At our Water Ceremony, we invited people to consider what they had learned from water. As we brought water from a variety of places, we asked what lessons that specific water held for them. It’s a question that might feel challenging. Or vulnerable.
Some just shared where the water was from. I get it. A particular way of engaging with a ritual gets rooted in our minds and our bodies. And maybe it feels safer to name where a water came from than to consider what the water was teaching us.
Many people responded with lessons they had learned from the water, though. We’ll share them all soon so you can read back over them and potentially contemplate them more deeply. It seems that water shows up as a spiritual symbol in every religious tradition. And it can mean a lot of different things. This year, we especially noticed how water moves, and how water moves the world around it.
We also honored that this past weekend was the beginning of Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish celebration of the creation of the universe. And the opportunity to re-create ourselves and the world around us. The deep understanding that we are never finished, but always have growing edges. New things to learn. Things to learn more fully.
Our work of creation or re-creation doesn’t mean starting over from scratch, though. We don’t burn everything down and build again from nothing. We re-create ourselves and the world around us based on present reality. We get honest about the current reality of our lives and relationships, and we become humbly aware of the gap between the present moment and a vision of wholeness. We re-create ourselves and the world around us by beginning where we are.
And immediately on the heels of Rosh Hashanah arrives Yom Kippur. A time of atonement. A focus on intentional repair. In Unitarian Universalist language, we might say that we begin to re-create ourselves and the world around us based on a deep commitment to liberating Love. And that commitment begins with repairing what has been ruptured in our relationships. Within ourselves, with other people, with whatever and however we name the sacred and holy.
In a certain sense, being living water means carrying the blessing of intentional repair and reconnection into every space we enter. Honoring connection with our inner wisdom as well as interdependence with all other beings. How might you nourish that connection and embrace opportunities for repair in this time of re-creation?
Repair is how we re-create ourselves and the world around us. This commitment is an embodiment of our values. This sacred work of repair is where the divine shows up most clearly.