Connected While Apart
Assurance in the Flow

Kishwaukee River — November 2, 2020

Dear Mayfield,
In any accounting of rivers, the winding, North-flowing Kishwaukee is in the watery minor leagues, especially in a state that hosts the likes of the Mississippi, the Illinois, the Rock, and the Fox Rivers, to name a few.  I remember when I first moved to Dekalb County one of my earliest perceptions of the landscape involved the Kish.  It seemed to me that wherever you were in our part of the county that you were never more than a couple of miles from the Kish.  No matter what direction I took, before long I would cross the river.  North, South, East, and West — it’s always accessible.  That first spring we were at flood stage for weeks.  It was important that I know exactly where the river was and wasn’t, so I could figure out how to move around on routes that were still unfamiliar, a number of which were underwater.

With the exception of flood waters or waters that are dangerously low, it is interesting to me how flowing water, the continual movement of a river, often stills and grounds me.  There is something comforting about that flow.  What a wonderful paradox — the unfixed flowing that renders an assuring sense of secure centeredness.  In our worship resources for June 7, 2020, I included river wisdom from John Philip Newell’s A New Harmony.  In Greek, the word for God theos is rooted in the Greek verb theo which means “to flow” or “to run.”  Newell wrote these words in that text regarding a ninth century Irish teacher who made the God-river connection:  “God, he said, is the One who runs or flows through all things.  If the subterranean flow of God were somehow dammed up or stopped, all things would cease to exist.  God is not simply a dimension of life, into relationship with which we may choose or choose not to move.  God is the very essence of life, the River in which everything is born, the Flow without which there would be no flow.”

On this high stakes and tense election day, I’m offering a few river quotes as a centering gift of assurance.  I also invite you, if you are able and have easy access to the Kishwaukee or another river, to spend some calming time today in a river’s presence.

May what I do flow from me like a river,
no forcing and no holding back,
the way it is with children.
Then in these swelling and ebbing currents,
these deepening tides moving out, returning,
I will sing you as no one ever has, streaming through widening channels
into the open sea.  (Rainer Maria Rilke)

When you do things from your soul, you feel a river moving in you, a joy.  (Rumi)

I reflected on how powerful it was to be carried along by something greater than myself…I thought about rivers starting as a trickle, high in the hills or mountains, and gathering force as they descend, swelling into streams, feeding off tributaries, getting broader and bigger.  I wondered if faith didn’t grow this way too: slight and slow and then deepening and widening with time.  And what it would take for my faith to truly flow?…Who would I be–what would I do–if I trusted that I was carried by Spirit?  (Mary Reynolds Thompson)

God is a river, not just a stone.  God is a wild, raging rapids and a slow, meandering flow.  God is a deep and narrow passage and a peaceful, sandy shoal.  God is the river, swimmer, so let go.  (Peter Mayer)

I would love to live like a river flows, carried by the surprise of its own unfolding.  (John O’Donohue)

I live by a creek, Tinker Creek, in a valley in Virginia’s Blue Ridge…The creeks–Tinker and Carvin’s–are an active mystery, fresh every minute.  Theirs is the mystery of the continuous creation and all that providence implies: the uncertainty of vision, the horror of the fixed, the dissolution of the present, the intricacy of beauty, the pressure of fecundity, the elusiveness of the free, and the flawed nature of perfection.  (Annie Dillard)

In an assuring flow of peace, Martha