Where Waters Meet and Merge ©
Reverend Janet Parsons
Gloucester Unitarian Universalist Church
September 10, 2023
This past June, visiting Pittsburgh for the first time, I found myself drawn to the spot where the Allegheny and the Monongahela Rivers meet to form the Ohio. If you take a look at the cover of your order of service, you can see a photo that I took of that spot, that confluence of waters. I found it strikingly beautiful. In the photo, the Allegheny is coming in from the left, joining the Monongahela. In some lighting, in other photos, you can see the different colors of the water as they flow alongside each other for a time before eventually merging together.
We are fascinated by these confluences, these spots where two rivers converge and become one new river. If you look closely at the photo, you can see a park and a huge fountain located right at the tip of the land, where the two waters join. I walked all the way there one afternoon, feeling drawn to stand right at that spot, to get as close as possible.
Wherever this sort of merging occurs, there is a sense of something mysterious taking place. Sometimes a confluence isn’t two rivers, but a river meeting the sea, as in our poem, The Mississippi River Enters the Gulf. Our poet, Lucille Clifton, wrote,
“all of them carrying yesterday
forever on their white tipped backs,
all of them dragging forward tomorrow.”
We pause and wonder: where and when does one body of water become another? Why are the colors of the water so different? How do they ultimately mingle? Standing in such a spot and pondering becomes a spiritual moment.
The sense of magic can be heightened by religious belief. For some people rivers are holy; for example, the River Ganga in India, the Ganges, is considered to be a Hindu goddess – Ganga-ji. People bathe in the water as a spiritual practice. For these people, a ritual bath at a confluence of two bodies of water creates an even holier experience – the opportunity to touch, to be immersed in, two holy sources at once.[1] The sense of magic becomes spiritual as well as merely visual.
After this damp summer, we might not be feeling the magic of water. But today is a day when we pause to think about its mystery and all its contradictions. Water: one of the most mundane, ordinary substances on earth, and yet at the same time one of the most magical. It is shape-shifting: changing properties, from liquid to solid to vapor. It is life-giving and life-sustaining; we could not survive without it. And yet, water is destructive. It can destroy life. Water is to be consumed. Water is to be worshipped. Water is to be feared. We are grateful for it, we waste it, and we are afraid of it.
This power of water to enchant is nowhere more apparent than in the places where it converges. I think of my kayak trip each year to the outflow spot where my favorite pond in New Hampshire creates a stream. I am drawn there. We can picture in our minds the tidal creek at Good Harbor flowing into the ocean. Water observed in these places reminds us of how changeable it is, how it flows and takes on different properties, different colors, how it responds to the mysterious pull of the moon. The poet told us that water is forever carrying yesterday forward. And so it has been since the beginning of time, when the water we have now somehow became part of our planet, part of the living system that sustains us here on Earth. We have all the water we had at the beginning of time. It changes shape and location, color and form. But it is always the same water. It never ceases, it never arrives, it is never finished, it carries all of life forward.
Today we honor water, and the beauty of the places where water meets and merges. Today, we here are such a place; a place of meeting and merging, and we symbolize that using water. Here, we come together, each one unique, with different needs, desires, and skills. We float along side by side for a time, and then come together, creating relationships, learning to love one another, to help each other, to set aside differences in support of the larger community. We learn to flow in the same direction, to carry yesterday forward, to always be open to new streams entering the larger river of community. We recognize that each time a new source of water enters the riverbed we are different, changed by this new stream, whether blue or clear or sandy. This makes us stronger, helps us to provide the water needed to sustain more life in our community, both the church community and the global one.
My friends, may you think of us as a confluence of many streams, joining together to magically create a new whole, carrying us forward into the future. May you find this place one of nourishment, where your spirit can be sustained, where you can gain strength for the life that flows ever onward.
May it be so.
Amen.
[1] Letizia, Chiara (2017) “The Sacred Confluence, between Nature and Culture,” in Marie Lecomte-Tilouine (ed.) Nature, Culture and Religion at the Crossroads of Asia. Routledge. As cited in Wikipedia.
