So Thirsty!
Oh, the sweet peace of sitting outside, safe and dry under my front porch roof during a gentle summer rain. The neighbourhood gardens are in full July bloom and I feel their gratitude for today’s wet benediction. Lilies, orange, yellow and cabernet-coloured, raise their trumpets to the sprinkling. White phlox stand tall while golden coreopsis bend their long thin stems gracefully beneath the shower’s gentle weight. Pale purple hosta bells bow their heads. Tough lavender bushes revel like children in the rain. After days of hot sun, underground tree roots must be surreptitiously slurping it up the way I do at my kitchen tap on sweaty afternoons.
The air is pleasantly warm, filled with the whispering sound of thousands of droplets hitting green leaves and dusty pavement.
I can’t sit still any longer - I need to write an ode to water.
One of my personally canonized saints is Canadian Maude Barlow (see Council of Canadians, the only non-charitable organization to which I regularly donate). She is the political prophet who has been sounding the alarm for decades that we are squandering the very God-given substance that keeps us alive. For God’s sake, stop buying bottled water, I beg you. Mark my words, foreign corporations are draining our water table to get your money and drought-stricken Americans are eyeing Canada’s abundant melting glaciers and rainfall. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.
A week ago I had the honour of paraphrasing to my Texas children one of my favourite bible stories about water.
I chose the tale of Jesus, hot and tired from desert travel, sitting without a bucket near a deep well. Along came a lone woman, alien in both gender and race. He asked her for a drink.
She was no dummy.
Clearly a thoughtful feminist, she replied wryly, “Why would you, a Jewish rabbi, ask me, a lowly Samaritan woman, to fetch you water?”
Jesus, admiring her comeback, replied with an equally provocative comment, “If you knew who I was you’d be asking me for a drink of living water.”
“What? Ask you? Are you better than our ancestors who dug this well? You don’t even have a bucket with you.”
Instead of attacking her for defying his superior male ranking, Jesus, with tender respect, stated a profound spiritual truth, “Anyone who drinks regular water will soon be thirsty again but anyone who chooses to take in what I’m offering will not only have their spiritual thirst quenched but will be so filled with peace and unconditional love that they will feel as if they have a spring inside of them, a fountain of forgiveness and faith in God that never runs dry.”
Again, she was no dummy.
“Oh Sir, please give me that water!”
Jesus proceeded with a conversation perfectly tailored to this woman’s own situation. In the end she was so convinced that Jesus was God’s answer to all of life’s death-dealing deserts that she spread the astonishing good news to her whole town.
Sorry, but I just can’t help it. I always read life as its Author's allegory, like a graphic novel that isn’t fiction or fantasy. Gazing with pleasure on today’s lovely rainy gardens, I, too, swell with gratitude for water, both literal and eternal.
