Water--holy and wholesome?

Gibaut, John ; Gorsboth, Maike

Introduction

Among the blessings of working in the multilateral, international and interdisciplinary context of the World Council of Churches (WCC) are the many different dialogue partners who are able to challenge, broaden and mutually enrich one another. One such dialogue has been between a Canadian Anglican liturgical theologian and a German Lutheran eco-justice activist. Over a series of months Maike Gorsboth, coordinator of the Ecumenical Water Network, and John Gibaut, director of the Commission on Faith and Order, have engaged in a challenging and enlightening dialogue on the issue of water. We have already collaborated in the successful preparation of texts for the 2010 Seven Weeks for Water, which address the ecological crisis of water and its accessibility from different liturgical perspectives.

We are aware that to some, if not many, the Ecumenical Water Network and Faith and Order are unusual dialogue partners within the WCC. While the Ecumenical Water Network focuses on mobilizing concrete ecumenical activities to promote good stewardship and just access to water, Faith and Order engages in long-term multilateral theological reflection which seeks to resolve church-dividing issues, many of them relating to liturgical and sacramental questions, including water baptism. In this article we would like to share some of the learning we have gleaned from one another and our conversations, including the challenges posed by eco-justice advocates to the churches in their liturgical use of water and the challenges that the liturgical tradition poses in the context of the water crisis. In the end, we affirm that liturgical and activist perspectives belong together and are mutually enriching.

Overview: the Global Water Crisis

Today, humanity faces the overuse and pollution of water to an unprecedented degree, threatening ecosystems and the health and livelihoods of billions, particularly of the most vulnerable. Economic growth, population growth, changing life-styles and urbanization are increasing the demand and therefore the pressure on our world's water resources. Climate change is an important additional factor, aggravating water scarcity and leading to more extreme and less predictable weather patterns that affect how much water is available, where and when.

Those who suffer most from this situation are the world's poorest. Of the almost 1 billion who do not have adequate access to safe drinking water today, almost all live in developing countries and two out of three are surviving on less than $2 a day. (1) Many of them rely on dirty water from open rivers, lakes and wells, or spend several hours collecting water every day. Others spend large parts of their restricted income to buy water. Moreover, half of the more than 2 billion people who do not have access to adequate sanitation belong to the world's poorest households. The unsafe collection and disposal of human excreta is closely linked to the contamination of food and water and the spread of water-related diseases that kill 2 to 3 million people every year. WaterAid estimates that inadequate water and sanitation may be the underlying cause of more than a quarter of the 8.8 million deaths among children under five each year. (2)

It is also the poorest who are hardest hit by increasingly unpredictable and more extreme droughts and floods. Seventy percent of the world's poorest live in rural settings where they depend on rearing livestock and on mainly rain-fed agriculture to feed themselves and their families and generate some income. (3) Already today about 700 million people live in areas affected by water stress; by 2025 this figure could be up to 3 billion. For many governments and communities, it is becoming more and more difficult to satisfy the different demands and needs beyond drinking water: water to ensure food security, water to supply rapidly growing cities and industries, water for ecosystems. Ecosystems collapse as the natural water cycle is altered and the dumping of our waste overwhelms nature's capacity of purification. In many places the very "bloodstream of the biosphere" (4) is at risk of being clogged.

While the exact nature of water problems and their possible solutions differ from one situation to another, it still seems appropriate to talk of a "global crisis" for a number of reasons. First, even the promotion and implementation of local solutions require global solidarity and analysis. Second, there are many cases where water is depleted and polluted in the production of food and goods that are sold and consumed far away from the local populations suffering the consequences. Similarly, climate change is not always caused where its impact is most felt. Third, some of the underlying causes of the crisis are global in nature: the often rather single-minded pursuit of economic development, the inefficient and wasteful use of water resources, inadequate management and regulation, and all too often the insufficient prioritization and protection of the needs of the poorest.

Faith and Water

For us as inhabitants of our planet, water is an issue that concerns all Christians, raising the topics of just stewardship of the gift of God's creation, just access to water and just usage of water. This idea was expressed by the Ninth Assembly of the WCC at Porto Alegre in 2006:

   Water is a symbol of life. The Bible affirms water as the cradle of
   life, an expression of God's grace in perpetuity for the whole of
   creation (Gen 2:5ff). It is a basic condition for all life on Earth
   (Gen l:2ff.) and is to be preserved and shared for the benefit of
   all creatures and the wider creation. Water is the source of health
   and well-being and requires responsible action from us human
   beings, as partners and priests of Creation (Rom 8:19 ff., Rev 22).
   As churches, we are called to participate in the mission of God to
   bring about a new creation where life in abundance is assured to
   all (John 10:10; Amos 5:24). It is therefore right to speak out and
   to act when the life-giving water is pervasively and systematically
   under threat. (5)

The deep Christian concern for water is shaped by the biblical narrative beginning with the waters of creation and ending in the waters of the new creation, the river of the waters of life coursing through the New Jerusalem, bringing healing to the nations (Rev. 22:1-2). The narratives of life and death and new life in the Hebrew and Christian scriptures are often described in the context of water, from the Flood and the Exodus to the narrative of the baptism of Jesus, the stories of events around the Sea of Galilee in the gospels, and Paul's preaching of the Gospel across the waters of the Mediterranean.

The ordinary, everyday experience of water as healing, cleansing, quenching, life-giving, as well as death-dealing, and the bountiful biblical instances of water as part of God's healing action, are brought together within the context of the liturgy, in particular in baptism. Paul makes this connection clear in the letter to the Romans, where Christian participation in the death and resurrection of Jesus takes place in the experience of being baptized--literally "plunged under"--and raised up in the waters of baptism. Water plays a pivotal role in the life of the church through baptism and consequent liturgical acts, such as the blessing of people and things through blessed water, the celebration of the baptism of Jesus in the waters of the river Jordan, the place of water in the Byzantine celebration of the Theophany, and other liturgical acts. The theme of water appears in the course of the lectionary or assigned biblical readings throughout the liturgical year. And, for many traditions, water is liturgically blessed for use in baptism.

Given the pivotal role of water in the liturgical tradition, it is curious that sacramental and liturgical theologians on the one hand, and eco- or environmental activists and theologians on the other, are not in frequent alliance with one another for the enriching of the experience of water for the Christian community at prayer, and for strengthening the prophetic and advocacy role of the church around a just and faithful stewardship of water as a part of God's creation.

Liturgical Theology

An axiom of contemporary liturgical theologians is derived from a fifth-century theologian, Prosper of Aquitaine: lex orandi, lex credendi. (6) The Latin tag in ancient and contemporary literature states that the "law of praying" establishes or constitutes the "law of believing". In other words, how we pray shapes what we believe. Here, liturgy is understood as an event or experience, from which theological reflection follows; it posits that the experience of the encounter with God precedes its theological reflection. (7) Many add a third factor, namely the "law" of acting or living, forming a neat triad: lex orandi, lex credendi, lex vivendi. Accordingly, if experience gives rise to reflection or meaning, and horizons of meaning give rise to concrete actions, then the experience of God in liturgy shapes Christian believing; this in turn shapes Christian action. The axiom refuses to allow experience, belief and praxis to drift apart. Few would want to limit this dynamic interaction to liturgical prayer alone, but, as Aidan Kavanagh has poetically asserted,

   For if theology as a whole is critical reflection upon the
   communion between God and our race, the peculiarly graced
   representative and servant of cosmic order created by God and
   restored in Christ, the scrutiny of the precise point at which this
   communion is most overtly celebrated by us under God's judgment and
   in God's presence would seem to be crucial to the whole enterprise.
   (8)

The intimate relationship between liturgy and theology is borne out through study of the development of doctrine, as well as in pastoral practice. For instance, the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed, while developed by two ecumenical councils, finds its historic origins in the earlier baptismal creeds recited during the liturgical celebration of baptism. A simple example of pastoral life that illustrates the same development in individual Christians is found in the impact of Christmas carols and hymns on how we understand the incarnation. At times, insights into the validity of lex orandi, lex credendi are derived from negative experiences of corporate liturgical prayer; when liturgy is consistently sloppy or dull, it comes as no surprise when personal faith and piety falls away.

An important insight about the power of liturgy in shaping belief and action arises from feminist critiques of liturgy, which point out that when exclusively male imagery is used for God or the human person, maleness becomes normative, with a decreased accent on the place and insights of women. It is chastening to remember that 20th-century apartheid in South Africa began as liturgical division around access to the celebration of the Lord's supper and holy communion in the 19th century.

In short, what and how the Christian community prays has profound and often serious consequences for what it believes and how it behaves. We have wondered whether part of the reason that the sacramental and liturgical use of water has played such a weak role in Christian discourse on the environmental and accessibility issues around of water lies in the all too frequent impoverished use of water in baptism in particular and in the liturgical life of the church in general.

Liturgical Praxis and the Water Crisis

In the understanding of liturgical theology, liturgy is an event rather than a set of prayer texts, so how the Christian community uses water is as important as what it says about it in liturgical texts. The earliest Christian practice of immersing children and adult candidates for baptism in water continues in some traditions, notably the Orthodox traditions. It was restored by Anabaptist and other traditions in the 16th century and recovered more widely in some of the Western liturgical traditions in the 20th century. Nevertheless, for most Western Christians, baptism by sprinkling or pouring a small amount of water on the forehead is still normative. The gradual move from immersion to sprinkling in the Western traditions from late antiquity through the medieval church is due to a variety of factors, such as the normative candidacy of infants, the corresponding privatizing of baptismal celebration and the spread of the centres of Western Christianity to more northern climates. As baptism became more and more clinical and baptismal fonts smaller and smaller, the minimalist instrumentality of water came to dominate. As such small amounts of water could no longer correspond to the reality of water in daily life, or evoke the deep biblical narratives of water, the rite of baptism could no longer "exegete" itself, and became overly dependent on words and explanation, and less rooted in the inherent and rich experiential symbolism of water.

An important question is the extent to which the diminished experience of water in the church's central act of Christian initiation, and its disconnection from water in daily life, may gave rise to a diminished sense of the holiness of water, with a corresponding absence of Christian responsibility for the health and wholeness of water. It is worth asking to what extent the theological devaluing of water, with its roots in liturgical praxis, led Western society to treat water as a commodity to be used and abused, rather than as a holy gift. While the roots of the current crisis are of course more complex, there is a link between the beliefs about water from the major Western religious tradition, Christianity, and attitudes that have misused water for centuries.

The sources of the rise in Christian consciousness around the environment, together with the emergence of eco-theology evident in the works of theologians such as Thomas Berry, Larry Rasmussen, Leonardo Boff and Rosemary Ruether, (9) are rich and varied, with strong roots in the biblical witness. It is not surprising that the liturgy, understood as event or action, is seldom cited. Through the liturgical movement, however, there has been an insistence on the recovery of the fullest use of all the sacramental symbols, including eucharistic bread and wine, oil and touch. The recovery of baptismal pools, immersion baptism with larger fonts, as well as the baptism of adult candidates has been part of a wider liturgical reappropriation of the central place of water. Locating the baptismal pool or font to a central place in the church building, often accompanied by flowing water, begins to match the use of water for bathing or swimming, for healing and the quenching of thirst; it begins to evoke the biblical imagery of water. Such richer experiences of water give rise to a more fulsome theological understanding; it is at this point, where praxis and reflection meet on a different level, that liturgical theology and environmental theology and action begin to meet. Here, environmental concerns challenge the churches to live up to the theological vision of water inherent in baptism. It is here that the holiness of water is reflected in prayers of blessing or thanksgiving over it and its use in Christian initiation, and that the identification of gift and holiness in all water is authentically proclaimed.

Our conversations about the points of convergence between liturgical praxis and the environmental crisis around water have arisen from two "case studies" in particular arising from the articles prepared internationally and ecumenically for the 2010 Seven Weeks of Water. (10) The first touches on the water crisis in terms of pollution, while the second touches on the issue of access to water. Both point to the radical discontinuity between liturgical understandings of water and the realities created by the global water crisis.

Holy Water--Please Do Not Drink!

From Elias Abramides, an Orthodox theologian from Argentina, comes an account of the Feast of the Theophany. The blessing of water occurs in many different liturgical traditions, usually for the celebration of baptism, and, by extension, for other blessings of water. For Eastern Christians, particular blessing of waters takes place on the Feast of the Theophany, the Eastern equivalent of the Western celebration of the Epiphany on 6 January. (11) Whereas in the West, the "epiphany" or manifestation of Christ is to the Gentiles in the visitation of the Magi to the Christ Child, for Eastern Christianity the "Theophany" or "appearance or manifestation of God to the world" focuses on the Baptism of Christ in the River Jordan by John. The Orthodox celebration of Theophany includes a blessing of water using a rich and powerful variety of biblical images and liturgical actions. If possible, the blessing of water takes place outside the church building, by living water such as a river, stream, lake or sea. The blessing includes dipping lighted candles into the water, breathing over the water, and dipping a cross in the water, then plunging the cross into the living waters of the river, stream, lake or sea. The faithful and their homes are blessed by being sprinkled with the holy water, as well as by drinking it.

As celebrated in settings such as the monastery Valamo in Finland, (12) this ritual can bring the beauty of creation before the eyes of worshippers, and perhaps also some of its terror: the waters of baptism as a symbol of both death and rebirth, when you take the traditional bath in the ice-cold waters, as is customary in some countries in the northern hemisphere.

This year, a few days after Theophany, newspapers and internet sites around the world carried a news item with the headline "200 people hospitalized after drinking dirty holy water". It was reported that hundreds of people in the east Siberian city of Irkutsk in Russia had fallen ill after drinking from unprotected water sources on the date of the Theophany, in the belief that any water collected on Theophany was blessed and had curative powers. Apparently the cause was not water that had been blessed during the ceremony, but water from another, unprotected and unsafe source of water. However, it is worth thinking about the possible implications for a moment.

Some reactions to this news item expressed in comments on the internet showed little concealed ridicule and Schadenfreude, though these were mainly, but not exclusively, restricted to anti-religious platforms. Many remarked on how naive it was of people to think that blessing water would at the same time purify it. One commented that "maybe they should have added holy chlorine". (13)

Leaving aside the apparent desire to ridicule "overly credulous ... believers", (14) these reactions are interesting in our context as they reflect something else: the understanding that it is "common sense" to regard any open water source as likely to be harmful. Admittedly, even in Jesus' time it would have been common sense to be aware that there were both safe and unsafe sources of water. Today, however, with up to 12,000 cubic kilometers of severely polluted fresh water--that is, one-eighth of all global resources--the scale of the current crisis is one that would have been unimaginable in pre-industrial times, is For instance, in China, more than half of all surface water is too contaminated to be used for human consumption. In Latin America, less than 14 percent of human waste is being treated; the untreated water ends up either directly or indirectly polluting rivers, lakes and groundwater. The article on the worshippers who fell ill from drinking contaminated water on the feast of Theophany mentioned that generally, tap water in Russia was undrinkable.

We asked Elias Abramides what it means if the Feast of Theophany is celebrated over a polluted body of water. His answer was clear: "It does not matter; it is still Holy Water." But holy polluted water? Shouldn't something in us rebel at the very thought? Although not an water is liturgically "blessed", all water is inherently holy. Its quality of "normal", "daily" water lies at the roots of its biblical and symbolic meaning and the churches' liturgical use of (holy) water, which reflects this meaning.

Here, the liturgical blessing of water, revealing its inherent holiness as a gift of God, stands in radical contrast to the human misuse of water which, in a dangerously sacrilegious fashion, renders the holy unwholesome. The discontinuity between blessed-yet-also-contaminated water stands as a judgment against human abuse of God's creation. As such, polluted water blessed at the Feast of the Theophany becomes an intolerable liturgical scandal that impels Christians towards a just stewardship of God's creation.

Come to the Waters--Access to Water and Inequality

In the Great Commission at the end of Matthew's gospel, Jesus says to his disciples, "Go therefore and make disciples of all the nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit." The universal call to baptism contains an assumption that there will be universal access to water. The global water crisis raises serious questions about the accessibility of water for all and, hence, of universal access to the waters of baptism.

From Lucy Wambui, a Presbyterian from Kenya, comes an account of baptism in an African context. (16) She recounts a recent celebration of about 80 adults from the Maasai community of Kajiado (a semi-arid area in Kenya). They were baptized in a constructed pool, which she describes as a "deeper" version of a trough. Because the rivers are dry, water for the baptism had to be brought in from elsewhere, and was bought at the price of 2,000 Kenyan shillings (about 25 Swiss francs or US$35). In an area of Kenya where people and livestock are dying due to lack of food and water, this is a great deal of money, and represents a remarkable commitment to the liturgical practice of immersion baptism. Here, the people opted for the water of baptism, rather than buying food or drinking water. After the celebration of baptism was over, the members of the congregation scrambled to collect the remaining baptismal water in order to feed their livestock.

As Lucy points out, this story "represents the reality for many communities." It speaks of the poverty and lack of water and reflects the great inequality and injustice in access to water, as well as the potential for conflict. To some, the use of holy water for livestock could be understood as a sacrilege; to us, however, the sacrilege is the lack of access to water, including the waters of baptism, at least for those who cannot afford the high costs of water.

As highlighted before, and as illustrated by Lucy's story, the poorest suffer most from the shortage of water: part of that suffering is that they pay the most for water. Most of the urban poor in developing countries rely on usually unregulated private water vendors; the result is that they pay many more times the price for water than those who are connected to a publicly run or regulated water supply network. For the poor, living with the consequences of an unchecked commercialization of water is a bitter reality. This point is something to take into account when the use of the market logic is promoted as a way to use and allocate water more effectively. What are the effects for the economically and politically less empowered? How can we ensure that water both is effectively used and contributes to economic 'development', yet ensure access to water as a human right, water for sustainable livelihoods, for creation, as well for sustaining cultural and religious traditions? In this context, Steve de Gruchy called for an "olive agenda", recognizing the interconnectedness and aligning the brown agenda of (economic) liberation from poverty with the (ecological) green agenda of caring for creation. (17)

It is profoundly disturbing to see in this story how the reality of water affects people's ability to fully live their liturgical practices, how the crisis of water intrudes on people's experience of God in prayer and worship. For some, it might be surprising that a poor and water-deprived community would opt to pay so much money to be able to have an immersion baptism. Lucy Wambui concludes that "the people who thirst most for physical water thirst even more for baptismal water." (18)

The celebration of baptism promises spiritual salvation and the quenching of our spiritual thirst with the "living water"; it introduces the one who is baptized into the Christian community. Baptism is a universal promise that makes no difference between the poor and the rich. There is a strong discontinuity between the symbolism of this liturgical practice and the thirst and struggle for water in the real physical world. As the church offers the waters of baptism freely to everybody who wishes to drink of the living water and never thirst again, should not the same celebration remind us of the physical thirst and the discrimination from which so many suffer?

Conclusion

The insights of liturgical theology propose that how we pray shapes how we believe, and that how we believe shapes how we live and act in the world. Regarding the place of water in the prayer of the church, especially in the celebration of baptism, the experience in many traditions and communities, especially within Western Christianity, has been weak and minimalist. As such, water in its fullness cannot bear or reveal by its own nature its inherent meaning as something both life-giving and death-dealing, which quenches, heals, cleans, restores and kills. Such a self-exegesis is suggested in Faith and Order's text on the polyvalent nature of baptism in Baptism, Eucharist and Ministry:

   Baptism is the sign of new life through Jesus Christ. It unites the
   one baptized with Christ and with his people. The New Testament
   scriptures and the liturgy of the Church unfold the meaning of
   baptism in various images which express the riches of Christ and
   the gifts of his salvation. These images are sometimes linked with
   the symbolic uses of water in the Old Testament. Baptism is
   participation in Christ's death and resurrection (Rom. 6:3-5; Col.
   2:12); a washing away of sin (I Cot. 6:11); a new birth (John 3:5);
   an enlightenment by Christ (Eph. 5:14); a reclothing in Christ
   (Gal. 3:27); a renewal by the Spirit (Titus 3:5); the experience of
   salvation from the flood (I Peter 3:20-21); an exodus from bondage
   (I Cor. 10:1-2) and a liberation into a new humanity in which
   barriers of division whether of sex or race or social status are
   transcended (Gal. 3:27-28; I Cor. 12:13). The images are many but
   the reality is one. (19)

The diminished experience of water in the church's central act of Christian initiation, disconnected from water in daily life, reflects a diminished theological appreciation of the holiness of all water, with a diminished sense of Christian responsibility for the health and wholeness of water. While again we underline that the roots of the current crisis are more complex, there is interrelatedness between the beliefs about water from the major Western religious tradition, Christianity, and attitudes that have misused water for centuries. The weakened lex orandi contributes to weak leges of both theology and action around environmental protection of water and just accessibility. Here, the context of the water crisis and the insights of eco-justice activists call for a richer and more holistic use of water by the church at prayer that allows water to speak for itself if it is to be considered holy by usage and blessing.

At the same time, the two examples we noted of a rich liturgical use of water--the Orthodox Feast of the Theophany and a Reformed celebration of baptism incorporating full immersion into water--reflect a serious discontinuity between practice and theology of water and the lex vivendi. In these instances, the discontinuity raises liturgical questions of sacrilege. In the first, liturgical practice stands in judgment over any human practice that pollutes water and renders it undrinkable, if when theologically it is considered holy. In the second, liturgical practice stands in judgment over human practices that deny or limit access to water. Here, the liturgical tradition of the Church convokes Christians to seek and advocate for a just and ecological coherence between what it says in word and deed about water and what it says about the effects of the water crisis. We end our reflection with the hope that we may believe what we pray and live what we believe:

   "In baptism we use your gift of water,
   which you have made a rich symbol
   of the grace you give us in this sacrament.
   At the very dawn of creation
   your Spirit breathed on the waters,
   making them the wellspring of all holiness." (20)

DOI: 10.1111/j.1758-6623.2010.00058.x

(1) United Nations Development Programme, Human Development Report 2006. Beyond Scarcity: Power, Poverty and the Global Water Crisis, Palgrave Macmillan, New York, 2006, pp. 48-49.

(2) Oliver Cumming, Tackling the Silent Killer: The Case for Sanitation, WaterAid, 2008.

(3) Comprehensive Assessment of Water Management in Agriculture, Water for Food, Water for Life Earthscan and London and International Water Management Institute, London, 2007.

(4) Foreword by Malin Falkenmark in Peter H. Gleick, The World's Water 2008-2009: The Biennial Report on Freshwater Resources, Island Press, Washington, D.C., 2009.

(5) World Council of Churches. Statement on Water for Life (Statement adopted by the World Council of Churches 9th Assembly: 14-23 February 2006, Porto Alegre, Brazil) Available at http://www.oikoumene.org/?id=1955 (Accessed 12 March 2010)

(6) What Prosper actually said was, "ut legem credendi lex statuat supplicandi". (Capitula Coelestini 8, in Migne, Patrologia Latina 51, pp. 225-26.)

(7) The literature on the prayer and believing/liturgy and theology is vast. Among the classical texts of 20th-century liturgical theology, of particular importance are Alexander Schmemann, Introduction to Liturgical Theology. SVP, New York, 1966; Geoffrey Wainwright, Doxology, Oxford University Press, New York, 1980; Aidan Kavanagh On Liturgical Theology, Pueblo Publishing, Collegeville, 1984; Kevin W. Irwin, Context and Text. Pueblo Publishing, Collegeville, 1994.

(8) Kavanagh, On Liturgical Theolagy, p. 78.

(9) Thomas Berry, The Dream of the Earth, Sierra Club Books, San Francisco, 1988; Larry Rasmussen, Earth Community, Earth Ethics, Orbis Books, Maryknoll, NY, 1996; Leonardo Boff, Ecology and Liberation: A New Paradigm, Orbis Books, New York, 1995; Rosemary Ruether, Women Healing Earth: Third World Women on Ecology, Feminism, and Religion, Orbis Books, New York, 1996.

(10) See Seven Weeks for Water (website) at http://www.oikoumene.org/7-weeks-for-water (Accessed 12 March 2010)

(11) See Elias Crisostomo Abramides, Theophany--Blessing of the Waters (01.03.2010), available at http://www.oikoumene.org/7-weeksfor-water (Accessed 12 March 2010)

(12) See New Valamo: A Living Tradition in Finland at http://www.keeping-the-faith.info/fi_valaa.html (Accessed 12 March2010)

(13) "Holy water sickens more than 200 in Russia" (Los Angeles Times, online, 8.2.2010), available at http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/ booster shots/2010/02/holy-water-sickens-more-than-200-in-russia.html (Accessed 21 February 2010)

(14) "Overly credulous Russian Orthodox believers hospitalized by drinking 'Holy' water" (25.01.2010), available at http://stupidevilbastard.com/2010/ 01/overly-credulous-russian-orthodox-believers-hospitalized-by-drinking -holy-water (Accessed 21 February 2010)

(15) UNESCO, Water for Life, Water for People: The United Nations World Water Development Report. United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization and Berghahn Books: New York, 2003; also available at www.unesco.org/water/wwap/wwdr (Accessed 12 March 2010)

(16) Lucy Wambui Waweru, Give Me Water ... The Living Watery (15.03.2010), available at http://www.oikoumene.org/7-weeks-forwater (Accessed 12 March 2010)

(17) Steve de Gruchy, "An Alive Agenda: First Thoughts on a Metaphorical Theology of Development", Ecumenical Review 59.2-3 (April-July 2007). pp. 333-45; Steve de Gruchy, "Dealing with Our Own Sewage: Spirituality, and Ethics in the Sustainability Agenda" (Address to the World Forum on Theology and Liberation, Belem, Brazil, January 2009). Available at http://www.oikoumene.org/fileadmin/files/wcc-main/documents/ p4/ewn/resource-database/deGruchy%20WFTL_paper.pdf (Accessed 17 March 2010)

(18) Waweru, Give Me Water ... The Living Water!

(19) Baptism, Eucharist and Ministry (Faith and Order Paper No. 111). World Council of Churches, Geneva, 1982, p. 2.

(20) The Rites of the Catholic Church, Vol. 1. Pueblo Publishing, New York, 1990, p. 327.

John Gibaut has been the director of the Commission of Faith and Order of the WCC since January 2008. A priest of the diocese of Ottawa in the Anglican Church of Canada, he was a professor in the faculty of theology at Saint Paul University, Ottawa, for 14 years, where he taught, among other things, liturgical theology. Maike Gorsboth has been coordinator of the Ecumenical Water Network at the WCC since January 2007. Before this she was involved in education, campaigning and advocacy on water as a human right with organizations such as FIAN International and Brot fur die Welt in Germany.