Saturday, March 1, 2008

Blessed are the riparian species

Recently at Mass, the responsorial Psalm was Psalm 1:

Happy are those who do not follow the counsel of the wicked,
Nor go the way of sinners,
nor sit in company with scoffers.
Rather, the law of the Lord is their joy;
God's law they study day and night.
They are like a tree planted near streams of water,
that yields its fruit in season;
Its leaves never wither;
whatever they do prospers.

But not the wicked!
They are like chaff driven by the wind.
Therefore the wicked will not survive judgment,
nor will sinners in the assembly of the just.
The Lord watches over the way of the just,
but the way of the wicked leads to ruin.

After Mass, we looked at each other and simultaneously commented that God must love riparian zones too!

The phrase "a tree planted near streams of water" evokes powerful images in the minds of enviro-type people like us....vivid memories of stream surveys, macroinvertebrate samples, impervious surface analysis, and bankfull height calculations. And we both admitted that while the rest of the people in attendance probably absorbed the phrase and moved on, both of us had been wondering what species was being referred to here (yellow birch? silver maple? black willow? green ash?). And what kind of wildlife did that particular riparian environment support? What was the possibility of drought? What was the stream flow rate? What could have been done to prevent erosion (aside from prayer)? Were there damselfly larvae in this stream (kind of lessens the poetic effect, but that's reality)? And how long would it take a floating orange to travel one meter downstream (we can't help it if we've been permanently influenced by stream labs)?

We love streams. Audrey loves streams so much, in fact, that she is a water resources major and wants to bring clean drinking water to everybody in the world. A noble ambition, to be sure. Kristin isn't THAT into streams, but she did appreciate that one time during a Measurements & Mapping lab that she got the privilege of spending several hours barefoot in a cold Vermont stream, bonding with water skippers and slippery rocks.

We love water. It's quite prevalent in our Church. There's holy water, and a ton of Biblical water (Moses and the Red Sea, John the Baptist baptizing people in the Jordan River, Jesus turning water into wine at Cana, Jesus walking on water....just to name a few). We use water for baptisms, and during the Easter season we're CRAZY into the sprinkling rite (that's when the priest walks around at the beginning of Mass and uses an aspersorium [holy water holder] and aspergillum [holy water sprinkler] to fling holy water all over everybody).

In other news, our poll is over, and you have decided that it would be a good idea for us to blog about Bunnies: their ecological and cultural significance. Stay tuned. Thanks to everybody who voted!

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

heyyyy guys!!!! post!!!!!!! n very nice entry n how u related stuff here!! <3

tho a bit insane-o how u thot of riparian zones.....

Jim said...

Nice Post. Check out my blog at http://apostle-on-water.blogspot.com/