Sometime last year I decided to do more
to conserve water at my house. I’d
already stopped irrigating my lawn a year or two before, but with the severity
of the ongoing drought here in California I considered what further measures I might
take. I’ve never been a big one for
washing my car, or taking long showers, or letting the tap run while I brush my
teeth or shave my whiskers, so I didn’t see much room for improvement in those
areas. But there are the toilets. We have two of them, and as far as I know
they might very well date from when our house was built in 1972, because they
have those big old tanks that probably use five gallons every time they are
flushed. So, when I was at the hardware
store one day getting something else and spotted a product on the shelves that
seemed to offer at least a partial solution, I took a closer look.
It was a fancy replacement for the
old flapper valve, and instead of a handle like a little lever it has a couple
of push-buttons, one of which will measure out a smaller flush when less water
is required. And, though I was skeptical that the thing
would really work, it was inexpensive and I figured “what have I got to lose?” I only bought one, to begin with, and installed
it in the bathroom off the hall, which gets the most use, and for a while it
worked as advertised. But after a while
the valve started getting stuck the majority of the times you use it. You can release it, if you wait a second or
two after flushing, and then do this thing where you push the bottom button in
and then release it rapidly a couple of times until you hear the little “click”
of the valve snapping shut.
Which would only be a minor
inconvenience if we remembered to do that every time. But human nature being what it is, we
don’t. And of course the times we forget
are, often enough, when we’re rushing out of the house to go somewhere, and
there has been more than one occasion when I’ve returned home to find the
toilet running and I know that no one has been in the house for hours. So it’s hard to say at this point whether the
contraption has saved more water than it’s wasted, and I’m grudgingly coming to
accept that it’s time to bite the bullet and buy a couple of new,
high-efficiency toilets.
It hurts to know that my plumbing
wastes water, but I have been able to live with the pain of it longer than I
otherwise might, because there is a layer of abstraction that distances me from
the problem and softens the blow. It
costs me money, of course, but lots of things cost money, and many of them cost
more. And there’s the emotional cost of
feeling guilt about it, and ashamed of myself for procrastinating, because I
know that we are in a drought and I am wasting a precious resource, but my
actual lived experience is that there is plenty of water and however much I
use, I can always get more. That is
because my toilets are hooked up to the pipelines and pumping stations of a
modern municipal water system. And that
system has access to the reservoirs and the aquifers of the Russian River
watershed, which not shown any signs, even in this historically-bad drought, of
running dry.
It would be far different if I
lived in Judea in the 6th century BCE, which also had a summer-dry
Mediterranean climate like ours, and if my household water system was a cistern
containing what I’d been able to catch of last winter’s rain. If that cistern leaked, it would soon be
empty of water, and there would be no way to get more. It is to people in a dry land, who were
acutely aware of the precious and tenuous supply of water on which their lives
depended, that the prophet Jeremiah spoke. He was not addressing them as
individual householders, but rather, as he makes clear at the beginning of
today’s first reading from scripture, he speaks to the whole “house of Jacob,
and all the families of the house of Israel.”
And he did this during a time, when the nation faced an ongoing existential
threat, with the shadow of expansionist Mesopotamian empires constantly looming
over the land. But there is a greater
crisis, says Jeremiah, a religious crisis of which this political precariousness
is just a symptom. Speaking on behalf of
Israel’s God, he says: “my people have committed two evils: they have forsaken
me, the fountain of living water, and dug out cisterns for themselves, cracked
cisterns that can hold no water.”
In the eyes of our secular and
pluralistic age, prophets like Jeremiah can seem kind of ridiculous. The conventional wisdom about religion, if
people are willing to accord it any value at all, is that all faiths worship
the same god. Their essential truths are
the same, they just have different outward forms, different rituals, and
languages, and names for the divine. But
when Jeremiah accuses Israel of having gone after worthlessness, and so become
worthless, and of what changing their glory for that which does not profit, he
is not talking about making the wrong choice from a menu of equivalent and
interchangeable options, all of which are good.
He is talking about a critical difference in the way we think about and
relate to God, a difference that we are prone to lose sight of no matter what
“religion” we say we “belong to”.
As human beings we can, through
various ingenious means, build an artificial fountain; but even our most
advanced technology cannot create a spring.
If a spring goes dry, we can dig a well, and if the well goes dry, we
can dig it deeper, but we can’t replace an aquifer. The domain of things we can produce, predict,
and control may be vast. But it has its
limits, and the Word of the Hebrew prophets comes from the other side of those
limits, from the realm of the infinite and free. From that strange and awesome remove it
speaks, and strenuously, even violently, resists our attempts to give the things
that we have made the honor that rightfully belongs to that which made us. Any image of the divine in a created form, any
sorcery that tries to steal power or knowledge from heaven or hell, any cultic
sacrifice that claims to be able to pacify or animate the deity, is an insult
to the freedom of God.
And this freedom matters to us, not
least because it is the source of our own. Jeremiah says to the families of Israel that
they are in danger of losing their freedom, and this is because they stopped
asking “Where is the Lord who brought us up from the land of Egypt?” They stopped seeking the God who broke them
out of the house of Pharaoh, and saved them from his army. They stopped looking for the God who brought
them through the drought, and darkness of the desert, to a land whose abundance
was their gift of freedom and equality.
They contented themselves instead with a god who was a kind of domestic
pet. Forsaking the fountain of living
water, and dug cracked cisterns for themselves.
In a Presidential election year in
the United States, you can count on a lot of talk about greatness and
freedom—our greatness, and our freedom—though very little is said about what
these words might really mean. You also
hear a lot of passing references to “God”, whose job, it seems, is to bless us,
in a manner of our choosing. And none of
these glib invocations shed any light on God’s
greatness, let alone God’s
freedom. For that, you have to come to a
place like this, where people still listen for the Word that speaks from beyond
the sphere of our illusions and contrivances.
That word reminds us that freedom is a gift that grows out of the land,
when we dwell there in equality and justice; that it is still an arduous
journey to get there, one that leaves the false peace and illusory stability of
domination and subservience behind; and that our only sure guide on that
journey is a true and living God—a God who is free.
