Watershed Discipleship

Prepared message given as part of Three Rivers worship on Zoom
8 April 2021

So I woke up this morning, I guess it technically was this morning but it felt like last night.
 And I was thinking about the ways that Quaker meetings name themselves. The first meeting that I ever came to was Strawberry Creek Meeting in California.
And currently, I am a member of Fresh Pond Meeting. I used to be a member of Clear Creek Meeting in Richmond, Indiana.
 So many meetings named for so many bodies of water.


And we call ourselves Three Rivers, and I just kind of rattled off this whole spiel about the confluent rivers and the watershed that holds us.


And, waking up and thinking about that, I wanted to explore a little bit more about what this whole watershed business is. Because we as hosts of Three Rivers have said that watersheds and watershed discipleship is an important thing to us.


When I was a young adult living in Berkeley, California, there was an ecological activist named Peter Berg.
 And one of the things that Peter would do was to take a can of blue paint and, first unofficially, and then with the sanction of the city of Berkeley, he would paint the streets with meandering blue lines to signify where the creeks existed,
 and were submerged under the concrete. Where the water course way had once been but had been been culverted and domesticated and put underneath the pavement.


One of those creeks, that he painted a blue line, was actually daylighted. They dug up the culvert, they took vacant land and made it into a park, and that was Strawberry Creek. And they discovered that the unearthing of it, and letting it run its natural watercourse way, meant that there were a whole lot less street flooding that happened when they allowed the creek to exist and be free.


This same fellow, Peter Berg, has written in — I'm going to read from a book, it's about bioregionalism. He wrote, “We need a positive politics that views the late, industrial crisis — that's the time we're living in right now — as a transition towards a society that is based in, rather than on top, of life.” Based in, rather than on top, of life.


And I thought about how the action of paving over all of these creeks has just.
.. We are based on top of and not situated in life, in so many of the kind of habits of ourselves.


And so back to watersheds.
 What is a watershed? Wherever we reside, whether it is an urban or a suburban or a rural place, our place is deeply intertwined in a larger system that's called a watershed.
 It's the drainage basin, and the tributaries that feed into our particular body of water, such as a large lake or an ocean. John Wesley Powell, who is a geographer and the first non-indigenous person to run the Colorado River, defines watershed
 like this: “The area of land, a bounded hydrologic system, within which all living things are inextricably linked by their common water course. And where logic demands that if humans settle there, they become part of that community.
“ I had a permaculture teacher who called watersheds “basins of relations” — drainage basins of relations.


And one of the values that Three Rivers talks about holding is that of watershed discipleship, which is a term that was coined by someone named Ched Meyers of Bartimaeus Cooperative Ministries. If you were at New England Yearly Meeting you probably heard Cherice Bock talk about watershed discipleship. Watershed discipleship is a triple entendre.
 And it has to do with the watershed moment we're in, with watersheds as teachers — discipling ourselves to the teacher of the watershed.

The watershed moment that we find ourselves in is one of ecological crisis and racial uprising, and an opportunity for incredible change and transition.
 Becoming disciples in our watershed is the opportunity to not just care for the planet, but to learn from the patterns and processes of all life, and to more deeply live in, and not on top of, the earth.

And watershed as teacher? Ched Myers says this: to be faithful disciples in a watershed, to learn from life at this historical watershed moment, we need to become disciples of watersheds, which have everything to teach us about interrelatedness and resiliency. In a sense, we can treat a watershed as a wise, Rabbi, which is Hebrew for teacher.
 And he says three things:

We won't save places we don’t love.


We can't love places we don't know.


And we don't know places we haven't learned.


And I think we can.
.. I'm going to read that again and I'm going to add one word, and then I'm going to invite us to transition into our small groups.


We won't save places, and people, we don't love.


We can't love places, and people, we don't know.


And we don't know places, and people, we haven't learned.


Each of us has a particular place, and a particular people in our context, to know, to learn, and to love.
 Who are you? Where are you being called to learn to know and to love?