“I thirst” (John 19:28).
“My soul thirsts for God, the living God”. (Ps. 42:2)

Under the heading of this corporal work, I should like to explore two things, first, the different Biblical implications of thirst, so that we might see other dimensions to “giving drink;” and secondly, relieving thirst in terms of making water accessible to all and restoring ecological balance.

“I thirst” is the shortest of the Jesus’ last “words” or sayings from the cross. But what did it mean for him, the God-Man, to thirst? It’s easy to understand it from the side of his human nature. Near the end of his agony, Jesus experienced dehydration from sweating, bleeding, shock and asphyxia.

The combined effect of this produced a thirst beyond description. But what did it mean from the side of his divine nature? To contemplate this is to move directly into the heart of the paschal mystery. “My soul thirsts for God, the living God,” the psalmist cries (Ps 42:2). But by far the deeper mystery is that the living God also thirsts for human beings.

Jesus’ last word is our first, primal, human word. A child is born crying and thirsty, and from this first expression is the earliest proof that we cannot satisfy ourselves; we are not self-sustaining beings.

Thirst is our first expression of personal and social need. Lungs may breathe on their own, but thirst requires that something must be done on our behalf. A breast or a bottle must be given. Later, a tap must be turned on, a well dug, water itself purified.

Hunger and thirst are used interchangeably (sometimes as a unitary expression) to signify fundamental needs of our being – potential to be fulfilled, desire to be satisfied.

The Beatitude, for instance, considers blessed those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, that is, those for whom a passionate desire exists to see a righteous world. Yet it is thirst rather than hunger that more naturally connotes longing and yearning.

From this point of view, Biblical history can be viewed as a chronicle of thirst, a record of the human thirst for God, and the divine thirst for humans. The form of the latter in the Old Testament is the story of Yahweh’s love relationship with Israel.

Yahweh is the lover who pines for a faithless beloved, and despite repeated experiences of infidelity, protests his love and care. Thirst in the desert, on the other hand, brought the Israelites time and again to the point of mutiny: “Why did you bring us up out of Egypt, to kill us and our children and our cattle with thirst?” (Ex 17:3).

Yet, elsewhere, the desert is the environment where thirst is slaked and genuinely satisfied, where one discovers springs of living water.

The Samaritan woman at the well did not know how thirsty she was until Jesus spoke to her and awakened her desire. In the encounter the satisfaction of thirst moves from him to her, to deeper levels of her consciousness, until she, from whom a drink was initially sought, herself asks for living water. Finding the Messiah, she discovers, to her surprise and joy, that she had already been found.

This sheds further light on Jesus’ divine-human thirst. It’s both an infinite privation – “As dry as potsherd is my throat, my tongue sticks to my palate” (Ps 22:15) – and a gift. He experienced thirst so that she might drink.

In paschal terms, he was dried out, so that we might have a new immersion in life. The water flowing from his side is what relieves the world’s drought, and gives back life to our dehydrated souls.

Making water accessible to people in deprived areas of the world is a sacramental correlate of the divine work. Even here in Trinidad, with all our affluence, it is always a shock to realise that in some communities water is a commodity of luxury, that people go for stretches of time without it, and that a regular supply of water remains just an issue of political promise. Urbanisation meanwhile proceeds by leaps and bounds; a huge backlog of rural people remains, unserved with basic sanitation and safe drinking water.

In its “Water for Life” programme, the UN emphasises that clean water and sanitation are amongst the most powerful drivers for human development. Access to water and sanitation extends opportunities, enhances dignity and helps create a virtuous cycle of improving health and rising wealth.

The UN believes in setting targets on some of the key issues of development. Thus, there is a “Water for Life Decade”, which began on March 22, 2005.

It’s hard to say whether targets like this make much difference to small societies like ours. It really comes down to domestic governance, which should include a realistic understanding of development. Populations in small societies ought to know and feel the priorities government attaches to different dimensions of the development agenda.

Whether Trinidadians believe water to be a crucial element in such development is a moot issue. What is clear is that protests about water seem to be eternal.

There’s hardly a day that some people somewhere are not saying that they haven’t had water for days, and are reduced to drawing the precious commodity from something that looks like a swamp.

Here in Trinidad too we have long been careless of the ecological implications of our treatment of hillside, forest, and trees. We have cut and chopped and carted away, and generally laid waste, with the result that once flourishing streams are now little more than mud puddles.

It is not too late to remember that human sovereignty over the earth’s resources means human stewardship; that there is such a thing as an ethic of stewardship, which means among other things that we are not free to do with nature whatever we will, without at length having to bear consequences we may not like.