Minister's Musing

Rev. Mark Ward
Unitarian Universalist Church of Asheville

August 2008

Joni Mitchell said it some 40 years ago – “Don’t it always seem to go, that you don’t know what you’ve got ‘til it’s gone!” But who would have ever thought that she’d be talking about water? Water, of course, hasn’t gone anywhere. For all intents and purposes there is the same amount of water on Earth now that there has always been. But precious little of it – less than 1% – is fresh and available for our use, and less and less of it is available where we need it to be. In recent years we in the South have been suffering through a drought while the population continues to expand. We have already seen some political skirmishing over this issue that is only likely to intensify in coming years as supplies continue to dwindle.

As religious people who respect the interdependent web of existence of which we are a part, we can see an old pattern at work here: the tendency of us humans to believe that we can manipulate the natural world in any way we like without taking into account the way that natural systems work. Similar hubris is driving the global warming crisis.

It has been almost 30 years since Unitarian Universalists first gathered for what was called a Water Ceremony. That first ceremony, held at the close of a Women and Religion conference in 1980, sought to bring people together for a worship experience that connected them with each other and the Earth. The idea caught on at many churches, including ours, and has become a regular end-of- summer ritual in many places.

We have come to a time now when it is more important than ever that we bring to our minds the lesson of this ritual – that we and all life are connected, and nothing connects us so vitally as the thin trickle of water from rain drop to leaf to soil to river to our taps. So, this summer as you enjoy your outings I invite you to pay attention to how water connects us and bring a small amount of water wherever you find it – vacation idyll or home faucet – to our Water Ceremony on August 24. As we celebrate coming together again as a community let us also honor the vital links that connect all things.