To heal the river means that we must heal our social and cultural institutions as well as ourselves, and that brings us to religion. For religion to become once again a force for the preservation of the integrity of creation, a profound renewal of our understanding of religion must therefore occur, a renewal so profound that the only term that can possibly express its depth is metanoia, that is to say, repentance. We must recover the insight that religion is not an end in itself; it is a means to an end. When religion becomes a church a person goes to instead of the cosmos he lives in (G.K. Chesterton), it has become an end rather than a means. When religion acts as an end rather than a means, it becomes part of the problem rather than part of the solution. It becomes a sickness, rather than a means to spiritual health. It becomes a dead end rather than a living, effectual means.

The purpose of religion is to change the way a person thinks, so that the way one thinks will be in accord with reality, which includes nature as well as the Divine. It is to change the way a person feels so that the way he or she feels will be in harmony with reality in all its dimensions. The purpose of religion is to inform the way a person acts, so that one's actions will be naturally spiritual and spiritually 'natural', that is to say, in accord with God's

Having made this point, I hasten to add that for religion to be such an effective force, it is not necessary to change the doctrines and practices of the religion you follow. It is ourselves as individual religious believers who must change, must become more environmentally focused in the practice of our faith. All religions in their own way honor the natural world. To be Christian, Jewish, Buddhist, Muslim, Hindu, Taoist is to be ecologist. Therefore the role of religion in relation to the environment is to restore the means of considering the good of the whole of Creation, the world and all its creatures together in our thinking, feeling, willing and acting.

The "living waters" as the title for our forum is not just a "poetic" way of talking about rivers. The term "living waters" is Scriptural, with several levels of meaning. Its basic meaning is a gushing spring or a flowing river. Living water is running water, not standing water. On a second level, living water means water that is blessed or sanctified. On a third level, living water represents the movement or flow of spirit in a human being. And finally, at an ultimate level, living water means the Holy Spirit or God himself.

Religiously, then, a river is a reality in our lives and in the life of the earth that contains, symbolizes and represents all these levels of meaning, and it is vital that we recover them. We must recover them as an essentially religious act. Because only a religious response ­ that is, whole-personed response, in body, soul, mind and spirit ­ will bring about the metanoia or change of heart that is necessary for our culture to recover what it has lost ecologically. For "where the river flows, everything will live." (Ezek. 47:9). Earth-healing requires ethical acts: we must "let justice roll down like a river, righteousness like a never-failing stream" (Amos 5:24). Christ was speaking of the Holy Spirit when he said to the Samaritan woman, "If thou knewest the gift of God, and who it is that saith to thee, Give me to drink; thou wouldest have asked of him, and he would have given thee living water" (John 4:10). Perhaps the most telling Scriptural moment of all is found in the Hebrew Scriptures, where the Prophet Jeremiah, giving forth the word of the Lord that came to him in prophetic ecstasy, has God say of Himself: "for my people have committed two evils; they have forsaken me the fountain of living waters, and hewed them out cisterns, broken cisterns, that can hold no water" (Jer. 2:13).

To understand the river as truly "living water" in this four-fold religious sense, is to recognize that what our society and culture is doing to the waters of the earth, and especially the rivers of the earth, and specifically our Russian River, is basically a sin. It is a sin against creation, and a sin against the creation is a sin against the Creator. To change the way we treat the river requires the most profound repentance and change of heart. To think about it realistically (that is, in terms of all the political, economic and cultural forces converging upon the river) is almost to despair. But to despair is equally a sin against the Creator, specifically against the Divine Providence that is a fundamental part of everything that exists, including rivers, including human hearts. We must make our hearts rivers of living water again, and not broken cisterns that can hold no water.

To change the way we treat the river, we must understand both the river and ourselves honestly, clearly, without flinching from our responsibility as stewards. It is almost a cliché to declare that human greed is responsible for the human degradation of the natural world. But we must understand how that greed actually works, otherwise it is just an abstraction that will prevent us from ever seeing the solution. We will merely blame this greed on multi-national corporations, or agriculture or business or politicians, or capitalism or people in general‹anyone other than ourselves. But it is our own individual complicity in the present social order that is ultimately responsible, and we must find a way to change that.

Yes, the problem is human greed, but greed expressed in specific ways. It is greed in the form of the exaltation of certain human desires. We must pinpoint those desires and how they impact the environment. Thus the essence of the human destruction of the environment lies, not just in corporate or personal greed, not merely over-consumption or technological sterility, but in the four deadly "C's": the human desire for control, convenience, commodification and consumption. Everywhere you look today, you see the enormous cultural, social, political, economic and intellectual power of human beings directed towards more and better ways of controlling nature for human convenience. We have turned the rivers, which are the living arteries of a living planet, into a controllable source of water for human consumption and convenience. This is not to say that there is never a right use of nature for human purposes, but we have long passed that simple point. In our greed to commodify rivers, to control the use of water for human convenience, we have totally lost the meaning of water, the miracle of water, the mystery of water for our lives. But Nature is now telling us that we cannot control her with impunity. We must honor nature, respect her ways, understand her intelligence, humbly take our place in the divine and natural system of things.

A religious response to the river does not entail an imperative to return to a primitive form of nature worship. We must return, instead, to the basic idea hidden in worship ­ which is worth-ship, to give proper worth to.

To give proper worth to a river, the Russian River or any river, is to understand, first and foremost, that: 1) A river is not a resource (a spiritually inert substance intended primarily for human manipulation and use). 2) A river is not a sewer (a convenient source to dump waste and poisons and pollutants. 3) A river is not a commodity that can be measured and manipulated by the human desire for convenience and control.

No. A river is a living artery of the earth's blood. A river is alive and a complex source of life and health beyond our imagining. As the Chief of the U.S. Forest Service, Jack Ward Thomas, once wrote about ecosystems, that "not only are ecosystems more complex than we think, they are more complex than we can think," so too with a river. A river is more complex, more life-giving, more mysterious, more alive than we think, or can think.

So the beginning of a religious response to the environment, is to cease to think of the natural world as a separable space or place, but to see it as and in us. A river runs through us, and we live through rivers, and a river is our life, and Life itself is a river, amen.