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This week my husband I are spending a few days in Tofino “storm watching.”  What I love most is walking the beaches, watching the ocean roaring high above its summer level, the huge cedars and firs swaying in the breeze, the wet mist and moss dripping from the trees.  In the midst of nature’s raw beauty I am reminded that I am very small, just one small part in a web of living, fluid creation connected and sustained by the breath of God. I am reminded that water is fluid, changing to moisture to air to rain and back to water;  that we need, breath, are made of water.    

Many theologians have pointed out that our relationship with God is connected to our recognition of Earth’s sacredness. How can we use nature to cultivate an awareness of God?  How do we enter a space of reverence, where there are no walls and no ceilings and yet where we find a room we share with our Creator? 

Christians are slowly begining to realize what a muddle we have got ourselves into by not taking incarnation and creation seriously.  Theologian Sallie McFague (1933–2019) powerfully described creation as “the body of God” and the place of salvation. She wrote, “Creation as the place of salvation means that the health and well-being of all creatures and parts of creation is what salvation is all about—it is God’s place and our place, the one and only place.” 

With the growing climate change emergency the earth and its life systems, on which we all entirely depend, might soon become the very things that will convert us to an inherent and universal sense of reverence for the Holy.  We all breathe the same air and drink the same water. There are no Jewish, Christian, or Muslim versions of these universal elements.     
 All water is holy. It is always and everywhere two parts hydrogen and one part oxygen, and voilà—we have the absolute miracle of liquid water, absolutely necessary for all that lives.
This earth indeed is the very Body of God, and it is from this body that we are born, live, suffer, and resurrect to eternal life. Either all is God’s Great Project, or we may rightly wonder whether anything is. 

Water flows throughout scripture, and this reminds us of its importance…. both spiritually and physically.  Genesis 1:2 “a wind from God swept of the face of the waters, Revelations:  22:17 “let everyone who is thirsty come.  Let anyone who wishes take the water of life as a gift.” Jesus, the source of Living Water, extends an invitation to all who thirst.  Water is given to us by God.  

A Sufi teacher Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee writes: 
The world is not a problem to be solved; it is a living being to which we belong. The world is part of our own self and we are a part of its suffering wholeness. . .
It is this wholeness that is calling to us now, that needs our response. It needs us to return to our own root and rootedness: our relationship to the sacred within creation. Only from the place of sacred wholeness and reverence can we begin the work of healing, of bringing the world back into balance.

Walking the beaches, listening to the ocean, meditating of the presence of God in the midst of such energy returns me to my own rootedness and my relationship to the sacred flowing within creation, within each of us. 

From an old hymn:  The Sands of Time are Sinking

“O Christ, He is the fountain
The deep, sweet well of love;
The streams on earth I’ve tasted
More deep I’ll drink above.
There to an ocean fullness
His mercy doth expand,
And glory, glory dwelleth
In Immanuel’s land