On Ash Wednesday as we inaugurate the Lenten season of turning, the liturgy reminds us of our mortality—“from dust to dust.” We enter this season soberly, knowing that we are called once again to turn, to be cleansed, washed, purged of all that keeps us separated from God. As I write this reflection, a steady winter rain streams through the highest reaches of the coastal redwoods, soaks through the foliage, and seeps into the drought-parched earth below. For over a decade, our Southern California landscape has been dried out and thirsty. Now flows the welcome water: cleansing, healing, and nourishing.

Over and over the Psalter offers us poetry with which to express our welcome for cleansing waters. Today’s psalm sings lavishly of the ways we long for water: Cleanse me from my iniquity, wash me of my sins; wash me and I will be whiter than snow; cleanse me with hyssop; create in me a pure heart. We sing of our longing to be unburdened, cleansed of the weight of our careless living and all that estranges us from our source of life.

In the center of my garden that now so gratefully welcomes the precious rainfall sits a small solar birdbath. How often I have watched with delight when some house finch or scrub jay swoops down and perches on the edge of the fountain; then, peering about, hops into the water flapping and flitting, then hops out rustling its feathers, then hops back in again for the sheer joy of the cleansing water. Pure joy. Pure delight. Psalm 51, for all its poetry that cries out our sin and our need to be cleansed, ends on a different note: “Restore me to the joy of your salvation.” I like to think of those finches and jays in the water that then spread their wet wings and soar up into the air, cleansed.