In Honor of St. Francis ~ Reflections on Sister Water!

All praise be Yours, my God, through Sister Water, So useful, humble, precious, and pure.                                  –St. Francis 

Deep peace of the running wave to you, of water flowing, rising and falling, sometimes advancing, sometimes receding . . . May the stream of your life flow unimpeded! Deep peace of the running wave to you. – Celtic Prayer

God is a bright ocean that distills and reveals hidden truth so that my soul has a better understanding of how to trust Love, and this water is a mirror in which You, Eternal Trinity, give me knowledge.  – Catherine of Siena

Selections of the Poem: In Praise of Water by John O’Donohue
The imagination of the primeval ocean where the first forms of life stirred and emerged to dress the vacant earth with warm quilts of color.
The well whose liquid root worked through the long night of clay, trusting ahead of itself openings that would yet yield to its yearning until at last it arises in the desire of light to discover the pure quiver of itself flowing crystal clear and free through delighted emptiness.
The courage of a river to continue belief in the slow fall of ground, always falling farther toward the unseen ocean.
The river does what words would love, keeping its appearance by insisting on disappearance; its only life surrendered to the event of pilgrimage, carrying the origin to the end . . . A ceaseless traverse of presence soothing on each side the stilled fields, sounding out its journey, raising up a buried music where the silence of time becomes almost audible. . .
Let us bless the humility of water, always willing to take the shape of whatever otherness holds it, The buoyancy of water stronger than the deadening, downward drag of gravity, the innocence of water, flowing forth, without thought of what awaits it, the refreshment of water, dissolving t he crystals of thirst. . . Blessed be water, our first mother. (From: To Bless the Space Between Us)

Story: I was sitting on a beach one summer day, watching two children, a boy and a girl, playing in the sand. They were hard at work building an elaborate sand castle by the water’s edge, with gates and towers and moats and internal passages. Just when they had nearly finished their project, a big wave came along and knocked it down, reducing it to a heap of wet sand. I expected the children to burst into tears, devastated by what had happened to all their hard work. But they surprised me. Instead, they ran up the shore away from the water, laughing and holding hands, and sat down to build another castle. I realized that they had taught me an important lesson. All the things in our lives, all the complicated structures we spend so much time and energy creating are built on sand. Only our relationships to other people endure. Sooner or later, the wave will come along and knock down what we have worked so hard to build up. When that happens, only the person who has somebody’s hand to hold will be able to laugh. (Harold Kushner in When All You’ve Ever Wanted Isn’t Enough)

My Story: Once upon a time, I was waiting for a young man to visit.  I stood by the windows of the empty room watching the dark storm clouds move across the sky accompanied by peels of thunder and quick flashes of lightening.  When he entered the room, he joined me at the window to watch this display.  I spoke to him of how I learned not to be afraid of storms – for my father would sit with me on the porch swing and talk to me about the storm. The visitor then told me that when he was a young child growing up in his poor country, he lived in a cardboard box with his brother and grandmother – and when he hears the rain, it reminds him of the sound he heard on the “roof” of his box home.  Silence.

Blessing of Water

“Spirit of Living Water, you hold all of creation in your womb and spring us forward onto the earth at birth.  Spirit of the Tides, remind me of the rise and fall of your rhythms so that I may discover them deep within my own being.Spirit of Greenness, bring moistness and vigor to my life so that I might savor the experience of your energy moving through me out into the world. Blessings of water be upon me. May I be carried by the flow of the great river of life. May I discover a hidden spring within, gushing forth, May I be carried to the shores of the sacred and renewed.” (Christine Valters Paintner from Water, Wind, Earth & Air)