Seasons Online | River Sunday is the final Sunday in the Season of Creation 2011

Additional scriptures
Genesis 8:20–22; 9:12–17
Psalm 104:27–33
Matthew 28:1–10

Most of the rivers I’ve seen in Europe are different from those I know in Africa: rather slow-moving, contained within well-defined, unchanging banks, their pollution hidden under their dark surface carrying barges and ships with the produce of an industrialized consumer society. European rivers are predictable and not subject to the droughts, floods, changing banks, tempestuousness and destruction which is typical of Southern African rivers.

And yet, that will also change. When I was a young girl many years ago, I remember a visit to Switzerland to a mountain, source of two of Europe’s major rivers, the Rhone and the Rhein. The source of the Rhone was under a massive glacier that was so deep, we were able to walk upright far inside the glacier along a tunnel gouged out of the ice. At its entrance was a large stone building in which delicious hot chocolate was served to cold glacier-walkers.

When I saw the documentary “An Inconvenient Truth,” there was a shot of that same building at the top of that same valley. But my glacier had gone; retreated to a tiny area of ice high up the fold of the mountain. The building stood abandoned and useless. The impact of this sight shocked me into a deeper understanding of the reality of climate change.

Here in the southeastern part of South Africa recent years have brought so much rain that old springs on the hillside where I live have flowed again for the first time in fifteen years. Swollen rivers have rushed down from the Drakensberg Mountains to the Indian Ocean coast, their waters spreading out of the estuaries a wide brown tide of soil and plants and branches and occasionally great tree trunks.

In our mountains you can still enjoy sparkling streams bubbling along boulders and pebbles worn smooth by centuries of water. Further down, in some places, attempts are being made to save precious wetlands through which streams have long meandered to reach their rivers. People are beginning to understand the purpose of wetlands and are working to recover them from ignorant, thoughtless, or greedy planners who have drained them and often irretrievably destroyed their valuable life.

Around the mining and industrial areas of the Witwatersrand, where a gold-mining camp of the 1860s grew into the great and ever-growing metropolis of Johannesburg, new disaster threatens. The name means the “range of white waters,” and it is home to gold, platinum, coal, and uranium. Now, many of the old mines have exhausted their profitability and have been abandoned. Water from ancient springs is now filling the old mines, dissolving toxic metals from the worked walls. A massive time bomb develops as the toxic water begins to seep into groundwater and streams, preparing to poison the rivers that supply several cities, towns, villages, and shack settlements across an enormous area. The authorities have only recently admitted there is a problem after an era when research was suppressed or ignored.

Rivers are the very source of life. Water sustained the very stuff from which human life emerged. Ancient people knew the place of the deep river sources, from the Celtic hidden wells in Ireland, to the secret wells in Rajisthan, to the wells mapped by the first inhabitants of the outback in Australia still known today by the elders. The waters bring healing and wisdom to those who acknowledge their life-giving power.

“We all live downstream,” said South African theologian Steve de Gruchy a few months before he died in a tubing accident on a turbulent Mooi River in the Natal Midlands. Greatly mourned, Steve died in the prime of a life lived with energy and purpose, with wisdom and commitment to life in all its fullness for all and for the earth and its rivers.

River Sunday provides an opportunity for reflection on the life-giving and death-dealing potential of our rivers. It may be a time to discover once again that we all come from the water and wonder how we might use it with wisdom and foresight that offers the gift to future generations.

Sue Brittion is a priest in the Anglican Church of Southern Africa. Sue is on the board of the Southern African Faith Communities’ Environment Institute. Sue is a mother of three amazing daughters and grandmother of Jethro and Layla.

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September 25, 2011 is River Sunday