I ‘ve been following the story of the recent flooding here.  And as I mentioned at the beginning of the service rising and falling waters are a recurring motif which lie at the heart of the Judeo/Christian tradition; from the spirit of God which brooded over the face of the waters at the second verse of Genesis and on through Noah’s Flood, the parting of the Red sea, the crossing of the Jordan, Jesus baptism in the Jordan (which the church celebrates on this day) as well as the Gospels references to  Joshua’s and Moses’ miracles; as Jesus walks on and calms the waters.

I’m more likely to look at the underlying metaphors in religious language than to take them as literal truths, and I recognise that the water does bear us; we are water borne in the womb, and reliant on water throughout life so its a powerful metaphor of the way spirit moves and passes from generation to generation, a metaphor we preserve in Christian baptism and even in more humanist ‘namings’ welcomings and blessings where water almost invariably finds a way of being referenced.

Water is the great symbol of ‘the way’ in the Tao te Ching too, of the power of powerlessness and flow, of least resistance, the trickle that becomes a flood and the drip that can wear out a stone.
When I moved to Leighton Buzzard where I live now there was no Unitarian congregation so instead I sometimes attended worship at the Friends meeting house. I soon began working for the Friends as a sort of warden and I began to work with the local planning department on restoring parts of the building which is grade 2 listed. It was built in 1758 so its quite old. Something the planning surveyor said stayed with me; he pointed out that the damp problem was entirely self inflicted. He said that the building as it had been built would have been able to, as he put it, breathe. Naturally sometimes water would seep in, either from below or through the roof, but with natural brick, traditional mud mortar, and lime plaster it would fairly quickly just flow back out again. Then in modern times, from about the seventies I suppose, we developed concrete plasters and mortars, and plastic membranes and especially plasticized paints and the effect, rather than keeping damp, in the form of rain or tide, out, was that it locked damp, in the form of condensation, in. Outside he pointed to the damp course and laughed, this idea, he told me, of drilling holes in good brick and injecting chemicals was entirely market lead, in other words the salesmen who sold it created the market for it, and it quickly became seen as a real solution but with hindsight surveyors agree almost unanimously that it did much more harm than good because it denies the traditional building techniques the chance to work in the way they were designed to; water cant simply dry out but remains trapped in the footings which become waterlogged.

I ve got some friends I met when I worked in the theatre from the Ukraine. They’re a group called Maisterina Pisni which means the mystery of song. In their publicity blurb they explain the idea that folk song and hymnody is the conveyor of what they describe as “traditional ideology”. It keeps alive a tradition they believe has a continuing validity “Through the work with traditional forms of singing we find clear footworn over the ages way to our personal, unique and dear, what we can hand down to other person. The traditional song provides access to primary source, it is a bearer of knowledge, it can teach, cure and change the life. We use traditional technologies according to which a singing is a service, a singing is an instrument of connection with traditional ideology.” Although the translation is patchy I think its clear what they’re driving at here and it seems to me there is plenty we can learn from their idea that we dont have to abandon everything that has value from our own tradition and our own personal or cultural frame of reference just in order to be up to date with the supposedly cutting edge. At a meeting in Spring last year we were exhorted to begin to embrace the new technologies of social media in worship, to tweet and instagram from services, in interfaces that are literally momentary. I ‘m fascinated by communication technology and the spirituality that is implied by such complete connectivity but I also refer in my own spiritual life to that which connects me to the continuity of my past, my ancestors, my culture and my future. I want the point of connection which binds me to the eternal, the point which proceeds outwards and inwards infinitely. Baptism, with its  gentle reminder of the rising and falling waters is such meeting point and its one common to all spiritual traditions which take seriously the idea of a consciously chosen path, maybe not the easiest path, but one which leads beyond the mundane. So I’ll conclude with the poem by Jane Hirshfield that I read earlier, a poem about accepting that some things may be of greater value than our immediate concerns. The poem reminded me, with its image of the tree branches tapping insistently at the kitchen window, of the flood waters that were lapping recently at the doors of this chapel, that immensity that demands our attention whether we have accounted for it or not.

Tree

It is foolish
to let a young redwood
grow next to a house.

Even in this
one lifetime,
you will have to choose.

That great calm being,
this clutter of soup pots and books –

Already the first branch-tips brush at the window.
Softly, calmly, immensity taps at your life.

Jane Hirshfield

Thank you for your attention.