Lenten Devotional by Willie Sordillo
March 30, 2017
Wade in the water, wade in the water, children. Wade in the water; God’s gonna trouble the water.
Safety is at best a relative term. None of us is ever really safe- you can live a healthy lifestyle and still come down with a debilitating disease. You can lock your doors, and someone can still break in. I had a friend who was waiting patiently on the sidewalk for the light to change so she could cross the street, and a truck made a turn too sharply, crossing the sidewalk, and killed her. In the end, we’re all going to die. Some of us have had the luxury of living under the illusion that the bad old days of slavery and racial inequality were a thing of the past, while others have known all along that simply driving your car through the wrong neighborhood is putting your life at risk. As a parent, there’s nothing you wouldn’t do to keep your child safe, but every day when you send them off to school there are a myriad of dangers over which you have absolutely no control. Yet we know that we would not hesitate for a heartbeat to put our own lives at risk in an attempt to keep our children from harm.
God never promises us safety. What God promises is to accompany us through the danger, walking with us through the unsafe space that is the homeland of this sometimes treacherous journey of life. We are made in the image of God, and God lives in us. Our call, then, is to be like God, allowing the God within us to act, and accompany others in their journey.
I first encountered a movement founded by people of faith called “accompaniment” in the 1980s, when I spent time in Central America. During that time, civil war and severe government repression raged in several countries. To be poor was to be seen as an enemy of the state, regardless of whether you participated in any public dissent, and you could be “disappeared”- woken from your bed and arrested in the dead of night without warning, never to be seen again, but surely to face torture before death. As it happened, the US government was often aligned with and supporting these repressive regimes. The accompaniment movement sought to provide safety when North American citizens physically accompanied people whose lives were at risk, under the belief that the perpetrators of the violence would not want to risk harming citizens of the country which was their benefactor. This proved to be true.
The origins of the spiritual song quoted above are in several biblical passages. It refers to the parting of the waters so that the Israelites could pass safely out of Egypt described in Exodus 14, as well as in John 5, where an angel troubles the water of a pool, turning it into a cleansing bath that heals whatever disease one has. The song is also said to have been a code to those escaping slavery in this country, advising those on the journey north to travel in waterways to throw the pursuing dogs off the scent.
But I think there’s another meaning. I think the song is telling us that life is not a safe space, and it’s not our job to try to make it so for ourselves. Rather, we are invited into danger, and, like God, accompany others, trying to create relative pockets of safety for the most vulnerable while being unafraid to step into the troubled waters ourselves. Not a safe space, but a brave space. A holy space.
I’m not always capable of such courage or purity of heart. I’m selfish and I’m scared a lot, and sometimes I allow myself to become so overwhelmed with the toils and snares of life that I find it hard to act at all. But ironically, when I manage to dip my toes into the troubled waters, putting my fears, doubts and apathy behind me, with effort, I find that my small actions against insurmountable obstacles are what give me the hope to go on. When I accompany others, not only am I helping create a measure of safety for them, but I feel safer myself. My salvation is in theirs. May I remember this the next time I hesitate to act, fearing the roiling sea which stretches out to the horizon.