Reflections and Refractions on the Anacostia River

As part of my current series on God's Green Equity, I've invited those in my life more engaged in this than I am to share their thoughts in the form of a guest blog post. Today's post is by my son, Matt, who recently relocated to a neighborhood in Anacostia, DC, just a stone's throw from the Anacostia River. 

River Reflections

Remnant of wetlands on the Anacostia River, Matt Kuniholm, 2013

Like most things, rivers are reflections of the people and places surrounding them. The color of water reflects the mineral content of the bedrock and soils throughout the watershed. The taste of water reflects trace elements and the quality of water coming from upstream sources. The temperature of water reflects the watershed’s climate and the structure of riparian habitat. The oxygen content of river-water, an all-important requirement for aquatic life, reflects the slope and texture of the river-bed, temperature, biological activity and nutrient load of the river. Quite literally, the sight of water can reflect the panoramic and often picturesque beauty of the surrounding topography. And what would all these reflections be if they weren’t also perceived by people and all the other species which share the capacity of sight and the need for water?

If rivers are reflections of the people and places surrounding them, they can bring ongoing, seemingly endless joy as we see a tranquil, beautiful or awe-inspiring reflection renewed by the ever-steady flow of water. We may want to jump in and swim, floating and spinning around, enjoying the current’s clean pull. We may stand back, contemplate and create paintings or poems on the source and structure of the river. We may throw in a line or net to harvest and enjoy the river’s bounty. And all of these responses reflect our own character which values and enjoys the character reflected by the river.

But if rivers are reflections of the people and places surrounding them, it can become very uncomfortable to gaze out over a river and find an unwelcome reflection staring back. There’s no way to hide, except by looking the other way.  When thousands of tons of trash flow down and empty at the mouth of the river, there’s only one direction it could have come from. When fish are dying and their rotting bellies are floating in stagnant water, there’s only one direction that the contamination could have come from. When phrases like ‘the other side of the river’ connote dangerous and foreign worlds to people who use a river to divide and protect them from their fears, there’s only one reason that could be. And when rivers are dammed, diked, channeled and over-allocated, leaving a trickle of water where powerful rivers once roared, there’s only one direction to look to find the reason. In all these examples, it’s clear that the cause of any correlation flows in one direction: people, in one way or another, have the capacity to manage water, water resources and watersheds. Their decisions are reflected in the extent to which rivers maintain their character and contribute to the life and joy and peace of the people and places around them.

River Reflections in Washington

This dynamic reflection of a place on its people, and the people on their place, is true in many ways of the city in which I live, Washington D.C., and the closest river to my house, the Anacostia.  When it comes to rivers, there are dozens and dozens of agencies, associations, organizations, committees, conferences and workshops in this city which aim to project a positive influence on the nation’s waterways and water resources. From the clean water act in 1972 to the Safe Drinking Water Act in 1974, to the EPA’s ongoing Total Maximum Daily Load (TMDL) program applicable to the majority of the nation’s waterways, the United States has established a water management framework that has been replicated in many other countries throughout the world. But even with this myriad of environmental agencies, laws and organizations, the river closest to home – to the heart of our government and the city of Washington – has been recognized as one of the most contaminated rivers in the country and has historically been seen as a racial and socio-economic boundary segregating the city.

Aerial photo of the Anacostia river, National Journal, 1991, 

Having grown up in the DC area and lived, worked, played and worshiped within the city for the last several years, I’ve found it hard to avoid looking head on at the reflection cast by the Anacostia River. What does that reflection say about the character and characteristics of the city? Can our laws and regulations, advocacy groups and NGOs suffice not only to protect our nation’s waterways but also instill a deep enjoyment  and a desire to be good stewards? As I’ve looked into these questions, I’ve been encouraged by what I’ve found, but left longing for what’s still missing.

Let me explain:

I’ve been encouraged by the number of individuals and organizations working to restore the Anacostia River to the incredible resource it should be for the people and ecosystems of DC. For example, the Anacostia Watershed Society (AWS), a non-profit organization leading environmental education, stewardship and recreation activities throughout the watershed, has a straightforward mission: “to make the Anacostia River and its tributaries swimmable and fishable, in keeping with the Clean Water Act, for the health and enjoyment of everyone in the community.” It’s been a joy to meet people who are unified by this vision and who enjoy the river, even if it takes some imagining to anticipate what it would be like free from contamination and abuse.

The AWS, together with other local organizations such as Groundwork Anacostia River, the Anacostia RiverKeeper and Sierra Club DC, are also working together on practical environmental conservation projects and holding regulating agencies and those responsible for current sources of contamination accountable. These organizations, working with the Smithsonian's Anacostia Community Museum, recently assembled a great exhibit on urban waterways and civic engagement which highlights different community groups involved in reclaiming the Anacostia River.

The Anacostia Community Museum

I’ve also been encouraged that people of faith, particularly Christians from multiple churches throughout DC, are supporting what has too often been a secular environmental movement. For over a year and a half, a network of Christians in conservation and environmental science professions in the DC metro area has been meeting on a monthly basis to participate in environmental conservation activities in partnership with organizations working throughout the watershed, to pray, study the Bible and encourage each other in our professions in the environmental sciences.  The group, which is organized as a local chapter of an international organization of Christians in Conservation (A Rocha USA), is now working towards establishing an urban field center within the District of Columbia which would serve as the foundation for community based conservation projects, environmental education, collaborative community development and environmental research, all grounded in our Christian faith. The current plan is to establish the urban field center on a parcel of land overlooking the Anacostia River, adjacent to the grounds of a landfill that was covered over in the 1980’s and next to the Aquatic Gardens National Park.

Refractions of the River

Despite these encouraging signs, many people look at the Anacostia River and see it for what it currently is: a contaminated river full of trash and sewage that’s been dredged, degraded and largely forgotten. Those who still fish in the river do so despite the fact that approximately two-thirds of the popular brown bullhead catfish have tumors. Those who live on ‘the other side of the river’ do so knowing that the rates of poverty, crime and environmental contamination are all higher than in other portions of DC. And those who hope that the river may one day be restored to a river of life, do so knowing that the development trends and environmental indicators don’t provide much support for optimism.

Speaking as someone who works professionally in the environmental sciences, and who spends much of my time outside of work involved in community-based conservation and recreation, I can say that nothing could sustain my hopefulness for any type of environmental restoration except the promise of the river of life flowing from the Christian gospel. Throughout the Bible, this river of life refers to the Spirit of God which leads people to forgiveness and restoration through faith in Jesus. Were it not for this source of the river of life, my own ability to sustain this life, joy, and hope for restoration would soon run dry, leaving me a lifeless remnant of what life could be. And if rivers reflect the people and places surrounding them, I would expect the river to follow course as well.

So it’s with great anticipation that I look not to myself, or the laws, regulations, organizations and agencies doing good work to conserve and restore our rivers, but rather to the source of life and our hope for restoration. I join with the singer who sings:

             O Lord, how manifold are your works!

In wisdom have you made them all;

The earth is full of your creatures (Psalm 104:24)

God is our refuge and strength, a very present help in trouble.

Therefore we will not fear though the earth gives way,

though the mountains be moved into the heart of the sea,

though its waters roar and foam,

though the mountains tremble at its swelling.

                There is a river whose streams make glad the city of God,            

                                the holy habitation of the Most High.

                God is in the midst of her; she shall not be moved;

                                God will help her when morning dawns (Psalm 46:1-5).

River of Life, Tiffany Studios, 1921

No city, no river on earth could fulfill that expectation; but they can direct our attention to the God who can. In this way, the Anacostia River is not just a reflection of the people and places surrounding it, it’s also a refraction of the true river of life. To borrow a theme from Makoto Fujimura’s book “Refractions:  a journey of faith, art and culture”, the Anacostia River and our stewardship of it is a refraction of the way God stewards his free flowing Spirit referred to throughout the Bible as a river of life. Stewardship of a broken creation can therefore become a creative art which gives glory to the Creator God.

In the introduction to his book, Fujimura, a Christian painter, writes:

“Via my art, I hope to create a mediated reality of beauty, hope, and reconciled relationships and cultures…. I have found that mediation of any kind is never black-and-white but prismatic and complex too. In order to find hope, even in the midst of the broken and torn fragments of relationships, in order to begin to journey into the heart of the divide, we must first wrestle with the deeper issues of faith. We must be willing to be broken ourselves into prismatic shards by the Master Artist, God, so that Christ’s light can be refracted to us.”

As I look out over the Anacostia River, I am forced to wrestle with my disappointment over its current contaminated state and its troubling reflection of our society’s character. Even so, as I attempt to be a steward of God’s creation, I see the refracted light of the Master Creator, God, and imagine the day when the entire world – the people and all its places – will be fully restored through the coming redemption and restoration in Jesus. It’s this hope that calls us to be good stewards of the river and the people surrounding it, to treat them not as the broken things they are now, but as the life-filled creations they were meant to be.

This post is also part of an ongoing series on God's Green Equity.

• God's Green Equity: August 4, 2013
• Seed Parables: August 11, 2013 
• Miracle Seeds of Sorrow's Kingdom: August 25, 2013   
• How Much  Does Justice Cost? September 1, 2013
• Taxonomy of Ignorance and the Unknown Unknowns: September 8,2013
• For God so Loved the Earth, September 15, 2013

 Earlier posts on the same topic:

• Green Grace: May 15, 2011 
• Earth Day Shalom: April 22, 2012
• Hungering Far Past Rightness: March 3, 2013

As always, your thoughts, comments, questions are welcome.  

Courage, Hope, Generosity

No, no, there is no going back.

Less and less you are

that possibility you were.

More and more you have become

those lives and deaths

that have belonged to you. . .

Now more than ever you can be

generous toward each day

that comes, young,

to disappear

forever, and yet remain

unageing in the mind.

Every day you have less reason

not to give yourself away.

  (Wendell Berry,

         The Timbered Choir)

I spent this past weekend in the company of women of great courage, hope, and generosity.

I have been on an interesting journey, and most recently it’s been leading me into political engagement with the League of Women Voters. I’ve been working on a national agriculture study, leading caucuses and workshops about food and farming, and have just been voted onto the local and state League of Women Voters boards.

So, this past weekend, I went to the biennial state convention of the Pennsylvania League in the lovely town of Lewisburg, PA.

The start of the weekend was a wild caravan ride to see some natural gas drilling sites in the hillsides near Loyalsock State Forest. Guided by a local member of the Alliance for Responsible Drilling, our group drove down steep back roads, stopped along roadsides, counted waste water tank trucks in caravans of their own, then hiked across a muddy field for a birds-eye view of six active fracking wells.

One of the members of our group, a woman well into her seventies, carried a small note pad and jotted notes at every turn.

Another, just weeks after hip surgery, gratefully accepted a hand to climb a slippery slope, eager to see and understand further a topic she’s been studying for years.

The conversation never stopped: How many gallons. What happens to the waste water. How far is the nearest stream. How many trucks per day.

From there we went back to our convention site, for meetings about judicial reform, industrial farming, the broken party system, how best to advocate for more open primaries.

Some of those in attendance were younger than I am (57, if you’ve been wondering).

Many were older.

Some much older.

One woman spoke of working for thirty years to find a way to promote a more impartial, well-prepared judiciary.

Another has been studying Pennsylvania politics for almost as long, looking for possible points of reform, showing up for hearings, offering testimony, meeting with legislators, tireless in pursuit of something approaching a more open democratic process.

I sat several times next to a woman working to protect lakes, farms, and a fragile wetland area from the dangers of fracking wastewater being dumped into old, crumbling wells just miles from her home, not far from Lake Erie.

I spoke with another woman working hard to ensure adequate funding for education in rural schools far from any center of political power.

At one meeting we talked about the Pennsylvania Justice Bell and the 1915 statewide referendum on women’s rights. While my county and many western counties voted for women’s right to vote, the majority of state voters (all men) voted emphatically “no.” We were reminded of the 72 years between the 1848 Seneca Falls Convention, hosted by Lucretia Mott and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and the final ratification of the 19^th Amendment in August, 1920.

At another meeting we recognized fifty-year members – women who joined the league to work for Civil Rights, to advocate for the still-unpassed Equal Rights Amendment.

I was struck by the energy and resolve of these women, and the endless hours they give, showing up to register new voters, writing letters, making calls, trying to understand issues. One meeting paused over a motion about sales tax: Who is harmed by higher sales tax? Who benefits? Why should it matter?

Listening to the passionate discussions over morning coffee, over lunch, between meetings, late into the night, I found myself thinking about this month’s Synchroblog topic: ordinary courage. 

“In her book, The Gifts of Imperfection, Brené Brown has this to say about ordinary courage:

'The root of the word courage is cor—the Latin word for heart. In one of its earliest forms, the word courage had a very different definition than it does today. Courage originally meant “to speak one’s mind by telling all one’s heart.'

“The great thing about ordinary courage is that it leads to wholehearted living.”

We live in a world that encourages us not to care: 

Don’t vote, they’re all the same. Give up, things will never change.
 It’s all too complicated, so why bother?
 Look out for yourself, it’s the best you can do. 

It seems unwise to engage our hearts, to let ourselves care too deeply. Somehow it’s okay to be passionate about a TV show, a new restaurant, a hairstyle. But keep your voice level when you talk of politics. Don’t say too much about poverty or prison reform. Don’t offend, don’t insist, don’t dig too deeply.

Please, don’t think too much.

 

This past weekend, one of the women I was with spoke laughingly of a reporter who wrote of “whip-smart women in comfortable shoes.”

Well yes – it’s hard to visit fracking sites in anything but comfortable shoes. Or to run down hallways lugging laptops and projectors in a pair of narrow high heels.

What kind of culture is more interested in women’s shoes than in what chemicals are in our water, what toxins are in our food?

I’m reminded of a passage from Wendell Berry’s essay “On Difficult Hope”: 

"We are living in the most destructive and, hence, the most stupid period of the history of our species. The list of its undeniable abominations is long and hardly bearable. And these abominations are not balanced or compensated or atoned for by the list, endlessly reiterated, of our scientific achievements. Some people are moved, now and again, to deplore one abomination or another. Others . . . deplore the whole list and its causes.
 "Much protest is naive; it expects quick, visible improvements and despairs and gives up when such improvement does not come. Protestors who hold out longer have perhaps understood that success is not the proper goal.  .  .
 "Protest that endures, I think, is moved by a hope far more modest than that of public success: namely, the hope of preserving qualities in one’s own heart and spirit that would be destroyed by acquiescence.” (Wendell Berry, "On Difficult Hope") 

Both hope and courage are qualities of the heart, essential to whole-hearted living, worth preserving no matter the stupidities of the age.

Yet, as I think of the women I came to know this past weekend, I see in them something beyond the  the perseverance Berry describes. I turn back to the poem I started with: the idea of generosity.

What motivates these women of courage is the wish to give something better to those who come

behind us.

The woman living near the waste-water wells, organizing town meetings, writing the EPA, protesting, once again, a dangerous practice she fears will do great harm, said emphatically:

“It’s not about us. Or even our children. It’s our grandchildren. And the children after them. What happens when those well-linings break? What happens when those chemicals leach into the water table, into the lake?” 

It takes courage to look past the economies of today, to spend time, energy, resources tirelessly, generously, in hope of passing on something of value to generations to come.

In a world of self-protectiveness, of turning inward, of looking out for number one, I admire, celebrate, and am happy to walk with those tireless, fearless, generous women who refuse to settle for a life in stylish shoes. 

Every day you have less reasonnot to give yourself away.

This post is part of the June Synchroblog. There are lots of links this month - take some time to visit them and join the conversation.

This Is Courage by Jen Bradbury
Being Vulnerable by Phil Lancaster
Everyday Bravery: Overcoming the Fear of Being Wrong by Jessica
Moving Forward Takes Courage by Paul W. Meier
How to Become a Flasher by Glenn Hager
Ordinary Courage by Elaine Hansen
The Courage to Fail by Wendy McCaig
The Greatest Act of Courage by Jeremy Myers
Sharing One’s Heart by K. W. Leslie
All I See Is Rocks by Tim Nichols
I Wonder What Would Happen by Liz Dyer
What is Ordinary Courage? by Jennifer Stahl
Loving Courageously by Doreen A. Mannion
Heart Cry: The Courage to Confess by Elizabeth Chapin
The Act to the Miraculous by VisionHub
the spiritual practice of showing up & telling the truth by Kathy Escobar
It’s What We Teach by Margaret Boelman

A Learn-as-You-Go-Along Marriage

detail, Le Bateau Atelier
Claude Monet, 1876, France

Like the water

of a deep stream,

love is always too much.

We did not make it.

Though we drink till we burst,

we cannot have it all,

or want it all.

In its abundance

it survives our thirst.

In the evening we come down to the shore

to drink our fill,

and sleep,

while it flows

through the regions of the dark.

It does not hold us,

except we keep returning to its rich waters

thirsty.

We enter,

willing to die,

into the commonwealth of its joy.

   (Like The Water, Wendell Berry)

It’s wedding season. Yesterday we attended the lovely wedding of a young friend we’ve known since she was in middle school. Tomorrow will be our own anniversary. 

We married thirty-five years ago, on a bright June afternoon in an old Baptist church in Carmel, New York. Our friend Harry officiated, reading the service from a small black Book of Common Prayer. He had just recently been ordained, and was so nervous he accidentally turned two pages at once. If he hadn’t listened when I whispered to him that he’d skipped a page, we would have missed the marriage vows completely. 

I was twenty-one. I’d graduated from college just three weeks before and spent those weeks sewing my wedding gown and a bridesmaid’s dress for my friend’s wedding on Long Island the Saturday before. Whitney, the groom, handsome in grey cutaways, had just turned twenty-three, and had just that week found us a second floor apartment in a creaky old row house in West Philly. 

Looking back, I’d have to say I was clueless about marriage, love, adulthood, and a whole host of other things. The marriages in my own family had all ended sadly, as far back in the family tree as anyone could remember. I had thought maybe I’d put off marriage completely, yet there I was, promising to “love him, comfort him, honor, and keep him, in sickness and in health; and, forsaking all others, keep thee only unto him, so long as ye both shall live.”

We weren’t given much advice. Our premarital counseling consisted of an awkward dinner and an hour of stilted conversation at Harry’s dining room table, with his wife and small son down the hall. I’d read Scanzoni and Hardesty’s All We’re Meant to Be, so I had some vague idea of equality in marriage, but we’d also been hearing reverberations from Bill Gothard’s Institute of Basic Youth Conflicts, which seemed to me to treat wives as permanent teenagers. A Gothard enthusiast told me, not long after the wedding: “You were under your grandmother’s umbrella. Now you’re under your husband’s. Remember that.” Living under an umbrella seemed a bit constraining. I still shudder when I think of the patronizing tone, and the limiting, constricted image. 

Whitney had grown up in a well-ordered home where the governing principle seemed to be “learn as you go along what pleases the Lord,” the Living Bible rephrasing of Ephesians 5:10. His parents were steeped in scripture, interested in following the lead of the Holy Spirit, and not very concerned about defined gender roles. In points of conflict or disagreement, their default mode seemed to be prayer, then acquiescence, with a shared resolve to learn along the way what God had to teach them. I watched, intrigued, as they navigated conflicts, changes, crises, with surprising harmony and good grace. They’re still learning as they go along, sixty years into marriage, still good friends and partners.

Is theirs a complementarian marriage? Egalitarian? I’m not sure they ever gave it much thought. In fact, refreshingly, the idea of “who is in charge” doesn’t seem to be much of an issue: God is in charge, and together they look at the example of Jesus, ask for wisdom and discernment from the Holy Spirit, consult others, including my husband and me, and wait for a sense of unity and peace. 

We’ve followed that same model through grad school, job changes, financial constraints, selling and buying of houses, moves from Philly to Virginia and back to the Philadelphia suburbs. We’ve parented three children, hosted one wedding, given shelter, over the years, to a mix of extended family, friends in transition, cats, hamsters, fish, birds, a legendary lizard and one very stubborn beagle. 

We’re never talked much about “men’s jobs” or “a woman’s place.” Whoever is nearest the baby changes the diaper. Whoever has the skill or interest does the job that needs to be done. I helped our kids edit their school papers: I was a writing teacher, so that made sense. He taught them golf and basketball: he played both in college, so that made sense. I remodeled our bathrooms, removing and installing toilets and sinks, something I learned helping rehab a house the fall I was sixteen.  He makes great omelets, something he learned as a short-order chef in high school. 

He tells better bedtime stories than I do: his imagination is wonderfully random, and endlessly amusing. But I do a better job reading at bedtime: he’s more apt to fall asleep mid-sentence. For the most part, I taught our kids to swim; I taught swimming at camps for years, and had more time with them in the neighborhood pool. For the most part, he taught them how to drive; he thought it would be a fun Sunday afternoon activity, and he’s far better at parallel parking than I am.

Yes, he mows the lawn, operates the power tools, and is more likely to be the one lugging heavy furniture up and down stairs. But he cried as much as I did when we left each child at college for the first time. Which proves not a whole lot – except that we both love our kids, and would love to keep them nearby forever.

But we also want them to learn, and grow, and find their way to the lives God has for each of them. There’s no umbrella here for them to stay under. We told each one, when we said goodbye at college, and at other transition points along the way: “We trust what God is doing in you.” In each that’s different. In each it’s a joy to watch.

They aren’t here to please us, make us look good, make us happy. And we’re not here to do that for them, or each other. We’re here to please God, to learn how to use the gifts he’s given us, to share his love with each other and those he brings across our paths. 

Marriage is a mystery, a means of grace, and a daily challenge. We are very different people, with very different personalities. I’d love to have a backyard full of chickens and a house full of neighborhood kids and noise. He’d like a townhouse with no lawn to mow, no clutter of any kind. I like meandering down back roads, floating lazily in my kayak in the nearby lake, wandering through the woods listening for bird song. He prefers focus: if he’s going somewhere, he wants to get there sometime soon, whether by foot, boat, car, or golf cart. For him, the idea of going is to get there. For me, the idea of going is to see what's happening along the way.

Marriage offers a place to learn all those lofty words the Bible invites us to grow into: patience, forgiveness, humility, forbearance. 

And love: the kind of love that invites us to die to our own plans, our own preferences, our own love of comfort, our own visions of what might be best. 

Submission is like one of those lovely Celtic knots: there’s no telling were it starts, no telling where it ends. Together we submit to each other, the needs of the family, the callings God leads us to, the cry of the broken world around us. The pattern emerges as we go, beautiful, complicated, so interwoven it’s hard to tell: is it one strand, or two? Maybe three.

Here’s the passage we live under, live into, rest in, taped for years inside a kitchen cupboard door:

For this reason I kneel before the Father, from whom every family in heaven and on earth derives its name.  I pray that out of his glorious riches he may strengthen you with power through his Spirit in your inner being, so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith. And I pray that you, being rooted and established in love, may have power, together with all the Lord’s holy people, to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ, and to know this love that surpasses knowledge —that you may be filled to the measure of all the fullness of God. (Ephesians 3:14-19)

We aren’t there yet, but we’re learning as we go along. 

And for that, I’m very very thankful.

detail from Book of Kells, c. 800 AD, Ireland