I remember journeying to Ireland hoping that the rivers there did indeed flow with rich quantities of Guinness in place of ordinary water. I got the idea from an old Irish immigrant at my church who told me that the Irish bottle the stuff right from the rivers and ship it straight to his door. Needless to say, even though I found no such extraordinary rivers in Ireland, as I climbed the small mountains of County Kerry along Conner's Pass, what I did see was the ordinary kind of river flowing with crisp, cold water. But because of the romance of Ireland, the ordinary water took on a divine quality and as I washed my face it felt baptismal; as I drank it I thought for a moment that it did in fact taste like Guinness. That old man was right.
The rivers of Ireland are romantic because we can still see the divine quality of water when we travel to a foreign land. I know however, even after those ethereal days on the Emerald Isle, that I could find the same water - crisp and clear - in any of the great spring fed waterways in Pennsylvania; certainly I could find it among the rivers and creeks of the Appalachian Trail or the Rockies out west. But I went to Ireland with a child's mind, with an eager heart, with a lack of boredom - with the hope of divine rivers. And I found them. I was satisfied because it was the first time I looked at a river again. It tasted like Guinness because for a moment I forgot what Guinness tasted like. It was baptismal because I approached the river bed as if with original sin.
There is nothing ordinary about water. It may be common - but it is far from ordinary. What creates boredom in the human heart is not that we are constantly dealing with ordinary things. It is that we are constantly missing the extraordinary in what is common. We seek uncommon things in order to fulfill our need for the divine. But God, it seems, is often found in the ordinary. In reality, what seems ordinary is always extraordinary.
My three month old son is fascinated by white walls with slight dancing shadows. He will stare for minutes on end at a blank wall - even smile at times at the change from light to shadow that the swaying curtains behind him are creating on the wall. What is his fascination?
Consider now the glory of a river - and the first time you saw one. Fascination cannot even capture the human response to a majestic river. It has always lifted our souls to heaven; at every first experience of a rushing, refreshing river the human rises to ponder divinity. No wonder we baptize with water and bless ourselves too - God must swim in the holy liquid. We know it and we take advantage of it. But it sometimes becomes ordinary. It sometimes becomes all too common. We sometimes walk through the church doors without a second thought to the glory of the gift of water; we dip our fingertips into the bowl, bless ourselves, and get bored.
If the rivers were suddenly Guinness, or milk, or some other substance for a day - all of humanity would rush to their rivers again. We would find sustenance, refreshment, a cure for our boring hearts; we would find God again and thank him for the river, so rich like Guinness, or so gleaming white like milk. But because our rivers rush with the ordinary, most of us forget that they even rush at all. Most of us forget about the glory of a river - and most of us begin to forget about God.
Chesterton said concerning the greatness of fairy tales: "They make rivers run with wine only to make us remember, for one wild moment, that they run with water." This is the essence of my trip to Ireland. But, I have learned, it should be the essence of my trip to the backyard.
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