The Power of Water

September 8, 2024—Rev. Rita Capezzi

The flooding of the Nile River was one of the first things I remember studying in primary school. We learned about the Egyptian gods and goddesses, along with the story of river silt rising on a tide, up out of riverbanks and onto the flood plains where all manner of food would grow. We learned about storage baskets woven of reeds and crafted from clay. Somehow in those early lessons, flooding did not appear to be devastating, though that old story of the baby Moses placed in a reed basket and sent down the torrents of the river must certainly have been horrifying to some. I mean, there’s crocodiles there!

I got my first direct sense of the power of water when in 1969 the remnants of Hurricane Camille brought flooding to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. We lived on a bluff about a creek that fed into the Allegheny River. I had to be reassured that the waters would not rise so high as our house, because I had seen on the TV news the houses flooded along the rivers in Etna and in Millvale.

Since then, I have been preoccupied with the flooding in a favorite vacation spot—the barrier islands in North Carolina called the Outer Banks.

Over the years, and most recently this spring, we’ve watched the shoreline get gobbled away by the ocean, despite mitigation efforts, houses washed off their piers and floating out to sea. Scientists believe that the natural erosion of waves and tides upon fragile sandbars, as well as the loss of estuaries, those ground sponges for water, that erosion is speeding up due to climate change. Having an explanation for why things happen as they do is not always a comfort.

You’ve here experienced this summer two major flooding events in the GTA that brought more rain than systems could handle, causing lots of damage to waterways and to the human-built world. All that water in all those streams and creeks and rivers trying to get to the big lake where they all become the same body. And all that concrete and asphalt and sheer structure in the way. Something had to give, and it was not good.

All this to say that what water does in the course of its being water is not all sweetness and light. Yes, water is beautiful when it falls as rain on a day when the sun is also shining, making those amazing, ordinary, extraordinary rainbows in the sky.

Water is beautiful trilling down steep rocky streams, singing over obstructions. Water is beautiful in lakes reflecting the clouds and the color of the sky, light sparkling and twinkling on the waves. Water is beautiful in a tall, thirst-quenching glass after a day in the hot sun, or just a day living our lives, that’s how much we need water to sustain us. Water is beautiful poured from individual containers by individual hands into a common vessel, spilling over the sides of one bowl into another. And water where water is not wanted—flooding homes, bringing destruction and sometimes water-borne disease, washing out farmland—such water is hard to swallow. Water is not simple, and none of our metaphors is either.

Today is our big gathering day—for many back together after a summer of pursuits that took you elsewhere. And here you return, where you long to be. For some, you are putting your toes in the water here for the first time or tentatively, deciding if this is a place you can swim in, swim through the waters of life that are both beautiful and devastating. And we all ask, is this the place I can tread the waters of tears? Is this the place I can drink my fill of the waters of nourishment, the waters of cleansing and renewal? Is this the place where I will find waters of change, where I can bring the waters of change that are important to me?

Will I find here a common bowl that can hold all that I am, all that I bring, all that I need? Can I go slow, finding both my sigh and my shout? Will I find here a community I can drink deeply from?

The answer to all these questions could be “yes,” it could be “no.” Because until we decide, until we each decide, until we decide together, that we will take the risk, that we will mingle our waters and swim in them, nothing happens. Until we define together what the water here is, nothing happens. Until we accept the nature of community—the ebb and flow, the overall whole of thing —nothing happens. The flooding that creates fertility and growth, the change that enables renewal and vitality, the thirst-quenching of belonging after the parched languishing of loneliness—none of that happens without the risk of living in community—living in covenant, recognizing our place in the whole and understanding the larger whole that we shape with our presence and our actions, taking responsibility for our actions and their effects, both those life sustaining and those love wrenching.

We poured our waters together. We blessed the water poured. It is a ceremony deeply meaningful, as long as we mean it. Our ritual is only as meaningful as we make it. If making meaning—within the sorrow and the joy which is inevitable in life, within the struggle and the change that is necessary for liveliness—if making meaning is for you, if seeking meaning and fullness is for you, if embracing both the torrents and the gentle rains is for you, then our ceremony, our ritual is already meaningful. We are once again in a new year, at the beginning of something wonderful once more. We are home together, away together on our blue boat home, making our way together again. May we deepen the meaning of the waters we poured and into which we journey. May we do this together, with love. May it always be so.

Rev. Rita Capezzi