I go before you always.
It was the Sixth Sunday of Easter, and I hadn’t caught a single drop of water during the sprinkling rite that occurs near the beginning of Mass. As each Sunday passed and the water missed me, I recalled a reflection I’d read in which a little girl loudly complains to her grandmother: “I didn’t get any water!”
I felt similarly cheated—craving just a single drop of water to quench my thirst for this Baptismal symbol. I may have missed out because of where I was sitting—it all depends on the wrist of the one doing the sprinkling—or because some Masses lacked sprinkling volunteers. No matter how I had missed out, I was missing a ritual that I have found very meaningful. If a water drop would fall on my hand, I imagined God saying, “Go, be my hands.” If water would fall on my shoulders, I felt called to help another “shoulder” their burden.
But this year—no drops of water to hint at where God was calling me.
Until the Sixth Sunday of Easter. On this particular Sunday, the volunteers distributed water with something that I can describe only as a bushy brush-type tool. This brush was capable of collecting a LOT of holy water to sprinkle onto the community.
The volunteer came up the aisle from behind me, and suddenly I felt a drenching on my back. As she passed my pew, she flicked water again. So much water that the wooden seat was wet, multiple large drops covered the floor near me and the aisle, and droplets flecked my husband’s glasses like rain.
Quenching, drenching water worth waiting for. I felt unmistakably baptized anew by this outpouring of water.
Water. Sacred water. Holy water.
Washed. Cleansed. Renewed.
I couldn’t help remembering the water poured over my bare feet a few weeks ago on Holy Thursday. Water whose message was: “Serve and be willing to receive another’s act of service.” In the pouring of the water over my feet, I had felt humbled but loved, then called to love like Jesus as I poured water over the feet of someone from the congregation. “Do as I have done for you,” Jesus said.
And in this Sunday drenching, God was saying, “I have your back. Go, I walk ahead of you. I will give you living water to sustain your journey. I am living water. Go!”
Water sends. Let me flow where you need me, Lord.