Every morning when I get up and I shave, I know that there’s no way that I can thereafter approach the Holy God. Where I live, on the ninth floor, in order to shave with any comfort, I have to let the hot water line from the basement run for six-gallon’s worth of water. I’ve measured it. Six gallons! What an unholy waste!
One solution that’s really not a good solution: I could run the hot water line in the bathtub first. There I could fill my two-gallon watering bucket three times with relatively cool water and go around watering the many plants that I have in my apartment, before I start shaving at the sink. But that option would only work one day a week, since my houseplants can’t take any more than that. Why shouldn’t I say, then, with Alfred E. Neuman, “What me worry!?” But, for whatever reason, I can’t stop worrying about wasting all that water, most days of the week. Let me tell you about that worrying in more detail.
Once, when I was a young pastor, I invited an even younger Palestinian Christian to meet with my congregation’s youth group one Sunday morning. The evening before, since he was staying at my home, I asked him to join me in the kitchen after dinner, just to chat, while I did the dishes. This is what happened. I turned on the hot-water faucet so that I would have that water ready when I needed it. Then I went over to the kitchen table, where we had been eating, to gather some of the dirty dishes. Immediately that young man leaped from his chair and turned off that faucet. He had come from a different place with a different set of ecological assumptions. He couldn’t bear to see a single drop of that, to him, precious substance, wasted.
Since then, that story has come back to haunt me virtually every day of my life, wherever I’ve found myself, whether at home or in some hotel somewhere, as I shave in the morning. “Turn off the friggin faucet!,” I often hear myself saying in my heart of hearts. Am I such a captive of my own affluent world?
Never mind that I also drive my wife to the grocery store to shop, most weeks. That driving is surely problematic. Over a year, say, those shopping trips must add up to a lot of fossil fuel burned up and a lot of pollution poured into the atmosphere. Multiply that by the many millions of Americans who do the same thing over the course of a year, and you have a huge mess of fuel consumption and air pollution. Just to get the groceries! Never mind all the energy consumed and the pollution emitted in producing both the food and the cars.
So what am I to do? Not shave? Not wash the dishes? Not take my wife shopping? In response, I have a not very original proposal. It sounds very American, as a matter of fact: bargain. I should find a way to measure the environmental price of my daily shaving and dishwashing and our weekly shopping trips, in order to discover how much those things cost our planet environmentally, especially the poor. Then, having checked this out with my wife, I could decide to donate that amount of money to an ecojustice activist group, like Lutherans Restoring Creation or Bill McKibben’s initiative for seniors, Third Act. Sounds complicated, I guess, and driven not by love, but by guilt.
But should I not be thinking such thoughts as I shave every morning, staring right at what I all too often assume to be my own innocent countenance? Six gallons!! What’s an American resource-consuming guy like me to do!?
I suppose I could become a Christian who takes Jesus seriously. One of my favorite theological tutors, Søren Kierkegaard, talked a lot about that sharply, addressing the Church of his own time. Instructed by SK, then, positioning myself to be a genuine follower of Jesus, maybe I could figure out how to start a Consumers Anonymous group at my own Church. “Hello, my name is Paul. And I waste six gallons of water almost every morning. Which, of course, is just a symptom of my whole wasteful life in America. I need help.”