Watershed Wisdom, Watershed Discipleship

 We know that when ice encounters warmth it becomes water and when water is heated it becomes steam. There has been steam coming out of my ears this week as the Ontario government made the announcement, after "consultatiion with the public", that the 36 conservation authorities in the province would be consolidated into nine. I responded to the invitation to provide feedback to this plan and the survey was clearly meant to steer around any critiicsm or resistance, let alone informed science. 

I listened to an CBC Radio nterview with associate professor Michael Drescher from the University of Waterloo School of Planning about these changes. He reminded us that conservation authorities are watershed based and that the local wisdom of those who work in them helps to mitigate flooding and erosion and maintain water quality. In other words, they protect the environment and humans with place-based knowledge and acquired practical understanding. 

Prof. Drescher also reminded us that the Ford government did away with the Endangered Species Act in Ontario and has reduced development seitbacks from wetlands from 120 metres to 30 metres. Even though municipalities, fees, and federal government provide a large percentage of funding it is the province making these decisions. Can you understand why I'm steaming? 

Here is the link to the interview: https://www.cbc.ca/listen/live-radio/1-193-fresh-air/clip/16203178-ontario-plans-decrease-number-conservation-authorities.-heres-one

We have spent time in many of the Conservation Areas in both Quinte and Lower Trent Conservation Areas and we feel blessed, literally, by these oases of nature. As the decades march on I've become more convinced of the necessity of  a "grounded" approach to caring for Creation. Sometimes I become discouraged and angry but I want to maintain hope despite what unfolds around us. 

Years ago the theologian Chet Myers introduced the notion of Watershed Discipleship, a bio-regional approach to how we as Christians inhabit the Earth. In a prophetic article in Geez magazine ten years ago Myers offered: 

A talk in 2009 by Brock Dolman, a permaculturist in Northern California, really sold me. “Watersheds underlie all human endeavors and form the foundation for all future aspirations and survival. The idea is one of a cradle,” he said, cupping his hands into a little boat. “Your home basin of relations is your lifeboat.” “Our watershed represents a community,” he continued, “every living organism within this basin is interconnected and interdependent.” This represents the most viable “geographic scale of applied sustainability, which must be regenerative because we desperately are in need of making up for lost time.”

What would it mean for Christians to re-centre our citizen-identity in the topography of Creation, rather than in the political geography of dominant cultural ideation, and ground our discipleship practices in the watersheds in which we reside? Five years ago I began to explore an approach I called “watershed discipleship” with other faith-rooted organizers and educators around North America. “Watershed discipleship” is an intentional triple entendre:

• recognizing that we are in a watershed moment of crisis. Environmental and social justice and sustainability need to be integral to everything we do as inhabitants of specific places;

• acknowledging the bioregional locus of an incarnational following of Jesus. Our discipleship and the life of the local church inescapably take place in a watershed context;

• and implying, as Todd Wynward added, that we need to be disciples of our watersheds, learning from and recovenanting with the local “Book of Creation.”

                                                                                from the Narwhal 

Crustacean Compassion?

1 This is God's wondrous world,

and to my listening ears

all nature sings, and round me rings

the music of the spheres.

This is God's wondrous world;

I rest me in the thought

of rocks and trees, of skies and seas,

God's hand the wonders wrought.

When we arrived in outport Newfoundland from Toronto 46 years ago the practical acts of kindness to the new minister and his wife soon began. It came in the form of edibles (not those edibles), everything from fish to moose to rabbits to berries and jam. We were willing to try just about anything but the most unsettling gift was live lobsters. We may have indulged in "surf and turf" once but we discovered that living creatures into boiling water was not for the faint of heart -- shades of Annie Hall. Ruth has a vivid memory of putting the lid on the pot with relief only to have it pushed off by a large claw. 

This morning I recalled our lobster queasiness as I heard on the news the effects on Canada's lobster fishery from a growing movement in Europe. Several countries have already or are considering bans on cooking live lobsters because it is a form of cruelty to animals. In Britain there is an organization called Crustacean Compassion and I must admit I guffawed when I heard the name.

Yet I realize that during my lifetime attitudes toward other creatures has changed, often dramatically. We regard our companion animals differently and cruelty can be a chargeable crime. We have laws about the treatment of the livestock we eat and have restricted the use of animals for testing of products and experimentation for medical procedures. This is all important and what I think most of us would consider progress.

                                                            Saturday Night Live Skit 1982

As Christians we recognize that we are people of a Creator God who brought call living things into being and in our United Church we affirm that we are called to "live with respect in Creation." While we may readily agree that this applies to Fluffy the Llasa Apso, do we share this conviction about Larry the Lobster? 

When Kristi Noem, former Governor of North Dakota, and now former ICE Barbie, admitted in her biography that she'd shot a supposedly untrainable pet dog named Cricket many people were appalled. Did her callousness toward this hound contribute to the hardness of heart she demonstrated toward undocumented immigrants as her minions hunted them down in communities across the United States?

I have never seriously considered becoming a vegetarian or vegan, although I respect those who've made this choice. As an outdoors guy I won't alter my slaughter of mosquitoes and blackflies. And I will never be a card-carrying member of Crustacean Compassion. Still, as we become increasingly aware of the decline of biodiversty and species extinction we probably have a lot more to learn about compassion toward all the critters in God's Wondrous World. 

This is the end of my tale...tail? Anyone want to write a lobster hymn? 

                                                                 Scenes from Annie Hall -- 1977

Iranian Christians in Montreal

 

Pourya Zaganeh (left), pictured here with Anglican bishop Victor-David Mbuyi Bipungu, was Muslim when he lived in Iran but was baptized at St Jax in Montreal after some powerful personal religious experiences. Now he leads a Farsi Bible study at the church. (Photo courtesy of Pourya Zaganeh)

We've been informed during this past week that Ayatollah Ali Khamenei the supreme leader of Iran who was "eliminated" by US missiles has been replaced by his son, also a hard-liner. It would seem that the perserve version of Islam practiced by the leadership structure in Iran has not been shaken by the onslaught by the United States and Israel and the citizens of Iran are still in their iron grip. 

We might assume that all Iranians are fundamentalist Muslims but this is not the case. There are moderates in the faith as well as a small number of Christians, despite persecution. I came upon what was for me a suprising article in Broadview magazine, formerly the United Church Observer, about a growing group of expatriate Iranians living in Montreal who have been baptized as Christians in an Anglican congregation there: 

As participants logged into St Jax Church’s weekly Bible study on Feb. 3, the Zoom call filled with the warm echoes of “salam baradar” and “salam khahar”—peace, brother, and peace, sister. The study, held in Farsi, is one of the services the Montreal church has recently added to address the growing influx of Iranian congregants. St Jax has baptized over 140 Iranians since 2020, when it opened as a new Anglican church plant.

“The growth of our Iranian community actually started with a person who was a very dynamic community leader and came here saying, ‘I’m definitely not a Muslim. I’m definitely not a Christian, either. However, I know a lot of Iranians who are trying to explore Christianity, and I’ve looked into where the best churches for them are. It may as well be here,’” recalls senior pastor Rev. Graham Singh. 

While Iran is predominantly a Muslim nation, Zoroastrian, Jewish, Christian and Baha’i communities have rich histories in Iran and continue to gather as minorities, often at risk of persecution under the Islamic theocracy that has ruled since the 1979 Revolution. Although apostasy is punishable by death under the Islamic regime, Christian conversion among Iranians born Muslim is a growing movement both within the country and across the diaspora living in the West. Now, as Iran reels from levels of governmental violence that haven’t been seen since the revolution, Montreal’s Iranians are finding comfort at St Jax.

It's tempting to consider conversion as coercion but it sounds as though the people who have joined this congregation have experienced the Good News of acceptance in Christ in this setting. 

I'm grateful that Broadview shared this story and we can pray for this faith community and all whom they love in a war-torn land. Here is the link to the article:  https://broadview.org/st-jax-church-iranians/

A Canticle to Medieval Women

 I've mentioned that we listen to books together as we travel in our vehicle, downloading them from the library, often repeatedly, until we work our way through. 

We have just finished our most recent tome called Canticle, by Janet Rich Edwards which we both appreciated, although I did moreso than Ruth. A canticle is a song, often a religious song, and this novel is a song of praise to women of courage and faith. 

A review in the Washington Post drew me to the novel and this paragraph sums it up well: 

Edwards, like her late-13th-century heroine, Aleys, is walking a treacherous path. With “Canticle,” her debut novel, she has created a bizarre story of miracles and martyrdom by drawing on equally bizarre stories about medieval mystics such as St. Clare of Assisi, St. Teresa of Avila and St. Catherine of Genoa. Some readers will catch echoes of Lauren Groff’s 2021 novel, “Matrix,” about the 12th-century poet Marie de France, but Edwards’s fidelity to the Christ-saturated imagination of the period is bolder — and, probably, less appealing to those modern readers who want historical women to be sweetened with modern feminist sensibilities like a Communion wafer dipped in honey.

I wouldn't describe the story as bizarre even though it is very different from our perspective of the world today, including the spiritual. I appreciated the many allusions to that era, some of them listed above but also the Beguines. The Beguines were religious lay communities in which the women were devout yet not nuns and were free to leave if they chose. 

As I listened I was reminded of so much I've read about women of that time who found ways to express their faith outside of the often oppressive control of men. They were often mystics who experienced God and Christ in unconventional ways that were viewed as a danger to the patriarchal control of the Church. If they strayed too far from that control their lives could go up in flames -- quite literally. There are also echoes of Hildegard of Bingen and Julian of Norwich in this well written novel. 

We agree that there were portions that could have been been edited to a degree but I'm glad we prevailed to the end. 

                                                            Print of a Beguine Woman from 1489

Bedside Manner in Medicine & Ministry

Opinion

A medical tradition worth reviving

I have found making house calls to be one of the most meaningful and satisfying aspects of my work as a family doctor. Although they have long been in decline in North America, there are still physicians fighting to save the tradition

Nicholas Pimlott

The Globe and Mail

Published January 31, 2026

When we lived in Halifax I got a phone call one Christmas Day evening about the death of an elderly woman I had been visiting in hospital, She was the mother of a member of the congregation but I ended up seeing her a number of times. She actually died at home because the family made arrangements for her to receive care there in her final days.

I went to be with the family so that we could pray and commend her to God's eternal care. She and her husband lived in one of the swankiest condominium buildings in the downtown and as I approached the elevator I realized that the man waiting there was my doctor, who, it turned out, was her physician as well. We were both a bit surprised to see the other and we chatted on our way up. 

A few weeks ago the artiicle above was publiished in the Saturday Globe and Mail and it brought to mind that incident. I was touched as I read it because I found pastoral "house calls" to be a deeply meaningful part of ministry, although my role was in spiritual health rather than physical. Dr. Pimlott began his piece with a story about the death of a woman and the solemn and intimate formality, with her care-giver daughter present, of verifying what had occurred. Dr. Pimlott went on to offer some facts and a reflection on the value of home visits:

Before the Second World War, house calls made up around half of all visits between doctors and patients; by 1950, that had fallen to roughly one in 10, and by the 1980s house calls made up just one in 200 of all such visits...

Not long after I started making those monthly home visits to her, the weekly trips to the emergency department suddenly stopped. Whether or not it was because my regular home visits finally had an impact, or because in her new home she had easy access to the help and advice of a nurse, I cannot say. Nor did I ever ask her. Like many doctors, I am vain enough and arrogant enough to think that somehow, I had changed her behaviour. The more obvious truth is that she changed mine. After years of frustration, I had finally stopped treating Isabel as a problem to be solved and began treating her like a person to be cared for.

Although still inadequately compensated compared to office visits and not always convenient to do, I have found making house calls to be one of the most meaningful and satisfying aspects of my work as a family doctor. They have provided me with insights into the lives of my patients that have helped me to better understand and care for them, and they have deepened my sense of connection to them.

I did have occasions when I was present as parishioners "shuffled off this mortail coil" and it was always a powerful experience. Thankfully, most visits were pastoral  in nature with conversation and perhaps a scripture reading, a prayer, and sharing in holy communion. I had my own version of the doctor's bag, a lovely walnut-cased communion set, and a visiting bible, a small version I would have trouble reading from now because of the tiny print. 

As with Dr. Pimlott there were individuals I didn't really want to visit and neither did the excellent pastoral care ministers I worked with through the decades in multiple-staff congregations. One imperious old soul insisted on holding court in her bedroom with the stock market scroll on the TV. I eventually convinced her to turn off the set for the time I was there. 

I'm grateful that son Isaac, also a United Church minister, visits congregants, mostly older,  where they live. As with physicians, home pastoral visits by clergy have been on the decline for decades. More than once colleagues opined that they didn't have time to "sit around drinking tea" (a direct quote) and I wondered what they were doing that was so much more important than this aspect of ministry. Of course, there are so many cautions and rules about time spent alone with vulnerable persons but compassion is still essential. 

While I will readily admit that I often felt mildly guilty that I wasn't keeping up with this ministry of presence in Christ's name I have no regrets for the time I "wasted" with my parishioners. 

Reproductions of The Doctor, a painting by 19th-century British artist Luke Fildes that depicts a house call to a sick child, hang in many modern family doctors’ offices.

The Crisis in Cuba and Christian Witness

 

                                                       Matanzas Theological Seminary

The United Church of Canada expresses its unwavering solidarity with Cuban Mission and Service partners and the people of Cuba. At a time of deepening interconnected crises, the United Church condemns the recent  executive order (opens in a new tab)issued by the Trump administration, which declares a national emergency and establishes a process to impose tariffs on goods from countries that sell or otherwise provide oil to Cuba. This threatens the right to life and the wellbeing of Cubans. 

We spent time as tourists in Cuba on several occasions over time although we haven't been there in at least 15 years. Even though we enjoyed the respite from the cold of Canadian winters we became increasingly concerned about the the oppressive regime generally and the lack of religious freedom, despite statements to the contrary. We were very aware that tourism was an economic engine for the country and those who served us in resorts were dependent on Canadian dollars to lift them above poverty.

Now, thanks to an American embargo on Venezualan oil entering Cuba, most tourism has ground to a halt and the country is suffering from power outages and serious food insecurity. People have no money and are starving in the dark. This embargo is punitive for average Cubans who have no say over government policy. Canada is trying to figure out how to offer aid to those who need it most. 

On one of our trips we visited a Christian seminary in the city of Mantanzas, a simple oasis in the midst of the poverty. At the time the United Church had am active partnership with the seminary and our son, Isaac, considered doing a portion of his theological education there. We toured the grounds and saw the extensive vegetable gardens which provided produce for the seminary and the broader community. We had brought with us cloth and sewing supplies for a collective sponsored by the seminary and we met with the coordinator later in Havana. They simply didn't have the money for or access to these supplies within the country. 

I have been thinking about this Christian witness in Mantanzas and about the ministries of the Roman Catholic church in Cuba. A spokesperson for the RCs said recently:

“Food prices are rising. Medicines are scarce, medical services have been reduced, and surgeries are limited only to those whose lives are in danger. Access to drinking water has become more difficult because many people depend on water trucks, and without fuel, they cannot reach them.”

In this context, the Church — poor and among the poor — offers a pastoral ministry of charity and consolation. “It is in the area of charity that we are perhaps being renewed and continually growing, as we see increasing needs and experience the Lord’s call to serve Him in the poor,” he said, recalling the many assistance efforts carried out — often with great difficulty — for the most vulnerable.

The prospects for Cuba are bleak and while President Trump has mused about a "friendly takover" of the country, starving the poor is not a form of liberation. 

I'm not sure to what extent the United Church connection has continued but we can pray for Christ's church in all its expressions in the country. Here is a link to the United Church response to the current situation:

https://united-church.ca/news/new-us-tariffs-target-cuba-united-church-offers-solidarity-cuban-people

                Various moments from the social pastoral ministry of the RC churches in Havana

Living Water

 

Now when Jesus learned that the Pharisees had heard, “Jesus is making and baptizing more disciples than John” (although it was not Jesus himself but his disciples who baptized),  he left Judea and started back to Galilee.  But he had to go through Samaria. So he came to a Samaritan city called Sychar, near the plot of ground that Jacob had given to his son Joseph. Jacob’s well was there, and Jesus, tired out by his journey, was sitting by the well. It was about noon. A Samaritan woman came to draw water, and Jesus said to her, “Give me a drink.” 

 Jesus said to her, “Everyone who drinks of this water will be thirsty again, but those who drink of the water that I will give them will never be thirsty. The water that I will give will become in them a spring of water gushing up to eternal life.” The woman said to him, “Sir, give me this water, so that I may never be thirsty or have to keep coming here to draw water.”

John 4: 1-7. 13-15 NRSVue 

Both Lower Trent and Quinte Conservation Authorities have issued warnings about high water levels in rivers and streams due to heavy rain and rising temperatures. The message is that banks might become unstable and flooding is possible. These are important cautions although I'm somewhat pleased that they are necessary. Last year drought in our region was so sustained that water levels dropped alarmingly, wells dried up, and many dependable channels became a navigation nightmare. Our waterways need to be replenished. 

                                                               Samaritan Woman at the Well -- He Qi 

Wouldn't you know that the gospel reading for this Sunday in Lent is exclusive to John, the story of the encounter between Jesus and a woman at a precious source of water, a well. It looks as though our pastor (and son) Isaac will tie what is the lengthiest conversation between Jesus and any person in the gospels to International Women's Day, a thoughtful choice. In the back-and-forth of this exchange Jesus, the Jew, promises the Samaritan woman Living Water, even as she provides him with a drink to quench his thirst. 

Although this story abounds in symbolism, as is the case with so much of John, it is also a reminder of the value of water for daily sustenance. Finding sources of water and managing them was a vital part of every day, often women's work. Some of you may have read James Michener's novel, The Source, which unfolds the complex history of the region through countless generations with the focal point  of a particular water source. In years past I would recommend this entertaining saga to those who were going on trips to Israel and Ruth read it before we visited in 2023. 

The paucity of water in places around the planet due to global heating is becoming a crisis and even in normally watery climes such as ours is cause for concern. While we watch the extensive bombing of Tehran in Iran, there is another emergency for this city of well over 10 million.  Officials have been warning about Day Zero, when the taps run dry as the country has endured six consecutive years of severe drought.

When we read the story of the Samaritan Woman we appreciate that Jesus is offering a deeper spiritual truth to this rejected person, a message of hope and acceptance. Perhaps we can also rethink the symbol of  Living Water as the precious resource that brought the two of them together in the first place. Water is sacred in many religions, complete with rituals and liturgies. 

Am I suggesting that the seemingly endless snowfall of this Winter was actually a blessing? I'll let you decide!