A Tale of Two Lakes, A River and some Streams
Preacher: Reverend Andrea Abbott
A Tale of Two Lakes, A River and some Streams
If you have a suspicion that this started off as a Water Communion service, you would be right on. Then I looked at the calendar and found that incoming Sunday was September 11th and somehow this sermon didn’t seem right. So, it is here with you today, a sort of prequel to Water Communion which we will have in two weeks.
Let me start with a verse from Ni’Mat-Allah “The Sea Is Our Essence” (1330–1431) Persian Sufi poet
We are of the sea, and the sea is our essence;
Why then is there this duality between us?
The world is an imaginary line before the sight;
Read well that line, for it was inscribed by us.
Whatsoever we possess in both the worlds
In reality, my friend, belongs to God.
When I get stuck writing, and yes, I do find myself looking at the page in front of me and wondering what comes next, I find the best way to get unstuck is to wash dishes. Given our house, there are always dishes to wash. I found this solution by accident. I’d run out of words or would find that what I wrote wasn’t what I meant, words having a way of taking off on their own, and I’d take a break. There were the dirty breakfast dishes, staring at me, I’d start washing and words would come tumbling into my mind. I didn’t connect the two acts at first. Maybe I didn’t want to. After all, who wants to even admit this little peculiarity? What if people began sending me dirty dishes thinking they were helping my creativity? But, like it or not, getting my hands in water seems to loosen something up.
Water is the key, I’m sure, not the detergent or the act of scrubbing. I have heard other people who write say that a bath or shower renews their ability to keep pounding on the keyboard or facing a half-finished canvas. And it makes sense that water is the key. We come from water, collectively, from our earliest beginnings as one celled creatures in the primordial soup and individually, from our earliest beginnings in our mother’s primordial soup. We are begun in water and we are mostly water. If we all leaked out all our H2O, there wouldn’t be much to sweep up afterwards. Similarly, the planet we call home is mostly composed of water. Funny, then, that it’s called earth, isn’t it?
Of course we are more conscious of the earth part than if we were, let’s say whales or manatees or perch. But even when we live on dry, dry land, water is still around us, in dew, in mist, hidden in the soil and in aquifers under the soil.
Perhaps because there is so much of it, we almost forget it’s there. When we stand at the edge of the ocean, we feel much as we do when we look into the night sky. How vast, how unimaginably powerful! How could we ever have any impact on this power? But, of course, the ocean is not even a drop of water when compared to the universe and, unlike the vast reaches of space, we have had a lot of impact on even the great seas and on the creatures that call it home. And now, in turn, we are finding that this is having an impact on us. We can live for, possibly, three weeks without food but we die in three days without water.
Perhaps because it is so essential, water shows up a lot in folk tales and poems and sacred legends. It is a big part of our Judeo-Christian heritage, the tales that formed our Western consciousness. Noah and the Ark, one of many, many flood tales from the Mid East, Moses’ staff (water from a rock, parting the Reed Sea), living water that Jesus promised the Samaritan woman. Perhaps because it is too close to us, we often don’t see its power in our lives but its poetry lives within us as a submerged stream. It is a submerged stream that surfaces when we cry with joy or sorrow, the water within us that is part of our expression of emotion. Perhaps because it is all around us and within us, perhaps because we need it so desperately, we forget our reliance on water, taking it for granted as we too often take for granted those closest to us in our lives.
That old saying, you don’t miss your water ‘til your well runs dry has been on my mind this summer as I watch our lawn turn into something the color and consistency of shredded wheat. It has been much on all of our minds, I think, as we watch streams dry up and hear about stunted harvests and water restrictions, so far voluntary. It is much on our minds when we hear of the drought in California and the vast forest fires consuming the West. It probably should have been on our minds when we heard of the gradual desertification of Northern Africa, a process that has been going on for many, many years. We may think it makes sense that water features so much in the Bible given the dry and dusty nature of the area but that area was the breadbasket of Europe as well as the Middle East in Biblical times. Many areas that are now sandy waste were once fertile ground and drought has sent millions of people into famine. It is sometimes a slow process, so slow and so far away that we are able to keep it out of our thoughts until it strikes closer to home. You don’t miss the water ‘til your well runs dry.
The water that is available to humans is also becoming increasingly problematic. I grew up near the St. Lawrence and in those far off days people took their water directly from the river. The river that was billed as the cleanest in the world. I wouldn’t advise that now.
I became very aware of water, its use and misuse, when we were in Africa with Marcia and company in January. As one of the last events on our trip, we visited a lake, Lake Ganvie. It is a beautiful lake, sparkling in the sun, with small boats sailing with square sails of many colors across it. As we watched the fishermen cast their nets in spreading veils, it was as if we had gone back in time and could be seeing the same sights one hundred, two hundred years ago. How fresh and unspoiled! That is the image. In reality, touching even a drop of the water from that lake could have meant severe illness. The villages that dot the lake, villages built on stilts so that everyone has the lake as their cellar, have one of the highest rates of tuberculosis in the world. After we knew this, everyone in our group kept their hands well in our tour boat. After we knew this, it was painful to watch the children who lived in the stilt houses playing in the water. What would look like innocent childhood fun here looked like suicide there.
Then I had to remind myself that we do not swim in Onondaga lake, that we have the distinction, if that’s what we want to call it, of living near a body of water that’s been described as the most polluted in America. Millions, possibly billions, have been spent on restoring it and still there are problems. We have our neighbors, neighbors we have not always treated so well, the Onondagas to thank for reminding us of the sacredness of water. This is not a quaint notion from a primitive people. We can only live for three days without clean water.
As Roger Scruton says in The Soul of the World.
From the Enlightenment onward, we have regarded the world as a commodity, one of many commodities, to be used, to be exploited, for our good, though the good from this exploitation often went only to a small group of people.
What would happen if every time we used water, we thought about water as sacred? A gift from God, the emanation of the Spirit, the essence of life, the revelation of the laws of Nature, the world’s heritage, however you think of it, how do we honor the world, how do we counter the force that has stripped the world of its sacredness and substituted bare utility in its place?
Let me read you another poem, this is an old and famous one by Wordsworth, written in 1806.
The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers;
Little we see in Nature that is ours;
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!
This Sea that bares her bosom to the moon;
The winds that will be howling at all hours,
And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers,
For this, for everything, we are out of tune;
It moves us not.—Great God! I’d rather be
A pagan suckled in a creed outworn;
So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,
Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;
Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;
Or hear old Triton blow his wreathèd horn.
In conjunction with this, I’d like to quote again The Soul of the World by Roger Scruton, in the section titled “The Fallen World”.
“When we see the world exclusively as an assemblage of objects, then nothing is rescued from barter and exchange. That is what we now do to each other and to the earth. It is also what we now do to our habitat, which is ceasing to be a home and becoming instead a “machine for living in.”
A machine for living in. That is how we have seen the world since at least 1806, probably a lot longer. But how long can we go on seeing our world this way? And, the trickier question, how can we detach ourselves from that view of the world? How do we see things as those people who lived before we began to view the earth as something to be exploited? Can we?
I don’t think we can. We live in the age we live in. Our thoughts and beliefs are set in molds created by those who came before us and it is very hard to break those molds. We have been the recipient of great comforts and great advances in knowledge, in ways of living by seeing the world in the way that industrialization and commercialization have taught us to see. We cannot see the world in a pre-Enlightenment way ever again. Later in the chapter, Scruton goes on to say,
Environmental degradation comes in just the same way that moral degredation comes, through representing people and places in impersonal ways, as objects to be used rather than as subjects to be respected. The sense of beauty puts a brake upon destruction, by representing its object as irreplaceable. When the world looks back at me with my eyes, as it does I aesthetic experience, it is also addressing me in another way. Something is being revealed to me, and I am being made to stand still and absorb it. It is of course nonsense to suggest that there are naiads in the trees and dryads in the groves. What is revealed to me in the experience of beauty is a fundamental truth about being—that being is a gift.”
How do we see differently from how “getting and spending”? What will change our consciousness so we see this “fundamental truth about being”?
Is it possible for us to change our consciousness about our relationship to the rest of the natural world? I think such a change would be on the same order as the Axial Age, that period of time that saw the Greek philosophers, the Jewish Prophets and the Buddhist way arise in different parts of the world. We seem to have before us the start necessity that gave rise to these advances in thought. As Wordsworth reminds us, we have outlived and outworn our old ways of understanding. We have unprecedented dangers and challenges before us, challenges and dangers that have arisen from our own ways of thought. We have created the problem; we need to find a new energy to solve it.
I am talking about water in a time of drought. I am talking about water when the seas themselves, what we thought of as the boundless seas, are becoming endangered by our waste and overuse. I am talking about understanding our absolute dependence on the natural world. Lake Ganvie is a metaphor for the water on our earth. We are a sealed system. We cannot shoot off to Mars to live or import water from Jupiter. Will we only miss our water when our well runs dry or is poisoned? We, here, currently have the luxury of pure water, but for how long and at what cost? And at what cost to others that we do not see whose water is polluted or disappearing?
We are mostly composed of water. We need water to live. Perhaps for that reason so many of us find renewal in the beauty of different lakes, rivers, streams. Think for a moment of the water that is most sacred to you, that is your living water. Think how you feel when you are near it; think of the peace it gives you. I would like to close with one more poem, a poem by William Butler Yeats that captures that feeling.
I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made:Nine bean-rows will I have there, a hive for the honey-bee;And live alone in the bee-loud glade. And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow,Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings;There midnight’s all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow,And evening full of the linnet’s wings. I will arise and go now, for always night and dayI hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore;While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements grey,I hear it in the deep heart’s core.