Living water: Dean's monthly reflection

There is a fern in my study which I am fairly sure has been dead since sometime in July. I did not notice for several weeks, having watered everything else on that windowsill quite conscientiously and, for reasons that still elude me, walked straight past that one pot every single day. It is a mildly embarrassing case study in how easily a dry place can go unnoticed, even by someone standing right next to it.

The Prophet Ezekiel was looking rather more carefully than I was. In one of the most arresting passages in the Bible, the prophet is led to the threshold of the Temple and shown water trickling from beneath its door. He wades in further and the trickle becomes a stream, then a river too deep to cross. Wherever this water goes, the land responds: banks that were barren break into leaf, and even the sea is made fresh. It is, on any reading, an extraordinary vision of what the presence of God does to a place.

This September, the Church of England keeps a new festival built around that vision. On the first Sunday of the month we mark the Festival of Creation in Christ, which falls within the wider Season of Creation running from 1 September to 4 October. This year's theme, drawn directly from Ezekiel, is ‘Living Water’.

I must confess that I approached the theme expecting a festival chiefly about recycling and biodiversity, worthy causes both, but rather narrower than what the Lectionary has in mind.

Creation in Christ says something bolder: that the whole created order is held within the love of God, made through Christ, sustained in Christ and moving, however haltingly, towards its renewal in Christ. The care of the earth is not an accessory to Christian belief, to be adopted by the keen and set aside by the rest of us. It is close to the centre of what it means to follow Jesus Christ at all.

We are well placed here to feel the force of that claim. Gloucester Cathedral has stood on this spot for more than thirteen hundred years, in a diocese shaped by the Severn and the Leadon, by orchard and by wold. Ivor Gurney, who as a boy sang in this choir before he went on to write some of the finest poetry to come out of the First World War, could hardly compose a line without the Gloucestershire landscape finding its way in. He knew, as Ezekiel knew, that a place and its water are seldom easily separated from the people who love it.

Gerard Manley Hopkins put the same intuition rather more economically: for all that the world is bent and smudged by our use of it, he wrote, “There lives the dearest freshness deep down things.” That freshness is not a mood. It is a fact about who holds the world, and it is not us.

It is also a fact about what happens under our roof. When a choir sings here, or an organ sounds, or a child discovers for the first time that they can hold a tune, something is set flowing that did not begin with us and will not end with us either.

Through our choirs, our academies, our schools and our music projects, we try to make space for that kind of flourishing: a first invitation that changes what someone believes is possible for them, a welcome that gives a hesitant voice the confidence to be heard. Living water, on Ezekiel's account, does not stay where it is put. Neither, on the whole, does grace.

We shall keep the Festival here with a Choral Eucharist at 10.15am this Sunday 6 September and warmly invite all to join us, whether or not this is a service you would ordinarily attend. It seemed right, in a year with a new festival to observe, to mark it first and foremost in worship, and to let reflection and action follow from there, as they generally do when we get the order right.

Perhaps, then, two questions are worth sitting with this month, whether or not you can be with us on Sunday. Where are the dry places, in the world or closer to home, that need the water of God's love? And what might it mean for each of us to help that water flow, through the care of a garden or a hillside, through an unlooked-for kindness, through making room for someone to flourish who has not yet been given the chance?

I cannot promise to become a more attentive gardener by the time you read this. I can, however, promise something better. Here at Gloucester Cathedral we mean to go on being a place from which water flows outward: into the barren places, into the anxious, into anyone who has forgotten what it feels like to be wanted.