Each time I come to this place I am overwhelmed with the power and majesty of God’s creation. Before me rushes a wall of water that turns into a thunderous narrow river, which flows into a fast moving creek and eventually makes its way to the sea, where I began my journey.
It is a three and a half mile hike in one direction, tracing the water’s journey through dense woods at an ever-increasing elevation between the waterfall to the sea. Along the way, the water’s movement is loud and overbearing and at other times gentle and inviting. For me, there is no greater icon of the journey from Palm Sunday to Easter than the endless water cycle.
Poet and friend Judy Brown describes this movement in her poem “Currents”:
Currents pull us, tides, crosswinds.
We come out of an eddy in a stream,
into a narrow place,
a curve where water has a power of its own.
The river has its strength,
the pull of a stream downhill in whitewater,
around a bend, the power of the seas and oceans, too, the tides.
And we have choices still in how we are within that flow,
as if reed-like we float,
so that the current pours within and through us,
or else in grasping not to go to some new place,
we lodge crosswise and broken against rocks,
safely unmoving and yet crushed by force of water,
pushing against us.
We have a choice, not of the current,
but of the way we turn ourselves,
within its strength.
We cannot foil the tides
but we can learn the timing
and the grace of turning so that force of water
gives us strength,
and helps us on our way to some new place we
didn’t mean to go,
yet where we can arrive in safety, with exhilaration,
gratitude, relief,
still whole and even more ourselves
for having found a way to be in partnership with currents
we had not anticipated.
May you navigate through the Holy Week journey with Jesus, may you be overwhelmed, exhilarated, and inspired by the force of the current and the endless depth of God’s love for you.
Source: Bishop Brian Prior – The Force of the Current