Kerry Child, the Associate Minister at Gilmore Park United Church in Richmond, BC, recently asked people to send her their thoughts and memories about water, from a Canadian perspective, to be used at the upcoming BC Junior Youth Conference of the United Church of Canada. What follows is the two-page reflection that I sent her, with the invitation to use it or excerpt it as she saw fit. I'll post it here in its entirety.
Reflections on Water
From the personal experience of Murray Speer
I grew up in a farming family on the Prairies. In Edmonton, water arrives in three forms: rain, snow, and the river. In the Spring, rain washes the land clean and brings the smell of ozone. Spring rain on the prairie for me is a symbol of freshness and opportunity. However, in the Summer months, rain comes in the form of thunder storms. When cumulonimbus clouds tower over the rolling prairie, I am reminded of the immense size and incredibly beauty of God’s world. And when the towering clouds turn dark, they become images of the power and danger that are present in nature. A single hail shower can destroy an entire Summer worth of growth in the grain fields, and a tornado can destroy even more than that.
In Winter comes the snow, which for me has become a symbol of waiting. As the Earth points its northern pole away from the warmth and life of the Sun, we withdraw into our caves of steel and stone and wood, emerging for few reasons. One of these reasons is to play in the snow, in the wonderful miracle of water in solid form, covering everything as far as the eye can see. As feet trudge through it, bodies roll in it, and tongues taste it, we delight in a wonderful paradox. The world seems dead, yet we live a third of the year – a third of our lives – in this time of deadness. For us, snow is not something that
happens to water; it is not something that water
does. For us, this is water in its natural state. But still, we wait, for the return of the sun, and the cleansing Spring rain.
And there is the river. I have often thought that if I had grown up near the banks of the North Saskatchewan River with no knowledge of the rest of the world – if I had never seen the vast fields of ice and snow in the Rocky Mountains, or seen the vast oceans themselves – then I might have believed that the river had no beginning and no end. It is just water itself: broad and deep and slow for half the year, white and smooth for the other half, but always permanent. The deep channel that the river follows through Edmonton, which is home to wildlife and nature lovers, downhill skiers, and the longest continuous expanse of urban parkland in North America, was carved by the runoff of the glaciers at the end of the last ice age: an amount of water virtually unimaginable to a prairie-born farmboy.
When I was young, my family often vacationed in the mountains of British Columbia. In the months of May, June, and July, water seems to endlessly cavort down the sides of these tree-clad hills, in trickles, rivulets, streams, and occasionally outright cascades. I remember riding in the backseat of the family station wagon as my father negotiated the winding mountain roads, and every waterfall he saw (every one!) would be met with an exclamation: “there’s a waterfall,” or, “look at the water coming down that hill.” It became such a refrain with him that my sister and I began on one particular trip to tease him about it, saying, “Whoop-de-doo!” every time he would point out
yet another waterfall; which to us, of course, looked just like every waterfall he had pointed out that morning, and for the last two days. It took me much longer to realize how those waterfalls appeared to him, a prairie-born grain farmer, whose livelihood depended on water falling from the sky at precisely the right time. From that perspective, every single waterfall on the side of every single mountain along that highway becomes a little miracle. Whoop-de-doo, indeed.
I recently had the opportunity to drive across Canada for the first time. Even after having lived in Vancouver for two years, on the shores of the Strait of Georgia, I’m still impressed by large amounts of water. For me, if I have to move my head to see all of it, then it’s an incredible amount of water. So I hope you can imagine how powerful an experience it was for me to drive along the Trans-Canada Highway along the shore of Lake Superior. I went halfway around the lake, and it took me
eight hours of driving. For long stretches, the water would be out of view as the highway curved behind stony peaks and patches of woodland. Then, a harbour or bay would emerge into view, in an absolutely stunning shade of blue-green, and a second or two would pass as I admired the view before I realized: this is still the same lake that I have been driving around all day!
I have seen the icefields of the Rocky Mountains, which feed the prairie rivers. I have seen the Pacific Ocean from both sides, and just last week I visited both the Atlantic Ocean and the Gulf of St. Lawrence. I have seen the Great Lakes and the Gulf of Mexico. Some of the happiest memories of my early life include swimming in lakes and oceans around Canada and the world. And it is only now that I realize how my stories of water are stories of blessing and abundance. Other people’s water stories will include drought and pollution, pain and concern.
The call that I am hearing, out of this time of thinking about water, is toward a greater attitude of sharing. Just as there is one Earth, there is also one Water. But I don’t mean sharing our water – as though Canada’s water could be sent elsewhere and thus solve all our problems – I mean sharing our stories, so that my stories of blessing and abundance can become
real for people who do not have similar experiences, and the stories that other people have of drought and pollution can become
real for me.
So that whether we are in the Georgia Strait or the Bay of Islands, the North or the South, the snow or the drought, we have all of it in mind, so that we are truly living with respect in Creation, loving and serving others, seeking justice, resisting evil, and being faithful stewards of our resources, and so that water can continue to mean all that it has meant, in all of its wonderful variety and miraculous power.
This is the Anglican church on Church Hill (I tried to remember the name, but I forgot).
Gower Street United Church - this is taken from almost the same spot as the previous (Ang.) photo.
St. Andrew's Presbyterian (The Kirk) - A little ways up the slope; we're not on Church Hill anymore.
Basilica of St. John the Baptist (RC) - The oldest RC parish in North America
