The Slow Way: Water, Mercy, and Play

Religion can trick us into hollow how-tos. Sometimes exclusion and sacrifice seem easier than the playful mercy of Jesus.

for the frantic strivers, serial doers, and weary achievers

I was seventeen, on my first adventure outside the US, and floating on a white and blue boat, its deck covered in the bright woven hammocks where the staff slept in order to catch a breeze at night. I breathed in the heavy-weighted air of Amazon summer. The equator had wrapped its breath around us as soon as we stepped off the airplane in Manaus. And thirty hours later I found myself gazing out into the wide spread of the Río Negro, arriving by boat to a handful of villages whose names escape me all these years later, each town a river community not connected to the outside world by any roads, fully dependent on the boats that made their way like ours through the wide river, delivering goods, bringing information from the world outside. 

I was a few weeks beyond high school graduation, and all I longed for in the world—besides true love—was adventure and my whole life’s reason. No pressure. I was told I had the answer for the people we would find in every village. Hard working fisher-people, simple farmers, families in one-room homes, their bright colored hammocks strung up each night for sleep, then rolled into the tidy corner. The people welcomed our boat into their shorelines, invited us to their town’s afternoon soccer games, and sometimes even shared their rice and beans. We, a boat mostly full of gangly teens, were there to tell them how to know the one true God. Pray this prayer. Confess your sins. Believe in your heart. Commit your life. The secret code for life’s happiness, held by my middle class, American, white-girl hands. The thing they’d been looking for all their lives. 

This week—twenty-six years later—I wanted hearts of palm in my salad. I scavenged the grocery store for it and finally found one can hiding among the adventurous foods. Palmito must have been a favorite of our chef on the boat we took down the Río Negro those ten days. Every night, every meal I remember—rice and beans and palmito. Enough that our crew of American kids groaned to see the food arrive. I don’t say this to pat my own back. I’m not sure what made it different for me. But I loved that food. The others moaned and laughed, so I smiled. But secretly I savored the palmito in every bite. When I came home I tried to find it in every grocery I entered in 1997 Texas. A bit of a challenge. The years haven’t changed the memory of it in my mouth. The way it tastes like summer, bright and soft and new. Me at seventeen. 

We stayed in each town one or two days, enough time to teach the kids the lesson we had prepared, play the games we brought. Enough time for the grown ups among us to preach in the dusk, the interpreter explaining in Portuguese the way to God we had come offering. As the voices rose, I would close my eyes and ask that someone might hear and understand. I wanted lives to change. I wanted my life to be part of the world’s transformation. 

In the heat of one afternoon, as most of our team attempted soccer in the middle of the town with the generous villagers, who surely couldn’t believe our lack of skills, I walked back to the boat. In my memory the grass was yellow, just like at home. Scorched by the sun, the rainy season of the Amazon long past. I was thirsty, my water bottle had been left behind. I remember it all these years later—Poland Spring, 24 ounces, squeeze top. I took a long swallow and stepped back off the boat toward a  gaggle of little girls wearing shorts and nothing else—free, shirtless chests. They were playing their own game and I wished I knew how to ask if I could play as well. Instead, I squatted down and smiled. They smiled back. And one, with shining, sparkling eyes pointed to my water. This? I asked and held it up. I smiled, gave it a good squeeze and watched it rainbow its contents into the air. They giggled. The same girl brought a hand to her chest. I raised my eyebrows. She pointed to the water and back to herself again. She wanted a drink. 

Okay, I laughed. “Ahhhh” I showed her, opening my mouth wide. She did the same. And I aimed it straight for her. The squirt top spraying a line directly toward her pink tongue. She closed her mouth and giggled. Her friends joined her. Me, another girl motioned. Me, asked another. So I lined them up in front of me. And watched as other children seemed to arrive from hidden places, a line growing before my eyes. Six, eight, ten kids. A line of open mouths. My Poland Spring squeeze top. 

I had come to change the world. I had been told that this one message—repent, believe—was the one that might give purpose to the most painful of lives, might bring peace to the most violent of places. I had come with words, with a way, with a three-point spiritual plan. And here, in a culture I could never understand in my quick hours of introduction, among people whose lives were dramatically more difficult and more profoundly communal than I know how to quantify more than twenty-five years later, I was supposed to tell them how to know the love of God? I didn’t know how to make sense of my unease with this scenario.  All I knew was that as I aimed water into mouths, none of us were suffering. The little ones before me had ever-present parents, a community of care, a river of fresh water. I gave them water for the joy of it, and each squeeze of Poland Spring into the giggling pink mouths before me felt like communion, like the Spirit filling my insides and pouring out. Like I’d finally said what I came there to say. 

Oh, I had wanted to preach. And there on the yellow grass, in the heavy weight of Amazon heat, I only began to grasp the love of God beyond a how-to list of believing the right things in order to earn divine connection. There, my hands around that water bottle, my body alive, I preached my first sermon. It was grace and joy and water. 

“And if anyone gives even a cup of cold water to one of these little ones who is my disciple, truly I tell you, that person will certainly not lose their reward.” Those were Jesus’s words in Matthew 10. I don’t know about rewards, but I know that as I squeezed water into the mouths of the little ones lined up before me, I felt like I had become a follower of Jesus, like I had tapped into a story that was bigger than the one I had known before. 

Maybe I wanted to eat palmito this week because the passage read aloud in last Sunday’s lectionary were those very words of Jesus. “The impulse to holiness and purity is dangerous,” my pastor said, reflecting on the passage. And as he spoke I thought of the message I had come prepared to speak those ten days on the Amazon. A message that said there was one particular way to experience the love of God, and we had it. “It’s an impulse to exclusion,” my pastor said. 

Jesus came along, he said, “clarifying God’s nature.” And what was God’s nature? This invitation to give even a cup of cold water in the name of love, this act of physical mercy. 

I have a lot of regrets from my younger years of loving a God who seemed both demanding of sacrifice and somehow, simultaneously, filled with mercy. I didn’t know how to reconcile the two. So I preached a message of both to myself. Struggling with how one might turn one’s heart around without Love in the first place. Not knowing how, when I was most afraid, I leaned into the hollow how-tos, forgoing mercy when it felt too complicated. Sometimes exclusion is easier than the playful mercy of Jesus. 

But, even so, that day in an unknown-to-me village along the Río Negro, I tasted another way—preached what has become the greatest sermon of my life. A story of inclusion and mercy I hope I can live the rest of my days discovering. How thirsty I was. How thirsty we all are.

The playful mercy of free relief. 

A Slow Practice

How do we intentionally practice the playful mercy of the Divine? What better way than to play with water in the summertime? 

We all know that water is healing for us, that there is a need met in us when we step our bodies into water that is bigger than ourselves—a pool, a river, the sea, or even, a bathtub. 

Find a time this week to get yourself to a body of water. This may be a challenge, because you’re a grown up after all, and it’s hard to find a moment alone in the water, but if you can, let yourself float, taking long, deep breaths. 

(If you can’t get to a pool or body of water and still want to practice this, you can lie in your bathtub, or even on your bed and imagine yourself floating on gentle waves. Thanks to Jennifer Grant’s children’s book Finding Calm in Nature for inspiring this entire practice, and the idea of imagining those waves in particular.) 

As you breathe in, remind yourself that you are held in a calm and playful place. As you breathe out, release any tense and controlling part of you.

Listen to Spirit’s soft, playful, and cool presence. Maybe there are no words you need to hear, only the calm of the water. But maybe there’s something God wants to say in the water’s lapping around you, in the buoyancy of your own body. Allow yourself to listen.

Let’s close with this prayer: 

Holy One, who hovered over the waters in the beginning, hover over me now and always, that I might find rest, joy, and softness in the miracle of your mercy. Amen.

One More Thing!

Check my Instagram Monday for a big announcement of my new book’s title and cover and how to preorder! I’ll link to it here on my substack. So excited to share with you.