Holy Waters
Reading and sermon preached by Rev. Claudia Elferdink
April 19, 2009

Do you remember the last time it rained? 

The sweet damp smell just before the rain began to fall?
Tentative drops on your sidewalk or windshield.
The insistent pounding of a downpour waking you in the night.
Cool drops on your cheek.
Water gushing in your gutter or instant rivulets in the yard.

Here in New England we have an extraordinary gift of water.

The economy may be tight and money is more scarce now, but when it comes to water, we have an abundance of richness.  Rivers. lakes, ponds, streams, oceans are everywhere!  Just walk out the door and within a few blocks is water.   It is easy to take water for granted.  Many of us may have forgotten the last time it rained because it rains so often.

          In the Southwest, rain is NOT taken for granted.  Five years ago my daughter Martha was due to have her baby.  She lives in New Mexico and she runs a community garden.  In this arid climate, no garden grows without humans doing the watering. It was August and it hadn’t rained for months. Despite endless watering cans, the garden was withering. Martha was desperate so she made an offer to the universe.  If it rained, she promised, she would name her baby Rain.  It did rain and several days later Sylvia Rain Myers was born.

          We enjoy such an abundance of water in New England that often we don’t even need our watering cans.
Water is always flowing, seeking a lower place, flowing to the sea.  Where does your rain go?  To a small nearby stream?  To the Connecticut River or the Thames River, or to your garden and down into an underground stream or aquifer?  Where does it go?
When you turned on your bathroom faucet to brush your teeth this morning, where does that water come from?  And where does it go when it disappears down the drain?

As we sang earlier, water links us up.  Wherever you live on this planet, water links us up to each other and ultimately to the sea. We all live downstream.  We are impacted by our neighbors upstream, and we all affect those downriver from us. Seventy percent of Long Island Sound water is from the Connecticut River, so we are highly dependent on the people of White River Junction, Brattleboro, Northampton, Springfield, Hartford and Middletown to help us clean up the Sound.  And of course the Thames River watershed affects the water quality of the Sound. As we say in our Unitarian Universalist Seventh Principle, we live in the “interdependent web of all existence” .

Whether you live with a blessed abundance of water or scarcity, water connects us a human beings to each other and to our planet. Neglect of water exacts a high toll to all life.  Water demands universal cooperation, respect and stewardship for the common good.

Rabindranath Tagore expressed this interdependence in his poem, “The Stream of Life.” (529)

 The same stream of life that runs through my veins night and day
runs through the world and dances in rhythmic measures.

It is the same life that shoots in joy through the dust of the earth
in numberless blades of grass
and breaks into tumultuous waves of leaves and flowers.

It is the same life that is rocked in the ocean-cradle of birth
and of death, in ebb and in flow.

I feel my limbs are made glorious by the touch of this world of life.
And my pride is from the life-throb of ages dancing in my blood this moment.

          It’s enough to make you a Universalist.

          I imagine many of you in this room remember the first time an astronaut was high enough in space to looked out his porthole and see our blue planet--  bright and whole and vulnerable in dark space.  You could hear collective gasps of wonder, as for the first time, we could truly see our whole planet with its swirling clouds and great oceans.  Humanity took a giant leap in understanding as we must have with long ago when Copernicus and Galileo struggled to convince us that our earth was not flat, but a globe.

          That radiant view of earth from space was new evidence that we are indeed the water planet.  The great continents cover only a third of earth’s surface.  It is water and clouds that give our planet earth it’s distinctive blue color.  It is water that makes earth different from most planets that have no visible life.  Water is the source of life as we know it.

          Humans, animals and plants live on a thin edge of earth’s vast waters.
The salty oceans offer our water cycle moisture through evaporation leading to clouds and rain—the fresh water that sustains life.  Only 1% of earth’s water is available to sustain people, animals and agriculture. One percent.

          Living in water-rich New England, it is easy to be oblivious to how scarce clean fresh water is today on our planet.  I imagine a few of you, like me, did not grow up with an abundance of water.  Since I moved to Massachusetts several decades ago, when it comes to water, I have felt like an interplanetary visitor.   You see, I grew up in Los Angeles where rivers are bone dry most of the year. Rain is a rare event—I never heard of a rain date before I moved east. In southern California, people stay home when it rains.  In it’s natural state, my home region is semi-arid. The look of scrub brush and dust in old cowboy movies is literally the real L.A.  Hardball politics have stolen water from great distances for the manicured and irrigated lawns of Beverly Hills. The movie “China Town” was an all too realistic portrayal of the violence of California water wars. If you live in Los Angeles, you know that the lush green golf courses, turquoise backyard swimming pools and landscaping all depend on water coming from the Colorado River.

          With scientists warning that global warming will make dry places drier and wet places wetter, the entire southwest is in for quite a dry spell. I heard a New Mexican scholar give his main recommendation to a large group of locals:  here’s what he said, “First, you have to really love the desert.”  He went to say that as things only get dryer, everyone will have to be even more frugal with what precious water we have.

          It is no wonder that the New York Times reported last month that even with an economic slow down and with drinking water getting harder to find, one profession is growing like gang-busters: hydrologists. People who know how to find and deliver water are in high demand worldwide.

          Our own Unitarian Universalist Service Committee is now heavily involved in advocating for the human right to water.  Right now, over a billion people in the world do not have access to safe drinking water.  In the last ten years, more children have died from dirty water than all the people who died in World War II.

          Let me give you just one example of current water struggles where the UU Service Committee is involved.  When South Africa wrote its new constitution in 1996 they included the human right to water. Less that a decade later, the public Johannesburg Water service started installing water meters only in poor black areas and not in white communities. When a family had used about half the amount recommended by the World Health organization in a month, water was shut off.  The UU Service Committee teamed up with a local human rights coalition to take Johannesburg to court.

The court ruled that the citizens’ constitutional rights had been violated, the meters were removed and the water turned on.
          For some who grew up Catholic, Episcopalian or Eastern orthodox, holy water may have specific associations: water blessed by a priest and sprinkled on babies or adults.

          But today, I invite you to wonder with me if we’re ready to see common, essential, life-giving water as holy water.  Is water something that links us to each other and our planet, is a truly sacred or divine?

          Peter Myers, a Unitarian Universalist folk singer who grew up a Catholic, wrote a song about this called “Holy Now.”  John has offered to sing it for us.  Listen carefully.
          (John sings)

Holy Now

When I was a boy, each week
On Sunday, we would go to church
And pay attention to the priest
He would read the holy word
And consecrate the holy bread
And everyone would kneel and bow
Today the only difference is
Everything is holy now
Everything, everything
Everything is holy now

When I was in Sunday school
We would learn about the time
Moses split the sea in two
Jesus made the water wine
And I remember feeling sad
That miracles don’t happen still
But now I can’t keep track
‘Cause everything’s a miracle
Everything, Everything
Everything’s a miracle

Wine from water is not so small
But an even better magic trick
Is that anything is here at all
So the challenging thing becomes
Not to look for miracles
But finding where there isn’t one

When holy water was rare at best
It barely wet my fingertips
But now I have to hold my breath
Like I’m swimming in a sea of it
It used to be a world half there
Heaven’s second rate hand-me-down
But I walk it with a reverent air
‘Cause everything is holy now
Everything, everything
Everything is holy now

Read a questioning child’s face
And say it’s not a testament
That’d be very hard to say
See another new morning come
And say it’s not a sacrament
I tell you that it can’t be done

This morning, outside I stood
And saw a little red-winged bird
Shining like a burning bush
Singing like a scripture verse
It made me want to bow my head
I remember when church let out
How things have changed since then
Everything is holy now
It used to be a world half-there
Heaven’s second rate hand-me-down
But I walk it with a reverent air
‘Cause everything is holy now

For me, water is holy.  Walking along the Connecticut River, working for clean rivers, filling with joy with watching the PBS story of Pete Seeger and the Sloop Clearwater on the Hudson, all are religious experiences.  Loving water and treating it as holy for me is a source of inspiration and hope.  It nourishes my soul. It is a cool drink in a parched world of cynicism and despair.  One of the most spiritual moments of my life was swimming in the cool waters of the Connecticut Lake at the headwaters of the Connecticut River on the border of New Hampshire and Quebec.  I have lived and advocated for the Connecticut River for decades.  I felt I had come home.

          Feeling committed to the human right to water invites a practice of personal conservation and public activism.  What wire  will touch the chaotic liquid in your life and crystallize meaning in your vision of justice?

          Bill McKibben is a highly respected philosopher and activist in the environmental moment.  He is currently a leader in the 350 movement.  It is a global initiative to stabilize carbon at a sustainable level of 350 parts per million.  Hopefully, you will hear more about the 350 initiative this fall.

In his book called “Enough,” McKibben tells the tale of beavers who live behind his house in Vermont.  McKibben watches these beavers carefully and admires their steady habits.  I understand Connecticut folks also admire steady habits.  The Beaver Brook father beaver swam across the pond every day at five o’clock to begin his work repairing the wooden dam.  If a piece of the dam became loose at any other time of day, he immediately went out to fix it because his family’s safety depended on the water levels being above the openings to their dwelling. The beaver was not only a creature of steady habits, but also bodily demand.  He chewed on wood to fell trees for his construction work.  But he also chewed on trees because his front teeth grew at such a rate that they would grow through his skull if he didn’t chew methodically.  Beavers are driven to do their work, no matter what.
Humans, McKibben says we have “that beavering drive within us. (In fact, we have it in spades.  Beavers content themselves with one dam at a time.  No beaver has chains of dams.  They don’t franchise dams.)”

Humans are prone to conquer any limit; the bigger the better.  However, Bill Kibben reminds us that this “limitless” fixation, in humans  can be tempered with other values. We have instincts and drives, but as humans, we have beliefs and religious ideas that can guide us to say no.

Something very understandable and technologically elaborate can, in the end, be wrong.  “We are the creature that in Erazim Kohak’s lovely phrase, can ‘subordinate greed to love.’ ”  Birds have hollow bones, dogs an incredible sense of small.  Human are not better, but are unique in that we can intentionally reign ourselves in.

          When it comes to building dams, the environmental movement began in America when John Muir said no to the Hetch Hetchy Dam.  It spurred the forming of the Sierra Club and though they failed in stopping the Hetch Hetchy, they did save Yosemite from the same fate.  About ten years ago, former Interior Secretary Bruce Babbit pulled the plunger to dynamite the Edwards Dam in Maine.  It was the first hydroelectric dam to be intentionally destroyed to make way for fish.  Babbit spoke these words: “This is a statement about our capacity to honor and respect God’s creation, the sacramental commons, and to live not just in the past, but in a visionary and different future, in a way of harmony and balance with creation.”

Today, more dams are being removed than are being built.

          Ancient religious traditions have long taught the importance of restraint.  Taking a day of rest.  Not giving in to temptation.  Use only what you need.  Seven principles to limit and guide.  Enough is enough.

          So the next time you smell rain coming or feel raindrops on your cheek, accept it with gratitude.  Know that the river runs through you and links you up “like the river as it flows to the sea”.

          We are fully capable of showing restraint and respect in our water use.

          Holy waters.

Amen.

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