Advent. Water

Water is life. The water protectors at Standing Rock reminded us of that fundamental truth. Advent invites us to watch for another truth: there is living water that quenches parched places in our souls.

You don’t have to be a follower of Jesus to understand the parched places in human souls. Moreover, contrary to the guardians of orthodoxy, Jesus is not the only bearer of living water to quench that thirst.

As Norman McLean wrote at the end of his short masterpiece, A River Runs Through It, “Eventually, all things merge into one, and a river runs through it. The river was cut by the world’s great flood and runs over rocks from the basement of time. On some of those rocks are timeless raindrops. Under the rocks are the words, and some of the words are theirs.”

The world’s great religious traditions bear water like the Amazon, the Mississippi, the Nile, the Yangtze. Eventually the water from those great rivers runs into great oceans and the tides carry the water, the silt, the detritus, the ships, and all the rest across ever line the cartographers of orthodoxy imagine.

The water we drink, as David LaMotte sings it (beneath a younger head of hair in the video below), has “quenched the thirst of seven others beneath a younger sun.” The prayers we pray, the living water we swallow with our hearts and souls and bodies, have quenched the thirst of many others, too. Advent promises us that the well will never run dry.