With Water And With Words

With Water and with Words

I didn’t mean to watch the ceremony commemorating the anniversary of 9/11, but for some reason I did what I rarely do on a Sunday morning: I turned on the television. When I did, I saw thousands solemnly gathered at Ground Zero and heard the litany of victims’ names read by still-grieving sons, daughters, wives, husbands, siblings, mothers, and fathers. Those same names scrolled across the bottom of the screen; it would take more than four hours for the list of the dead to run from beginning to end.

Not only were the names read—interspersed with tributes from two presidents, a governor, and a mayor, anthems from a children’s choir, and a haunting cello solo from Yo-Yo Ma—they were etched in bronze around an inverted fountain, framing nearly an acre of rushing water with a strange music of its own.

Along with flowing tears, the morning was awash with water and with words.

The water gave life and movement to what was for so long an ugly, unhealed scar. And the words—the names—made the place even more hallowed than it might have seemed before. With water and words, the space was set apart and put to use again. Slowly, families made their way around the perimeter of the fountain and searched for the names that mattered most to them. Some stretched out hands to trace one by one the letters that they loved; others knelt and wept; still others rubbed impressions onto paper with crayons or with chalk. Flowers, small American flags, teddy bears, notes, and photos were lingered over and then left behind.

Like this precious space at the lower end of Manhattan, I’ve been sanctified and set apart with water and with words. Christ himself has washed me, for he is living water. With his beautiful words of life he has wooed and won my heart. He doesn’t mean to erase my past or eradicate my memory of it—his aim is higher: he cleanses and transforms it so that in his eyes I am radiant in the reflected beauty of his own splendor.

He makes all things gloriously new. Even me.

Christ loved the church. He gave up his life for her to make her holy and clean, washed by the cleaning of God’s word.

Ephesians 5:25-26