Season of Creation Week 4 – Lament for Water

Prayer of Lament – Keepers of the Water Vigil – by Ellen Goulden (adapted)
Creator and Life-giver, You water the earth abundantly, softening it with showers, and blessing its growth, and we clear-cut the forests and till the edges of the fields, until the soil spills into the streams and pesticides and manure make foul the rivers.

O Source of Living Water, hear our cry,
cleanse and renew us and all creation.

You make springs to gush forth in the valleys; they flow between the hills, giving drink to every creature, and we span those streams with pipelines that rupture and leak, oozing oil and poisoning the fish and the birds of the air.

O Source of Living Water, hear our cry,
cleanse and renew us and all creation.

You visit the earth and water it, soaking the subsoil to feed the plants and to fill our wells, and we sell off that water to be bottled in plastic and sold back to the thirsty at a profit, while the crops wither in the fields.

O Source of Living Water, hear our cry,
cleanse and renew us and all creation.

You opened rocks in the desert to bring water to Your thirsty people, and we fracture rocks for gases that set tap water aflame.

O Source of Living Water, hear our cry,
cleanse and renew us and all creation.

You lap the shores of the continents with the wide oceans, filled with living creatures great and small, and we choke them with our refuse and suffocate them with our waste.

O Source of Living Water, hear our cry,
cleanse and renew us and all creation.

Have mercy on us, forgive us, and make us new.
O Source of Living Water, hear our cry,
cleanse and renew us and all creation.
Amen.