All of Life Depends on Water ©
Reverend Janet Parsons
Gloucester Unitarian Universalist Church
September 11, 2022
All of life depends on water.
This summer has been a challenging one for those of us who garden, and my heart goes out to all those who farm, who rely on the income from crops or who grow their own food.
I merely grow flowers, and yet I have felt the stress of trying to keep my plants and shrubs and trees alive. On some level, we are in relationship with our plants, and it’s painful to watch them shrivel, to watch leaves turn brown and fall off. When Rockport instituted its watering ban a few weeks ago I became obsessed with capturing every drop that I could from washing and showering, and in last week’s rainstorm I kept my largest pots under a downspout. I am grateful that I could direct my anxiety into action.
This summer I discovered the novel The Four Winds, by Kristin Hannah. She writes historical fiction, and this particular book centered on the Dust Bowl in the 1930’s. My timing proved to be impeccable, as we were just beginning to grapple with the effects of this summer’s drought. All through the first watering restrictions, then the brush fires in Woodland Acres in Rockport and on Pole Hill here in Gloucester, I was engaged with this novel. Reading a book about the Dust Bowl in this context was physically uncomfortable at times, as what might be impossible to imagine came to life for me.
Few people are alive today who would remember the Dust Bowl of the 1930’s: the combination of years of drought and inappropriate farming practices that led to the phenomenon of topsoil drying up and blowing away. We know the basic story: how people lost their farms and their livelihoods, and were forced to migrate away from home and begin new lives. We are taught about this period in school, of course, and there has been much written about it, including Steinbeck’s famous novel, The Grapes of Wrath. But how often do we think about it, and what resulted?
How many of us have heard of Black Sunday, April 14, 1935, when 20 storms of black dust, topsoil, turned day into night and buried houses and farms and towns? Who has heard of dust pneumonia, the result of breathing in the swirling dirt, which contains silica, and which lodged in lungs?
In the book The Four Winds, three generations of a Texas farming family struggle to hang onto their land throughout the drought, but after Black Sunday the daughter-in-law has no choice but to take her two children, one of whom nearly died of pneumonia, and strike out for California, where, everyone said, there would be jobs. The migration of people was enormous and catastrophic: it is believed that by 1935 a half million people were left homeless. In the decade of the 1930’s, 3.5 million people emigrated out of the Great Plains. (Wikipedia)
It is time for us to remember and to think more about this; the effect of a climate catastrophe on the lives of people, not just here in Massachusetts, not just in the United States, but worldwide. We hear the reports of historically high temperatures, of drought, of wildfires. We got a taste of it ourselves just this summer. Even this weekend we see the haze from wildfires as far away as California, Washington state, and Oregon. We are all connected on this planet; by the circling winds and the currents of water. What affects people thousands of miles away can affect us as well.
It is time for us to not just think about climate science, but also about our communities; how they will be able to sustain us, and how we will be able to sustain them. As we gather together today, after the disruptions of the past two and a half years, it’s important to think about the role of communities such as this one, and how we can strengthen it.
In The Four Winds, by the time Elsa Martinelli flees Texas with her two children, the closest town is largely boarded up and abandoned. Businesses have failed, people have melted away. Churches and schools have dwindled away, the children’s friends have moved.
It’s easy to focus on the economic costs of a disaster such as the Dust Bowl, but imagine the human cost. Entire communities uprooted, the social fabric torn and destroyed. All the relationships, both casual and meaningful, severed. People lost not just their homes, but their community, their friends and family.
All of life depends on water.
And so today, still held in a drought that has just begun to show signs of releasing its grip, we gather in this community to share water from different sources, different places. We do this, as we said earlier, to symbolize how we come from different places but that together, here in this community, we join together as one body. We arrive, each with our own personalities, our hopes and dreams and fears, to mingle and create a life together. Water is a symbol of that force bringing us together. The small amounts of water that we pour added up to a nearly full bowl.
As Lucille read a few minutes ago, “Water unites us. All water is one water, shape-shifting as it goes on and on in its unending cycle.”
Water doesn’t just represent, or symbolize, community, it sustains it, as it sustains everything.
All of life depends on water.
Our need of water goes far beyond needing water to drink, to grow crops and to raise livestock. We need water to sustain our emotional lives, our community lives as well. The novel The Four Winds told the story of how communities were destroyed, and later, in California, how a new community emerged as homeless migrants settled along a roadside ditch filled with dirty water. The people arriving were seen as a threat to the established people in California, and were rejected, forced to pitch tents on the outskirts of town, along a ditch. A new community arose, new friendships, based on shared hardship and shared efforts to find a way to build new lives for themselves in another hostile environment; this one, not arid from lack of water, but from the lack of welcome. Compassion was in short supply toward the newcomers, known commonly as “Okies”, although they came from all across the Plains states, not just Oklahoma. Care for the stranger had dried up as more and more displaced people arrived.
Unitarian theologian James Luther Adams wrote that humans respond to the community-forming power that is God’s love. And indeed a new community arose alongside a ditch. The need to haul water, boil water, share water, the first tasks of everyday life, formed the foundation of this new settlement.
This morning I invite us to really think deeply about water, something that we so totally take for granted, and the multiple roles that it plays in our lives. Let us remember that in conserving our water supply, we are protecting our communities as well.
But I also challenge us to think about what happens when we become too protective of our communities, when we perceive our communities as threatened by newcomers, by migrants, by people we perceive as Other. How can we both protect and welcome? How can we share what we have and still make sure we are cared for?
The 21st century is calling us to sit with these hard questions. The climate crisis demands our attention and our intention. And our communities need our intention every day as well. How do we come together and stay together? How do we keep ourselves well-watered, not parched by lack of attention and resources, and lack of compassion for one another?
Community life is both challenging, and utterly essential to our survival. May we remember to carefully tend this community, to water it well, to protect it just enough so that we have enough to share with those who need us.
Welcome back to your community, dear ones. May we remember to be grateful for both for our community and for water, to never take them for granted.
I leave you with these words from our Call to Worship:
“We bring our own drops of water
To contribute to the well of community.
We replenish this well,
Even as we draw life-giving nourishment for ourselves.
May all who gather here be filled:
Filled with joy and hope
Filled with compassion and love
Here, may we be filled
So that we may pour ourselves out
into the world.” (Gregory Pelley, “Thirsty”)
