Saturday 13 June 2020

Diving in

I've been thinking a lot recently about the connection between water and the faith- partly encouraged by my reading, and partly by recent weather- we seemed to be heading for a drought, with the driest May recorded for one hundred and fifty years, followed by the usual British downpours which have more than soaked the ground, and certainly filled the rain barrel and the six other tubs and buckets I put out to capture the rain. This last amply illustrated a phrase  of St. Bonaventure which struck me sometime during the Easter season, of  'the torrents, the torrents, I say' of pleasure God takes in his children.
 Equally, the dry weather of May, when the rain barrel ran dry, and I was watering the garden each night ( May being the month when everything runs riot in uncontrolled growth- forget 'June is busting out all over') turned my thought to de-hydration, dryness, and the effects of this on body and soul. I remember well working alongside community psychiatric nurses in the community, when a joint visit to a patient always included the question 'How much water are you drinking?' There were follow-up questions, if needed, or a gentle pinch on the back of the hand- having explained what was going to happen- to see if the skin stayed in a peak for an undue time; this was a sure sign, I was told, of dehydration.
On the last great day of the feast, St John tells us in his gospel, Jesus called out in the Temple 'if any one is thirsty, let him come to me and drink, and living waters will flow out of him'. The output we hope for- to be refreshment, cleansing agents, sources of life for our communities- demands an input commensurate with the output. It's a challenge; torrents may be more than we can take, but sips will hardly sustain us, and do even less for the world around us. 

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