Stop And Drink, Stop And Think
By The Flowing Waters Of Oak Creek
After the First World War, the Great War, where some fourteen million died, bringing enormous disillusionment across the globe, from which perhaps we have never recovered, T. S. Eliot famously described the dry wasteland into which we have wandered.
In his enormously influential poem The Waste Land, written in 1922, two years before his conversion, he offers little hope.
Here is no water but only rock
Rock and no water and the sandy road
The road winding above among the mountains
Which are mountains of rock without water
If there were water we should stop and drink
Amongst the rock one cannot stop or think. . . .
The Psalmist adds to this vision, we’re like deer longing for running streams, where “we thirst for God, the living God.”
The rich prophetic tradition of our Christian faith, time and time again, laments this barren wilderness into which we wander. Why do we choose this path? For Jeremiah the answer’s easy.
13 My people have committed two sins:
they have rejected me,
a source of living water,
and they have hewn out for themselves cisterns,
cracked cisterns which hold no water. Jeremiah 2:13
How could we turn our backs on the “source of living water”? And then, amazingly, how could we imagine we can create a world of endless progress and perfection. When we begin to imagine we are masters of our lives, masters of the universe, we discover, to our dismay, we have created only “cracked cisterns which hold no water.” That’s where we are today.
The urgent question is how we might begin again to locate the source of living water for our barren time? We cast about for something that will hold water. Politics, we sometimes imagine. Some heroic figure, perhaps, maybe a celebrity, maybe a guru presenting yet another plan how to live well, maybe freedom from any kind of moral boundaries, or maybe our doctors or scientists or academics will come forward with all the answers to all our worries. We always end with disappointment.
Is it too late to turn back to the source of living water, where we may stop and drink? If we can make that turn, oh how amazing it will be.
Let the wilderness and the parched land be glad,
let the desert rejoice and burst into flower.
2 Let it flower with fields of asphodel,
let it rejoice and shout for joy. . . .for water will spring up in the wilderness
and torrents flow in the desert.
7 The mirage will become a pool,
the thirsty land bubbling springs;
instead of reeds and rushes, grass will grow . . . .
Isaiah 35:1-2, 35:6-7
I spent a lot of time in my life listening to the prophets of our age. While still young I wanted desperately not to be naïve as I clutched my childhood faith. Always, though, with Jeremiah, I was puzzled how a whole civilization could possibly choose the barrenness they described. Such a choice clearly ends, I thought, in disillusionment and despair across the land.
I remember well, growing up in Phoenix, the dry, sometimes blistering deserts of August. I remember our much-anticipated treks deep into our beloved Oak Creek Canyon. I remember those many walks to the creek, putting my face down into the crystal pure, cold, cold water, drinking deeply. Beside that ever-flowing stream, I would stop and think, by the hour. It was here I could hear Jesus promising “whoever drinks the water I shall give will never again be thirsty.”
Even now, with the prospects of gloom as strong as they have ever been, maybe with time running out for our age, I’m trying to make my choice, every day, every morning, to watch the thirsty land become again ever-flowing springs. I want to discard those delusional cracked cisterns that hold no water. I want to see the barren desert “burst into flower,” where the whole world may once again “rejoice and shout for joy.”
Can we still see this vision of the prophets? Can we hear these words of Jesus? Can we still choose? I’m going to do everything I can, every morning, every day, to stop and drink, stop and think? Will you join me? We’ve still got a chance, don’t we?