Holy Water

Published Jan. 22, 2014 in Tulare County's Foothills Sun-Gazette


     "We need rain," my customers lament as I scan their groceries.  "Pray for it," I encourage them, and try to remember to do it myself.  Perhaps we also ought to dance . . .


     On my way to church last Sunday, I saw a man at the fire station hosing down the sidewalk, sending gushing waves of water into the street.  Perhaps it was because I'd just surveyed my dry yard that this seemed so offensive.  Perhaps it was because I was on my way to read the scripture about Jesus' baptism by John the Baptist in the River Jordan, which runs through a place so much drier than ours.


     Or maybe it's because I feel the portent of drought in my bones.  John Lindt has an article in this week's Sierra2theSea online news service which verbalized that feeling into facts (see "Bone Dry & Scared: Tulare County Faces Grim Water Prospects" at www.sierra2thesea.net)  Opening with a webcam photograph of bare granite in Mineral King, he says it "provides a dose of reality for anyone who hopes to take a drink of water in June or wonders how we can irrigate 1.3 million acres of productive farmland this summer in Tulare County."  Documenting the empty reservoirs, the lack of snowpack, the jet stream's "Greenland Block" that is diverting all moisture-laden storms from reaching California's coast, and water contracts (over)committing scarce supplies elsewhere from the San Joaquin's Friant-Kern Canal, the picture is worse than bleak.  It's frightening.


     "People need to wake up and stop watering those lawns," he quotes president of the Association of California Water Agencies, Tim Quinn, as saying.  Visalia City Councilman Greg Collins says the City of Visalia needs to be a leader in calling for new conservation efforts, noting that he turned off his home irrigation system last September.  "We may have to put up with brown lawns while we try to save the trees."


     For last Sunday's sermon at the Methodist Church, incipient lay pastor Mark Smith brought a stone that had been immersed in water from the River Jordan by one of his teachers.  He passed it around the congregation, spreading the experience of baptism in that holy water from half a world away, and it was powerfully beautiful.  But when John the Baptist was immersing people in that river, it wasn't considered holy by the religious powers - it was considered profane.  Holy water was in the temple, where holy acts were performed. John's baptizings outside, in the countryside, in naturally-occurring water, were an act of sedition, a way of claiming that the poor people of the land were also God's people, that holiness was not the exclusive right of those who could buy it.


     "That muddy water made holy," wrote Gail Cismowski, a Merced County artist, referring to John's baptizings and God's promise.  "Transformation or just opening my eyes to what's already there? The old message sounds new when it is addressed to me."


     That eye-opening experience is that every life is holy, as is every drop of water.  Everything that breathes, not just every person, is dependent on those drops of water.  Everything that grows is dependent on them, too.  Please, friends, in this year of impending drought, let's see to it that those few drops of water we have are shared and not wasted.
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Trudy Wischemann is a water freak who writes.  You can send her your water saving plans and baptism stories % P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247 or leave a comment below.