Given at McAclaurin Chapel - Auckland University
Season of Creation 2026
My name is Rocío, which in English means “dew.” My mother used to call me her morning dew, su rocío de la mañana.
I was born in Lima, Peru, a city in the desert on the edge of the immense Pacific Ocean. Lima receives almost no conventional rainfall, and as a child I did not really know what rain was; I remember being astonished when, as an adolescent travelling outside Peru, I experienced rain for the first time.
And yet Lima is not a city without water. Because of the Pacific Ocean, it is a very humid city, and moisture carried by the fog and el rocío de la mañana—the dew of the morning—sustains vegetation in the coastal hills. In these extraordinary microclimates, moisture allows life to emerge from what appears to be a désert, so perhaps I was named well.
I also grew up swimming in the Pacific Ocean, and through swimming I learned to respect the sea and to love it. Many years later, after leaving religious life and gradually becoming aware of myself as a survivor of abuse, I discovered another dimension of my relationship with water.
I began swimming every day, in summer and in winter, and swimming became a place of healing for me. In the water, I could cry, letting my tears become one with the ocean, or I could simply be silent, allowing some of the sad voices inside me to quieten while I listened instead to the deep sound of the water, to my breathing, and eventually to my own heart.
And that is why I am so moved by the
vision of the prophet Ezekiel.
Ezekiel speaks from a time of catastrophe
and death. Jerusalem has been destroyed; the homeland in which he and his
people had lived, raised their families and found a sense of belonging has been
devastated; Ezekiel himself has been exiled; and the Temple—the place that had
given Israel a profound sense of identity and of God's presence among them—has
been destroyed.
This was not simply a political
catastrophe, but also a spiritual and existential one, because everything that
had seemed to give meaning, stability and belonging had been shaken.
And yet it is precisely there, amid this
catastrophe, that Ezekiel imagines a different future.
In chapter 47, Ezekiel sees water flowing
from the Temple. At first it is only a small stream, but as it moves it grows
deeper and deeper until it becomes a river that can no longer be crossed. The
river flows towards the Dead Sea, a place associated with salt, sterility and
death, and yet Ezekiel sees something extraordinary: the waters are healed,
fish begin to live, trees grow along the riverbanks, their leaves do not wither
and their fruit does not fail.
The river brings life to a place that had
seemed incapable of sustaining it.
Ezekiel is imagining the possibility of
life from within catastrophe. He does not deny the destruction, but he refuses
to believe that catastrophe has the final word. His prophetic imagination
anticipates something that will become increasingly important in later biblical
apocalyptic literature: the possibility that the end of one world can become
the passage towards another.
Perhaps this is why Ezekiel's vision
speaks so powerfully to our own experience today. We too know something about
dead zones: divisions, violence, wars, hunger, poverty, injustice, ecological
destruction, polluted and scarce water, plastic and consumerism, and societies
increasingly shaped by power and domination. Sometimes the scale of what is
happening can leave us overwhelmed.
The Spanish philosopher Eudald Espluga
suggests that we can fall into two extremes. On the one hand, we can fall into
what we might call collapse fantasies: the world of the “preppers,”
where fantasies of collapse become so powerful that we imagine we must prepare
individually for the extinction of the world. On the other hand, we can fall
into a form of technological optimism that leads us to believe that advances in
technology will enable us to become the first truly sustainable generation in
history.[1]
Espluga, who is not writing from a
Christian perspective, proposes a third way. He invites us to ‘recover
‘an apocalyptic imagination’. Perhaps
catastrophes give us the potential to use our imagination and vision to understand
that what may seem like an end, but is very likely not. Such vision can help us
to build a different, new world. We should not be paralysed by fear. We need
prophets today.
Ezekiel offers us something important
here. In his vision, human beings are almost absent from the passage of the
waters. The initiative comes from God; the water flows, and life returns. Human
beings do not create the river. Rather, they encounter and receive something
that has already begun to flow.
The vision therefore invites us to
recover a different understanding of our place’ in creation.
Perhaps we need to relearn how to belong.
Perhaps we need to decolonise not only our societies and institutions, but also
our minds and hearts, so that we can begin to imagine a relationship with
creation that is not based primarily on possession, extraction and control.
Through Māori understandings of
relationship and whakapapa, I have encountered a vision of belonging that is
based on relationship and reciprocity. The words Ko au te awa, ko te awa ko
au—I am the river and the river is me—express something that has deeply
resonated with me: the river is not simply an object outside myself, something
that I can observe or use, because my life is bound up with the life of the
river.
This also resonates with the commandment
to love our neighbour as ourselves. If we understand ourselves as beings
constituted through relationship, then aroha cannot be restricted to
those who are immediately beside us or who belong to our own human community.
It invites us into a wider relationship with our animals, our rivers, our
oceans, our trees and our birds, because these too are part of the world that
sustains and constitutes our lives. And as Pope Francis affirmed today however,
we have to realize that a true ecological approach always becomes a social
approach’ it must integrate questions of justice in debates on the environment,
so as to hear both the cry of the earth and the cry of the poor”.
And if everything is connected, and we belong
to the earth and one another, we cannot simply regard the wounds of humanity
and creation as someone else's problem. We have a responsibility. The word responsibility
comes from the Latin respondere, “to respond.”
The question is not necessarily, “What
can I do to solve everything?” None of us can carry the whole weight of the
world's suffering. The question might instead be: What is the little patch that
has been entrusted to me? What is within my reach? What can I do, together with
others, to care for the water, protect the life around me, reduce the harm that
I cause, take care of the vulnerable around me, demand justice, be voice for
the voiceless and create a different kind of relationships with the world in
which I live?
Transformation does not always begin with
something spectacular. It can begin with paying attention, with changing the
way we consume, reducing waste, caring for vulnerable people in my community, protecting
a tree or an animal, learning to listen, and allowing ourselves to be changed
by what we encounter.
And we are here today to pray, which is
also part of our response. In John's Gospel, Jesus says, “Let anyone who is
thirsty come to me and drink,” and the Evangelist explains that Jesus was
speaking of the Spirit. The first thing we ne ed to recognise, perhaps, is that
we are thirsty: that we have lost something of this prophetic imagination, and
that we need the Spirit to revive us, to give us life and to transform our
hearts so that rivers of living water might flow through us.
Our prayer resonates with what the
theologian Johann Baptist Metz called a “mysticism of open eyes.” Prayer does
not mean closing our eyes to suffering; rather, it means opening them more
fully, learning to see what is often easier not to see, and allowing ourselves
to remain present to both suffering and beauty.
It means opening our eyes to the
suffering of people: to the suffering of the ill, the poor, the marginalized
and It means opening our eyes to the wounds of creation. It also means opening
our eyes to the beauty that is still present, because even in the midst of
catastrophe there are rivers flowing, seeds growing, relationships being
restored and life continuing to emerge.
Perhaps this is why prayer becomes a form
of responsibility. When we truly see, we cannot remain entirely unchanged.
Perhaps this is what Ezekiel's river asks
of us. It does not ask us simply to stand on the banks and admire the water,
but to recognise that we too belong to the movement of life that the river
represents, and to ask how we might participate in that movement rather than
working against it.
I began by speaking about dew, those
small drops of water that sustained life in the desert where I grew up.
Ezekiel's vision also begins with something small: a little stream flowing from
the Temple. At first, it seems almost insignificant, but as it moves it becomes
deeper and wider, until it becomes a river that brings life to places that
seemed incapable of sustaining it.
Perhaps our response can also begin small,
but we need to respond.
For me, perhaps this is what the river
has been teaching me all along.
The water I encountered as a child in
Lima, the dew of the morning, the Pacific Ocean in which I learned to swim, the
waters in which I found a place to cry and heal, and the rivers and oceans of
Aotearoa are not simply things that have been around me throughout my life.
They have, in their different ways, been
teachers and they have taught me to move, to heal and to help with the healing
of others.
They have taught me that life can emerge
in places that look like deserts; that healing can sometimes begin when we
allow ourselves to be held by something larger than ourselves; and that we are
never quite as separate from the world around us as we imagine.
And the river is still flowing and we
must flow with it.
[1] Juanjo Villalba, “Eudald
Espluga, filósofo ‘No podemos dejar los imaginarios del fin del mundo en manos
de la extrema derecha’”, El Diario, 9th May 2026. Eudald Espluga, filósofo: “No
podemos dejar los imaginarios del fin del mundo en manos de la extrema
derecha"
