The Christian Century

A reader from Texas sent us a copy of a letter issued by a church summer camp: "Dear Parent(s): As you were aware, yesterday we went to the Mary T. Meager Aquatic Center. Sometime after we left the facility, some evidence of deification was located in the pool. The water was tested and found to be safe.

When I bought the land where I now live, there was nothing on it but trees, cows and fescue. The first question the builder asked me was, “Where’s your well?” I tried to hide my surprise. I had temporarily forgotten that water comes from the earth, not the sink. Of course there would have to be a well.

“I am haunted by waters.” These are the last words of Norman Maclean’s novella A River Runs Through It. Waters haunt all of us who profess the Christian faith. The human imagination is consumed with images of water, and rightly so. Our bodies are made up of water. If we fail to drink, or if we are prevented from drinking, we will expire.

James Bond is back, and in his latest action thriller filmland’s famous spy is battling a villain trying to control strategic water resources in a developing country. The plot does not seem farfetched to a church-related network based in Geneva.

Water will determine the future of the Occupied Territories, and by extension, the issue of conflict or peace in the region.” Thomas Naff made this remark several years ago, and water remains a key, if often unacknowledged, issue behind the strife in the Middle East.

The March 3 lectionary texts encouraged Christians to think about water. In John 4:14 Jesus tells the woman at the well that “those who drink of the water that I will give them will never be thirsty.