Ministerial ruminations on Homecoming Sunday. There they come across the platform - cupping a small vial of water in their hands with something of their lives to share. They pour it into a venerable vase that has tasted much water. They've been doing it for 20 years now - an outpouring of human life in all its joy and woe. "Let the full heart pour itself forth." I know most of them - but hardly all - know something of their lives - have shared much with them. I know it is Holy Water!
Their living waters have come from over 50 nations, and, of course, from home. These waters have come from the world's oceans and lakes and rivers - familiar names - Amazon, Congo, Loch Lomond, Mediterranean, Yukon, Ganges, Mekong, Baltic; they come from a glacier on Mt. Cook in southern New Zealand; from the Dead Sea, the River Jordan and the Sea of Galilee - as well as from more familiar waters like the Finger Lakes; from Seventh Lake under a starry Adirondack sky and the Great Lakes and Irondequoit Creek and, as one woman said - her water was gathered as she was just "careening through Pultneyville."
More important than the breadth of these collective travels are the meanings this water symbolizes - the peaks and valleys and plateaus of human existence. These pilgrims have recorded something of their journeys in a book - it makes good reading. From it come expressions from the depths of the human soul - "to symbolize tears shed for three dead friends this summer; to commemorate the dying and death of my beloved father; water mixed with sand from before the great Sphinx in Egypt; water from a honeymoon in Mexico, from Colorado used by the area Native Americans as healing waters.
Some who inscribed their names and significant places are no longer with us. Marty Griffith, Ministerial Intern in 1985 and dead too soon, brought water from Colorado "in honor of our shared summer in the first Unitarian Universalist Urban Internship;" there are notations from couples no longer together; and there is water from the Atlantic and Pacific oceans and streams between on a bicycle trip - to announce an engagement; water from a wedding at church; from a 40th birthday celebration; from a honeymoon in New Hampshire and Cape Cod. And who can forget one young couple who brought in their new baby's bath water or another couple who rung out a diaper (freshly washed) to represent their new baby girl; even symbolic amniotic fluid to represent an in-vitro fertilization baby, now vividly among us.
There is water from a special spring in the Adirondacks, from a mysteriously bubbling brook in Maryland and spring water from Rochester, Vermont. One environmentalist said, "It's against my own beliefs to take water from its source - this water is from church." There is water from Genesee Hospital - "where my husband's life was saved and from Rochester General Hospital where surgery gave him new life;" water to symbolize social responsibility - from a peace caravan for healing and the environment and from the women's peace encampment on the shores of Seneca Lake. And there are molecules from a family millennium party on an island north of Venezuela, on December 31, 1999.
It isn't all serious: there is water from Shea Stadium - home of the New York Mets; from Oriole Park at Camden Yards; from Silver Stadium during the last baseball game played there in September of 1996 and from Frontier Field during the first baseball game there in April 1997 - "we lost both games but made the Governor's Cup in 1997." Someone wrote, "As a souvenir of a summer of little travel, we offer a serving of Rochester rain," another - "from the rain gauge in our back yard." Perhaps not this year.
And there is proxy water poured by loved ones for those not able to be here in person. From San Francisco one young adult had water poured by her parents to symbolize how much this church means to her. Through friends came water and these words from a glacier north of Finland. "This is to be our contribution to the Homecoming Service which we'll miss. We'll all be thinking of everyone at UU on this day of the service. Looking forward to reuniting on our return."
Looking forward to reuniting on our return. What are we but our stories - individual stories merged into the communal story that is family - church - community - nation - world? What are we but story-telling creatures, eager to share what we have said and done and been? We come together to tell our stories; to listen to stories, to laugh and weep, to celebrate and commiserate - together.
This is the 20th time we have mingled the waters of our lives in the common cup. As long as we have done it, I never tire of the ritual of people lining up, a small container in hand, eager to share their experiences with the community. The stories we share tell where we have been - not as tourists, eager to check off one more sight on our lengthening list, but as pilgrims, eager to understand the inner meaning of the outer journey, the essence of religion.
The Gilberts were on the move this summer. In honor of our 40th wedding anniversary, Joyce and I took our sons and daughter-in-law to Europe where we attended the wedding of a German friend who was with us as a high school exchange student. It was a weekend-long party made even more interesting by the fact that in the midst of merry-making the bridal couple couldn't get a key to their hotel room because the desk was closed. When they went to his parents' home, the house was locked - his parents were still partying - it was 4:00 a.m. Today we poured water from an exuberant time with our German friends.
Then on to the Czech Republic where Joyce and I spent a week with Czech Unitarians in the Sumava Mountains on retreat. Appropriate to our morning theme - it rained all week, but we still hiked the trails with people from our sister congregation in Prague. I co-led a two-language worship service with the minister of that congregation who is the granddaughter of the Rev. Norbert Capek, creator of the Flower Communion Service we celebrate each June. There we heard their stories - the birth of democratic Czechoslovakia in 1918, living through the Nazi era, only to be followed by the Communist era, now democratic once more. Their capacity to survive is symbolized by the water we poured from Prague this morning.
From the Hassidic tradition - a story. Rabbi Isaac of Krakow had a dream. "Travel to Prague, look under the bridge, and you will find a great treasure." The first time he had this dream, he ignored it. Rabbi Isaac was a practical man. He sought neither to be nor to appear foolish. Both hopes were tested when his dream recurred. Finally, he donned his cloak and set off for Prague in search of gold. After an arduous journey, he arrived and found the bridge easily. But there was a problem. Soldiers guarded it, day and night. Rabbi Isaac waited for his opening, but the changing of the guards was too efficient. At last, he gave up, cursing himself for his credulity.
As he turned to leave, one of the soldiers finally spoke, "Hey, old man, you've been hanging about here for a long time. Now you're leaving? What am I missing?" Rabbi Isaac sighed. "I had a silly dream. I thought God was talking to me in my sleep. He told me to come here. All the way from Krakow. I shouldn't have listened."
"Foolish man," the soldier replied. "I had a dream like that once, a stupid dream. God told me to go to Krakow and look up a Rabbi Isaac. I would discover a great treasure buried beneath his stove. Can you believe such a thing?" Rabbi Isaac tipped his cap to the soldier, returned to Krakow, and found a great treasure buried beneath his stove.[1]
And so we have returned home - as have you - to commingle the waters of our pilgrimage in the common container - to celebrate our religious community - our great treasure.
Water has always been a metaphor for the spiritual life. In the Genesis myth we read that "the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. . . . And God said, Let the waters bring forth abundantly the moving creatures that hath life, and fowl that may fly above the earth in the open firmament of the heavens."
In the Muslim faith a disciple came to Mohammed and said, "My father has died; what shall I do for the good of his soul?" to which the prophet replied, "Dig a well, that the thirsty may have water to drink." In the Tao Te Ching we read "The highest good is like water. Water gives life to the ten thousand things and does not strive. . . . Tao in the world is like a river flowing home to the sea."[2]
On the hottest of last summer's days I refreshed myself in the cooling waters of Seneca Lake. It's cheaper and more ecologically responsible than air-conditioning. After swimming a few laps, I would float on my back - looking up at what e.e. cummings called the "true-blue dream of sky," the rolling green of the surrounding hills, and then at the surface of the lake.
I had this amazingly reassuring feeling that I was being sustained by a dependable power that was greater than I. I had only to have faith in its supportive capacity and yield myself to its strength.
Brother Roger, Prior of Taize wrote ". . . let yourself float on the safe waters, loving life as it comes, with all the rough weather it may bring. Give, without counting how many years are left, not worried about surviving as long as possible."[3]
Floating in those refreshing waters in blessed peace reminded me that, as one spiritual traveler noted a feeling of being ". . . part of something deeper than your cell phone plan."4 I live on the east side of the lake - repository of flotsam and jetsam - but also recipient of spectacular sunsets and full-moon reflections on those deep waters. In a sacred Hindu text, the Upanishads, we read, "When before the beauty of a sunset or a mountain, you pause and exclaim 'Ah', you are participating in divinity."
The poet Supervielle wrote:
"My body fills with dreams, more than one lantern
Lights at my elbow, at my feet, above my head.
Like a lake reflecting a mountain to its peak
I sense the depths where steepness is immersed
And tremble at the star-filled sky."
Water has always provided soul refreshment. Consider the images of water in the Bible: "Come unto me, you who thirst for righteousness, that you may be satisfied." In the Hebrew Bible, the prophet Amos proclaims that "justice shall flow down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream." I was reminded of that at June's Unitarian Universalist Association General Assembly in Cleveland as hundreds of us marched through a torrential downpour past angry fans around Jacobs Field to protest the Cleveland Indians' use of Chief Wahoo as their team mascot, a symbolic demeaning to Native Americans.
Of course, there are less romantic, but equally important meanings of water. Sweat symbolizes the virtue of hard labor - as one hooked on the work ethic I helped one son roof his house and with Joyce helped the other son settle into a new apartment. Good, honest sweat is virtuous - but there is no better feeling than a swim or a shower in its aftermath. Water symbolizes both work and refreshment.
Which reminds me of a favorite cartoon. A man is in his basement, wrench in hand, with an assortment of broken pipes bandaged and tied together, the water rising rapidly around his knees. In a flash of insight - a moment of wisdom - he says, "I shall become a plumber of people's souls."
And, so, instead of plumbing, that is what I have chosen to do for four decades - over three of them here. As one of your journeyman plumbers of the human soul, I have invited you to this water ceremony. Water is a spiritual metaphor.
Religious scholar Huston Smith speaks of the water table of our common humanity - water table - the upward level of water in the earth which sustains all life. We are all more human than otherwise. We are united as people in many ways - we are united in our essential loneliness and long for community; we are united more by our imperfections than our perfections; we all search for the "something mores" of human existence, realizing that there is a greater meaning to human life than getting and spending - something more than we can quite grasp. All this and more we do as we become part of coming home like rivers to the sea.
The poet Federico Garcia Lorca writes, "The poem, the song, the picture is only water drawn from the well of the people, and it should be given back to them in a cup of beauty so that they may drink - and in drinking - understand themselves."
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