The Water of Life

It is bitterly ironic that we are holding our water communion service now. Our water communion is supposed to be a time of celebration, a time when we gather in joy at the end of summer to celebrate community and share recent meaningful events in our lives.

Today the mention of water cannot help but evoke television, internet and newspaper images of hurricane Katrina and its aftermath. This morning we associate water with destruction, death, pain, suffering, and devastation. We are living through a disaster of historic proportions, a disaster that will continue to cause dislocation and misery for weeks and months to come.

I know that most of us feel a need to do something to help alleviate the human suffering we see. We are compassionate people, and what we are seeing would bring tears to a stone (to say nothing of trying the patience of a saint). Next week we will take a special collection to be used to help support the humanitarian efforts. After the tsunami in Asia we held a special collection that raised more than $11,000. We have been generous in the past; we should be generous again. In the coming days we will monitor the situation together and see what next steps would be most helpful. It is just too soon to know. Many have offered to house displaced families. That is wonderful, but we just do not know what the need is. For example, the district office of the Southwest District began taking offers of housing for displaced members of our congregations in the New Orleans area. They have hundreds of homes on the list, but as yet there are no requests for housing. It will just take time to sort things out. There will be ample time and outlets for our desire to help. This is a major disaster, and recovery is going to take many months.

In the coming weeks we would also do well to reflect on how much of this disaster had human origins. Many scientists believe global warming is making tropical storms more severe. We know that neglect of levees was a contributing factor; the vulnerability of New Orleans has been known for years without anyone doing anything about it. Just as important, for decades the channeling of the Mississippi River and the destruction of wetlands by development have made the situation dangerous. This was a natural disaster made far worse by human negligence and greed. What other disasters are we inviting by our inaction? How long will we try to plunder resources without regard to the long term effects of our actions? We have much to ponder.

We are witnessing a disaster where we see poor people seeking to escape water and its destruction. (And I must add that it is a national disgrace how it was the poor and African Americans who were disproportionately left behind and abandoned in this disaster. I know it is easy to criticize and that the task of providing help is huge, but this tragedy has once again opened my eyes to the disparities of race and class in our country.)

It is ironic to see so many poor people inundated, because one of the growing issues in our world is the struggle of poor people to get water. In much of the world today poor people are facing new restricted access to water. Water around the world is increasingly a commodity held in private hands and sold for profit. Our own Unitarian Universalist Service Committee, the UUSC, has identified access to clean water as a major human rights challenge of this century. A billion people lack access to clean water. Almost four hundred million have lost access to clean water in the last 15 years.

Water. Water can be so wonderful. Water can be a refreshing cool drink on a hot day, a summer puddle to splash in playfully, a soothing hot bath, a swimming pool, the surf on the beach, a way to bring life to flowers in our gardens. Water can also be what we are seeing in New Orleans today—a flood of death and destruction that destroys lives, a polluted filthy stench.

Water is like life. It can be joy; it can be heartbreaking.

This morning we will continue with our water communion. We will do it with some heaviness of heart. We will hold our celebration, but not as an act of collective denial of what is happening around us. Our water ceremony must not be an expression of our indifference to the suffering on the Gulf Coast. Rather, let us hold our time of sharing in the knowledge that life is ever a mixture of joy and sorrow, of delight and disappointment. Let us be mindful that life is both precious and precarious. When we are fully aware that life is fragile, life’s joys are more sweet, the times we share together are greater treasures.

As we pool our water, so too let us determine to pool our energies to help ease the suffering of others and to help share the water of life with all our brothers and sisters on our planet.