September 6, 2009

Flow Like Water

a presentation & readings

The Rev. Mark Ward, Minister & Taryn Strauss, Director of Religious Education
Unitarian Universalist Church of Asheville

Asheville, NC

Mark Ward: It was one night as the season’s warmth was fading that Jessie went to bed and as sleep caught hold of her she found herself drifting off not into her dreams but out onto a river. Overhead, leaves on the trees were changing from green to yellow and she could hear the metallic buzz of cicadas, like miniature saws cutting through the laziness of summer and revealing the crisp, clear blue skies of early autumn. But more than anything what she was aware of was movement. As she watched the trees and farm fields drift by she could feel something tug.

Reading “Riverwalk” by Richard Hague

I step down and in;

All the world grows higher.

The sycamore rises from its smoky roots;

I am lost in light;

Sky scatters all around me, riffles boiling and flashing.

I am weightless where my feet want to float,

My body unbodying,

Fleshless in buoyancy’s battle with gravity.

“Float,” the world says, and I want to,

Nimble in this clear medium, not air,

Tucked and tumbling,

Loose to find myself at last.

Mark Ward: How strange! Jessie was in the water but didn’t feel wet. She felt the current tugging, not as water pushing against her, but in a deeper way, as if she were part of it: swirling in currents around stones or logs, or rushing through narrow channels and tumbling out of it.

Reading “Water you Fall”

Water, you fall – there is poetry;

You run, there is music.

You rise, there is dance.

Weeping, swirling, spinning, running, quieting, rising, misting.

Fog-thick and ice-formed

Thawing, dripping, enlivening

The dry root, the juice of the flower, wine of the fruit.

Drop by drop and ocean full,

One water around on earth.

Dashing the shore, soothing the sand,

Leaving returning, together, apart,

Source of life, the great recycler,

Carver of rocks, writer of canyons, shaper of earth.

Mark Ward Soon, Jessie was aware of others in the river with her. She felt fish wriggling past her and watched a turtle pop its head out into the air. She cast her eyes over to the shore and saw other animals hunching down and peering in, looking for fish, seeking out tadpoles, or just ambling along the muddy bank.

Reading  from "The Wind in the Willows" by Kenneth Grahame

 As Mole meandered aimlessly along, suddenly he stood by the edge of a full-fed river.  Never in his life had he seen a river before--this sleek, sinuous, full-bodied animal, chasing and chuckling, gripping things with a gurgle and leaving them with a laugh, to fling itself on fresh playmates that shook themselves free, and were caught and held again.  All was a-shake and a-shiver--glints and gleams and sparkles, rustle and swirl, chatter and bubble.  The Mole was bewitched, entranced, fascinated. By the side of the river he trotted as one trots, when very small, by the side of a man who holds one spellbound by exciting stories; and when tired at last, he sat on the bank, while the river still chattered on to him, a babbling procession of the best stories in the world, sent from the heart of the earth to be told at last to the insatiable sea."

Mark Ward:  As one channel led to the next, Jessie noticed that the river was widening. There was not just one current but many, faster in some places, slower in others, warmer here and cooler there. The water was also becoming clouded with silt, and jostling along as she careened downstream were the broken branches of trees and debris of all kinds: glass bottles and plastic bags, broken rain gutters from houses, pieces of toys, street signs, and tires from trucks.

Soon she noticed that alongside the river were no longer muddy banks, but concrete walls and tall buildings behind them. The river pitched and rolled, so much more turbulent than it had been before. As she sped through the channels, Jessie looked up and saw a man resting on a bench near a channel wall watching the water as it tumbled downstream.

Reading “I’ve Known Rivers” by Langston Hughes

I’ve known rivers;

I’ve known rivers ancient as the world

and older than the flow of human blood in human veins.

My soul has grown deep like the rivers.

I bathed in the Euphrates when dawns were young.

I built my hut near the Congo and it lulled me to sleep.

I looked upon the Nile and raised the pyramids above it.

I heard the singing of the Mississippi

when Abe Lincoln went down to New Orleans

and I’ve seen its muddy bosom turn all golden in the sunset.

I’ve known rivers: ancient, dusky rivers.

My soul has grown deep like the rivers.

Taryn Strauss: Langston says, “My soul has grown deep like the rivers.”

Sometimes it is the river that deepens the soul.  Earlier in August I saw the souls of our Unitarian Universalist high school youth group members deepen, darken and muddy like the yellow Mississippi as we drove through New Orleans that first day.  Beneath an expansive, ominously grey sky and muggy heat, we drove down, below sea level, into St. Bernard Parrish, deeper still into the upper 9th Ward, further into Holy Cross, and finally deepest into the lower 9th ward of New Orleans.  The air was saturated.  Water was everywhere, droplets forming on our skin in the heat. Yet, I was struck by this paradox: Never before had I felt so strongly or sharply the absence of water, from where we were standing.  We were on land, yet we were poised exactly where the water had been 4 years before, and it felt like only minutes had passed.   Do not be fooled, life has not returned to anything like normal there. 

But I know that water also gives life.  We all begin in water, held in comfort by the amniotic fluid of the womb.  For rest and renewal, we go to oceans and lakes, rivers and pools to reinvigorate our energy and then leave the water and return to work again.  Standing in front of the levy in the lower 9th ward, I saw so clearly how water could be a harbinger of death and destruction, a source of breakdown and suffering.  We spoke with people who seemed trapped between the urge to run toward drier ground and the deeper need to stay in their communities, to return to the banks of the Mississippi and somehow find safety there, or at least healing.   Being in New Orleans feels like one of those tenuous places on Earth, shaky and unstable.  Surrounded by once-failed levies on all sides, this is what it must feel like to be under siege, encircled by legions whose targets are trained on you.  Yet this precarious balance is what gives birth to countless manifestations of beauty, culture, strength, and community.  I’ve only felt this way once before, in Venice, Italy.  There I found the same haunting gothic architecture, the same beautifully petrified perseverance of the ever-decreasing natives.  It is something to see water erode a civilization before your very eyes. 

In the Spike Lee documentary, When the Levees Broke, one quietly enraged, wisened woman, a lower 9th resident lends new significance to the song she grew up singing in church.  She sings: “Wade in the water.  Wade in the water children wade in the water.  God’s gonna trouble the water.”  And then we saw exactly this come to pass.   What does this mean?  We youth and chaperones found it difficult not become overwhelmed by the layers of infrastructure failure, the layers of events that have brought us to this moment, which still feels like a great clocked stopped short on August 29, 2005.  It’s hard to escape the feeling that this whole thing is a real present-day Biblical trial. 

What Spiritual lessons are we to learn from the water?  How can we again gather at the beautiful river, from which we are born?  I say “we,” and not “they,” because that is the message we heard from our wade in the water.  I watched each of our youth at the exact moment they realized yes, this is their America, and as Americans we are all affected.  We cannot stand by and let the water wash our people away.  We must do more than welcome the quote “refugees” to drier land.  Our spiritual response is to embrace our utter connection, to share the burden, and to rebuild what the water took down so imminently.  Another thing we learned is that we as a Unitarian Universalist movement are leading the rebuilding effort.  We are partnering with residents, and resident empowerment groups.  The work was slow going.  Brick by brick, brush stroke by brush stroke, taking in water as though it was a sacrament, the body and blood of this earth, of ourselves, of all of life.  In our daily rebuilding work we thirsted constantly, and felt that same water that had destroyed so much, felt it flow through our pores, nourishing the rebirth of that city and thus completing its cycle. 

How blessed were the torrents in the afternoons, when the skies darkened each day and brought sweet relief in the cloying heat.  What a gift it was to feel so tiny against the great Lake Ponchartrain, or juxtaposed against the mighty Mississippi, or the afternoon monsoons.  My greatest day of work came when I continued through the downpour, clearing brush, clearing urban jungle in fellowship with others, sweat mixing with rain and still striving and working through it, harder maybe than we had ever worked before, and it felt so right.  In the downpour we laughed, brandishing machetes, and felt our immense strength and our utter powerlessness in the very same instant.  This is what we mean by flow, and by returning to water.  This moment in the grand downpour, working side by side for justice, working for freedom from poverty, from homelessness.  This was gratitude, was prayer, and this is what it feels like to truly be connected to all of life and to its source. 

Mark Ward: As Jessie tumbled along with the water she noticed that in time its speed seemed to slow, but also the river banks were falling back. The river grew wider and soon the land she saw was no more than islands scattered in a mighty stream. As the land slowly faded from view, the silt began to sink out of the water, down to the bottom, and new currents joined her. And then, suddenly, something new: a taste she hadn’t experienced before.  She wasn’t sure exactly what it was, but it seemed to her very old, as if she was reminded of something from long ago in the earliest part of her memory.  It was a taste that somehow seemed to unite her with the turtles and the mole and the fish, the birds overhead, the trees on the river bank and the man sitting on the bench. Jessie felt herself beginning to stir from sleep, but as she did she heard words echoing from deep inside of her:

Reading from Gitanjali by Rabindranath Tagore

The same stream of life that runs through my veins night and day

runs through the world and dances in rhythmic measures.

It is the same life that shoots in joy through the dust of the earth

in numberless blades of grass

and breaks into tumultuous waves of leaves and flowers.

It is the same life that is rocked in the ocean-cradle of birth

and of death, in ebb and in flow.

I feel my limbs are made glorious by the touch of this world of life.

And my pride is from the life-throb of ages dancing in my blood this moment.