Water Communion

Rev. David Takahashi Morris

Thomas Jefferson Memorial Church – Unitarian Universalist

September 3, 2006

Do you know how it feels to have a thirsty spirit?

The Christian inspirational writer Max Lucado writes: “You're acquainted with physical thirst. Stop drinking and see what happens. Coherent thoughts vanish, skin grows clammy, and vital organs shut down. Deprive your body of necessary fluid, and it will tell you. Deprive your soul of spiritual water,” he goes on, “and it will also tell you. Dehydrated hearts send desperate messages.”

Have you ever heard the voice of a dehydrated heart?

There are many ways our spirits can grow thirsty. Sometimes we pour ourselves out for our loved ones in times of trouble. Sometimes we are surrounded by others’ anxiety or distress, and even though it isn’t ours we take it on, trying to make things better for everyone. Sometimes the distress is ours—a job that doesn’t feed our hearts’ deep longing, a financial worry that demands our constant attention, a report from the doctor that keeps us up late at night.

There are drying winds and desert places in all our lives. Even if there’s nothing dire going on, the day-to-day demands and pressures of life can leave us pretty parched. A half-hour with the morning newspaper haunts us with all the sorrow and strife in the world. A constant background noise of radio, TV, print, and internet advertising confronts us with uncountable unworthy demands for our attention, our time, and our money. Any given week of keeping up with the demands of work, the needs of family, and the desires and longings of our own hearts can leave us out of breath and depleted.

“Dehydrated hearts send desperate messages.” When all of this life coming at us leaves us feeling that we don’t have the resources to rise to the next occasion, we shrink and shrivel away from it all. We rasp at the ones we love; we pull back from situations where we know we are needed. We run out of tears to shed at the pain of the world, and our response to the mistakes and shortcomings of others is dry and bitter. We need to renew ourselves. We need to find wells we can we dip into to restore our drooping spirits.

Every one of us needs to know: What is my well, my source of inspiration and sustaining strength? We need to return to that source often, and drink deeply.

Water has always been a symbol of life and restoration. All life comes from water, we are reminded by Lynn Ungar’s words in our call to worship today. The preciousness of the gift, the urgency of our need for it, and the mysterious process by which water emerges from the earth, gives life, passes into the sky and returns to earth again—all of this has taught us reverence for water. In the presence of creeks and rivers, lakes and oceans and great storms of rain we are reminded that the source of life is vast and deep and always there. Perhaps water reminds us that if earth is our mother, the waters are her womb; perhaps it reminds us of our own mothers, in whose waters we swam before we knew that life had trials.

These waters we share today remind us of places that were important to us in the past few months. They remind us of our own sources of nurture. The water my family pours will remind me of Lake Michigan, of Boston Harbor, of the Baltimore Aquarium and the Mississippi River and a fountain beside a labyrinth in New Harmony, Indiana. It will remind me of the warmth of love and friendship, and the delights of food and laughter and discovery. By those waters I was renewed. By those waters I was reminded that there is love enough in the world for all of us; I was reminded that life is a trustworthy sustainer that won’t desert me even when death and grief seem to be everywhere—even when I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, as the Psalm says, the waters of beauty and love and generosity and life’s sweetness will restore my soul.

These waters represent all the different wells that fill the chalices of our beings, and above all they represent the well of community. We begin our sharing with just a little of the water we gathered last year in this ceremony, which began with water from the year before, and so on—a sign to remind us that the gathered life of the community includes what went before, and that the community carries us into the future. Someone whose water is here has died since they shared it; they are here with us in this water. Someone whose water is here was sad or angry or troubled when they shared it, and is at peace and happy now; the memory of their struggle and the hope of their restoration are here in this water. Someone shared water that represented the birth of a child last year; that water is here to welcome the child that someone’s water today will represent—and when we dedicate that child, we will touch their forehead with today’s gathered water.

The well of community is deep and rich. We can turn to it in our own times of need, for care and for comfort; we can turn to it when we need inspiration, for role models, encouragement, and the insights of others; we can turn to it when we are weary for friends to share our burdens. In a village, the well is dug and tended and watched over by the whole community; it is the center and symbol of community life. And so this well is here, at the center of a service in which we recognize and celebrate our in-gathering as a spiritual community. In truth, we never parted. The well of our community was not deserted and silent this summer, it was full and alive in grief and joy, in need and care, in worship and imagination and companionship. Today we celebrate that well, and we remind ourselves that it is here for us, and that it is we who must keep it replenished and refreshed, just as we all were needed to make a rainstorm, as we pour in the waters of our own renewal, our own spiritual lives, our own commitments. The life of the community is the power of Love made real among us.

May we all drink deeply from the well of community. May we never let it run dry.