A FLUID ASSIGNMENT

A few years ago I was hired to help a neighborhood whose parish church had been in turbulence for twenty years. The previous three parish priests had arrived in good health but one after the other, they each had to be later invalided out due to various forms of mental ill health. This was not wholly known in the congregation. People knew bits and pieces of the story, usually the elements of the story which had impacted themselves and their own families. But the larger and longer story was known by very few in the congregation and it was a kind of taboo.

Taboos are always depressive in community life and so, not surprisingly, through this period the whole congregation had entered into a kind of collective depression. This was a repeating pattern the regional HQ did not want to see repeated. My assignment was a surgical one: to go in, find out what had been going wrong and fix it before the appointment of the next pastor. It was, to be honest, one of the most daunting assignments in a long career as a church doctor. Going into the parish on a ticket as an Intentional Interim was vital in giving me the right kind of relationship to do the necessary work in addressing, pastoral, personnel, financial and governance issues. It was a multi-layered scenario.

UNCOVERING THE HIDDEN STORIES

When I had been in situ for a couple of months, another, even darker, layer of the story began to emerge. I began counting the families in the congregation with children. I pieced together a body of disturbing and taboo information which indicated that around 88% of those families had at least one child suffering with major illnesses such as brain cancer, leukemia, anorexia etc. The children became ill after the families’ arrivals at the church. I was even more disturbed when I realized that this figure did not include the families whose children had died. This frightening reality had become a taboo in the church, seldom acknowledged other than in the most guarded moments.

UNDERSTANDING THE ASSIGNMENT

Before I took on the assignment I spent some time alone in preparation for the journey. And in my daily pattern of meditation and Bible reading a theme began to emerge. I sensed that my new assignment was “to make bitter waters sweet.” The phrase emanated from stories in the Hebrew Scriptures – stories which are about real physical water and real physical healing. However my own cultural programming caused me to interpret the phrase “to make bitter waters sweet” as a metaphor for the community-healing that my work would involve.

However on my arrival I learned that the suburb had an aboriginal name that means “waters” and that every street was named after a water course. The church building was, accordingly, full of images of water and rivers. At that point I began to wonder if the instruction “to make bitter waters sweet” was intended more literally than I had first imagined.

SEEING THE SIGN

After a while my wife Ruth and I noticed that a certain street, which led to the parish church, had a bad vibe about it. Subsequently we noticed that some person or persons had taken great efforts to paint a larger than life size image in the storm water drain running parallel to the street. The image was of a girl, lying dead in the water with two black demons standing over her.

I didn’t have any sense that I needed to do anything specifically about the graffiti but that I was simply being directed to cleanse the waters. I told my wife, Ruth, “If we cleanse the waters, I have a feeling that the council will issue an order to erase the graffiti. I reckon that will be the sign that we have done what we need to.” This was no more than a hunch, but I felt it strongly and noted it.

FINDING PARTNERS AND MODELS

I did not know who to ask to help me with the cleansing. It was the first time I had ever been involved in water-healing. And it seemed a bit out there – even to me! My thoughts turned to a young university student who, from previous assignments, I knew to be spiritually sensitive. I just mentioned vaguely that I was thinking of doing some praying around the water courses in the neighborhood. I didn’t say more than that because I didn’t want to sound crazy!

On hearing this my friend immediately took out his iPad. “I have been doing that for a couple of weeks now,” he said. He then showed me the neighborhood from a God’s-eye-view – on Google Earth! He said, “Water enters the parish here, here and here. It all leaves at this point. If we go to those four locations we will have covered the entire suburb.” Clearly, I had asked the right guy!

So we did. Along with the parish priest of the adjacent Anglican church, we set out to visit the four key water points. To our surprise the municipal authority had dispatched its own workers that very day to clear the neighborhood’s water courses of the build-up of overgrowth and debris. It was just a funny coincidence that the council had picked that particular day to give the water courses some attention!

So we did everything that I had seen modeled in the Hebrew Scriptures and in the New Testament – particularly the book of Hebrews. We prayed prayers of spiritual cleansing over the waters, dropped the consecrated bread and wine of Communion into the water. We sprinkled oil that had been prayed over and set aside for use in healing. We repeated this at all four points. The work took a whole day and we went home tired but sensing that we had done what we needed to.

THE AFTERMATH

On the night which followed our day of cleansing, the heavens opened. It rained and it rained and it rained. It rained so much that I had to sand-bag my home to prevent it flooding. It rained solidly for a full three days and three nights. All the water courses of the neighborhood flooded. Ruth and I said to each other, “This is going to wash everything that we have done through the whole neighborhood.”

The following week, the day after the waters had finally subsided the council dispatched a team of workers to the street with the bad vibe. There they spent the whole day removing the demonic graffiti. It was the precise external sign that I had expected would signal to us that something had shifted.

In the weeks and months that followed we watched and saw the impact on the faith community. Children were recovering and not getting ill. And the social life of the church healed beyond recognition. And in the decade since my “fluid assignment” the community and its new pastor have thrived together.

A SYMBOLIC HEALING

To my surprise and amazement there was a further proof that something to do with the water itself had changed. A few weeks after our day working with the neighborhood’s water, a man came to visit me. He said,

“Paul, I have been listening to your teaching. Your preaching has encouraged me to begin reading the Bible and praying again. In my Bible-readings I noticed a theme cropping up and I sensed that I was being promtped to drink more water. So I have been making a point of drinking our local tap water every day. Now something miraculous has happened. For twenty years I have suffered in my throat. It has given me a squeaky voice and left me unable to sing. After three weeks of drinking the tap water my throat has completely healed. For the first time in twenty years I can open up my voice and sing!! And I am singing songs of thanks!!”

SOMETHING IN THE WATER

This postscript demonstrated that what the community had just experienced was far more than a symbolic, prophetic action or purely spiritual action. Something in the water had changed. Whereas before the waters carried an imprint of harm and ill-health, it now somehow carried an imprint or signal of health and healing.

I never found out what had imprinted the waters in this sinister way. I know that there had been a significant occult presence in the area but then that is no different to many places. I know that the area had been used for military exercises and that there were chemical issues in the soil nearby when excavations were made for a new suburb. It is also very possible that there were atrocities against the indigenous community in this part of Australia in a previous century. But I have never got to the bottom of the matter – nor needed to.

Nobel Prize Laureate, Professor Luc Montagnier has pioneered research into the capacity of water to hold memory and communicate information.

CROSS-CULTURAL COMPARISON

It is only in the time since my ministry in that neighbourhood that I have become aware of contemporary research into the memory of water, such as developed by Nobel Prize Laureate Dr Luc Montagnier and by Dr Masaru Emoto. The latter’s findings suggest that emotion, intention and trauma can all leave a structural imprint in water. It is a framework that can help us understand that what in the past we may have interpreted as purely spiritual, or even dismissed as superstitious, may in fact have an empirical footprint. It was the empirical before-and-after of the case I have just shared with you that introduced me to the arena of healing waters.

Prior to this assignment I had experienced the healing of places. And I had long known that the physical healing of water is a part of the narrative of the Bible. I had also learned that water, blessed, and set aside for healing purposes, has been used for centuries in the healing of places in spiritual traditions from all around the world. Yet the impact of spiritual and emotional environments on water is a realm that science has yet to model adequately. However at a more basic level there is no shortage of evidence that the health of the water we drink is vital to our own physical health.

What I have shared with you in this post may sound stranger than fiction. That is because it’s a true story! It happened to me while I was serving as an Archdeacon in the Anglican Church in Australia. The healing of water and the healing of our bodies with water have been a vital part of my practice ever since.

A CROSS CULTURAL EXPERIENCE

Enjoy this short documentary (below) about the traditional wisdom and the evolving science behind the secrets of water, in which I share the core elements of the above case-study for a wider audience.