Water has become scarce in our neighborhood. The taps yield no flow from early morning to late evening, but towards midnight, let out a trickle, which we catch with our drums – three big, one small – and five pails. The couple we hire to run the house, who usually go home after their work, have to knock off during the wee hours, after the containers fill up, and have enough water for the next day’s use.
On top of the things included in such use, I must put the morning bath. The ablutions that once entailed a long ceremony have been reduced into a brief operation of six quick steps – the strategic deployment on the body of six buckets of water, the way the guerillas do it when the enemy approaches.
The water district lays the blame on the El Niño, which for months now has deprived us of rain, and until Christmas will likely deny us a downpour heavy and frequent enough to load the watersheds, rivers and lakes with a continuous gurgling, which, unless we venture into the remotest backwoods, we see only in calendars that carry the photographs of waterfalls. Until then our wells will stay dry.
What would happen if a man appeared and announced that those who needed water could just come to him? People would wonder if he had a powerful pump that had tapped into a huge underground spring, and would crowd his place lugging their containers, each man carrying two drums, each woman two pails, and each child two little containers that can carry downwards of a gallon. Aside from that, just as in my childhood they did in the river, the wives would wash the clothes and even bathe at that source.
As far as I know, Jesus did something similar. John writes that on the last day of the festival, Jesus cried out to all and sundry, “If any man is thirsty, let him come to me! Let the man come and drink who believes in me!”
John clarified, however, that Jesus did not mean to give ordinary water to the thirsty, but water that can quench the deepest thirst – the Spirit, which will flow like “fountains of living water” from the breast of those who believe.
The wife and I had occasion to visit the famous fountains in Rome when we attended the canonization of San Pedro Calungsod, such as the Trevi Fountain, the largest and most spectacular of them all, which features Oceanus with his oyster-shell chariot, surrounded by tritons and sea nymphs; as well as the Piazza Navona with its centerpiece, Bernini’s four rivers (the Nile, Danube, Rio de la Plata and the Ganges).
None of these great fountains, however, can compare with the Holy Spirit, the source of living water, who descended on the apostles and the Virgin Mary at Pentecost, and whom believers receive at Baptism.
The deeper, more acute thirst happens in the soul, whose dry throat longs for God’s running streams. The world commits the fallacy of answering this thirst with ordinary water, although it may have the freshness and coolness of a Roman fountain. The world tends to prescribe medical remedies for such as loneliness, broken relationships and restlessness, despite the fact that they transcend the purely physical and betray a need for the marvelous, for something that feeds on trust and belief – for a personal God. Every soul cries for a western wind that can bring it rain and love.
This, in one poem, was Gerard Manley Hopkins’ cry, “O thou lord of life, send my roots rain.”