Waiting to See We Drank Our Fill
Perhaps you remember a scene in the movie Baby Boom. It’s one that often comes to my mind at Water Ceremony time. The former New Yorker, not yet adjusted to life on her rural Vermont homestead, is told that her well is dry. She laughs with relief. “That’s no problem,” she tells the plumber, who’s already looking doubtful, “there's a hose on the other side of the house. I’ll just pull it around and fill up the well.” Even if you haven't seen the movie, you know how the old New England plumber responds to that foolish statement.
Wells dry up sometimes, and when that happens there’s no refilling them. You have to dig another, or where it’s an option, hook up to city water.
Clean, potable, readily accessible water isn’t available in never-ending supplies. To mix my metaphors, water doesn’t grow on trees. Farmers and desert dwellers have known this for as long as they have cultivated the land, and roamed the deserts. Scientists have reminded the rest of us of this fact with increasing frequency and urgency in recent years.
It is, as Ruth Brin writes, little wonder that poets and lyricists through the ages have used water, precious, life sustaining, and often scarce, as a metaphor for the very essence of life, for that unnameable force or process of Life that will not let us down, that on which we can depend to deepen our joy, ease our burdens, accompany us in our loneliest times, comfort us in sorrow, and guide us when we’ve lost our way.
This morning's readings and this morning’s hymns tell of water symbolizing peace and love and joy, of a fountain “still there and always there,” of springs where waters that never fail quench thirsty souls. One of the primary tasks we take up in life is to discover for ourselves a source of never failing living waters. We must each discover what it is for us that flows or burbles forth, deep and pure and close at hand, ready at a moment’s notice to quench our spiritual thirst, to satisfy our heart’s longing for something we can’t even name, to sustain our souls, just as food and liquid water sustain our bodies. Contrary to the words of Isaiah on which our opening hymn is, I don’t believe that rain and snow water earth for the purpose of serving humanity–though we are sustained by them. But that’s a theological disagreement for another day.
In order to be reliable and accessible to us in the moments when our spirits are parched, these metaphorical waters must ultimately be found close by, though the journey toward discovery may be slow, arduous or circuitous. Along the way we may drink from pools of fetid water, from wells that eventually run dry, or from springs that are tainted. Alcohol and drugs may be ponds which seem to offer the thirst quenching properties of pure water–filling emptiness, dulling pain, clouding memory, elevating mood. But in the end, their waters prove to be adulterated. Work, material wealth, television, the internet, even some relationships, suitable for their proper purposes, when misused or overused in attempts to solace our parched hearts, are wells that will dry up or soon turn stale.
Each of us must discover our own source of unfailing, life-giving, spirit-reviving waters. While I can’t predict what yours might be, I do know some places that have proven to be such founts for others: art; authentic, messy, forgiving, loving, mutual relationships; nature; music; great and simple ideas that have stood the test of time; a personal spiritual practice; a balanced life of meaningful work, service, and play; and communities in which our spirits grow and deepen.
Indeed, I believe that for many of us the search for living wears, for springs that will never fail and fountains to solace parched hearts, led us to churches and religions. But the spring or fountain that quenches a spirit’s thirst can’t be found in just any religion or church. If they could, most of us wouldn’t be here. We’d be back in the churches or temples of our childhoods (those of us who weren’t raised UU, that is), or those of our parents’ childhoods, or our grandparents’ childhoods. Instead, we’re here, in this smallish congregation, in a very small religious movement, that is little known most places outside our own doors and difficult to explain, and that asks us to do hard spiritual and theological work for ourselves.
We’re here because we know, or are beginning to believe, that here we can drink and be satisfied. In the people and ideas, history and welcome, laughter and song and service of this community, we find our thirst abating. One way to understand all that we do as a church–from Sunday services to marching in the Pride and MLK, Jr. Day parades, volunteering with Celebrating Families to singing in the choir or working on building and grounds, from participating in covenant groups to providing hospitality, from Music Alliance to the curbside garden, from pledging our financial support to being part of ARC–one way of understanding all that we do as a church is as our best effort to ensure that the waters of this holy place never fail someone who needs them. All that we do as a church we do not just to quench our own thirst, but to provide water for the thirsty ones who come after us.
The woman of that place, shading her eyes,
frowned as she watched–but not because
she grudged the water,
only because she was waiting
to see we drank our fill and were
refreshed.
Whatever they may be for each one of us, whatever form they take, however they move through the world, the life-giving, spirit healing waters are there, waiting for us to drink our fill. And the keeper of the fountain, the spring, the well–whoever, whatever she may be, perhaps God, perhaps Life itself–is watching, concerned only that we do so and are refreshed.
In the year ahead, may we each find, anew or for the first time, waters that will never fail. If not here, then very near at hand. May we drink our fill and be refreshed for the living of the days that are given us. Amen.
