rigid muscles go limp for a while, to trust the buoyancy of this community to hold us and move us along the river, or with the tide, for the time we need to become restored.
And perhaps, perhaps this most of all, though the waters of peace, of love and compassion, of truth and hope will always flow in and through this place, perhaps this isn’t the only place we can drink and be satisfied, not the only place we can lie gentle and wide, not the only place where someone waits to see if we drink our fill and are satisfied. Maybe there are other places we can sort of splash around in kind words, with people who are happy to be with us.
Perhaps having found the fountain or the splash pad or the lazy, golden river here in this room or up in Phillipa’s Place, having witnessed the ancient, unending source of wisdom and love, justice and hope replenished and protected and kept clear by the words and deeds, the engagement and reconciliation, the laughter and the tears, labor and play of this community, as surely as the water in our common vessel is replenished by the drops we pour into it–perhaps having both found and replenished the water of life here, we then are able go out from this place, imaginary dowsing rods in hand, and both discover and replenish it in our neighborhoods, in our schools, in our workplaces and on the lines of justice-seeking, justice-making.
After nearly thirty years in the Unitarian Universalist ministry I’m still a bit unclear about the purpose of the water ceremony many, though not all, of our congregations celebrate each autumn. Water is a powerful symbol. One of the four most elemental. But why do we collect it on our vacations, worry about sealing it well enough to get it home without leaking, set it out the night before so we don’t forget it on Ingathering Sunday? Or grab a jar full from the tap on our way out the door? Why do we pour it all together, usually making a big mess? To what end do we do this?
Maybe this: as an annual tangible, visual, messy and sparkling reminder that each Sunday, each choir rehearsal, each board meeting and committee meeting and covenant group meeting and work day, we carry in our very being the stuff of life abundant into this community, pour it all together, and the sparkling, splashing drops quench us, sate us, wash us, hold us, and carry us glistening into a world that needs our sparkle, a world thirsty for the water of life poured forth from our being.
Let us begin.