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Good Morning. Water. We live in it for nine months before we leave the body of our mother. We are mainly made up of it. We drink it all day. We need it to stay alive. To stay clean. Water covers vast amounts of our earth and without it we wouldn’t survive. But we take it for granted … until it becomes scarce and we can’t get it. Or until it becomes a danger and threatens us. As it does for anxious residents in the Peak District this morning, evacuated from homes, bedding down in pubs and restaurants. Like a scene from a film, up in the sky an RAF Chinook drops ballast to shore up the Toddbrook Reservoir while down below engineers work night and day to pump out water and reduce pressure on the dam wall. The warnings of ‘mortal danger’ show how real is the risk of disaster for the residents of Whaley Bridge, the threat to treasured homes, possessions and memories. This C19th dam, like all dams, is an extraordinary act of engineering, allowing us to harness the power of water, to hold back the sheer overwhelming force of nature. A complex negotiation with the natural world. Sister Earth, Brother Earth as Francis of Assisi named this planet we share. We whose connection to water is domesticated and mainly through a tap forget her force until a thunderstorm breaks. Watching the sea lash in on a stormy day at the coast is a meditation in humility. The fear of storm and flood inhabits our ancient nightmares. Noah and the Ark, one of our oldest stories, is the original extreme weather event. In a more recent tale, The Overstory, awarded this year’s Pulitzer Prize for Literature, the novelist Richard Powers shows how this earth is a living presence. It is not inert or unresponsive in its relations with us but connected to us in ways we have yet to fathom. His subject is trees but he might be talking of water. ‘This is not our world with trees in it,’ he writes. ‘It's a world of trees, where humans have just arrived.’ The Met Office reported this week that ten of the warmest years on record have occurred since 2002 and, as our weather changes, policymakers scramble to keep up. We notice it with alarm on mornings like this but in some of the world’s poorest countries these shocks are already the new normal. We’re grateful to those working to protect the people of Whaley Bridge … and for the resilient community spirit of locals. But we also recognise their fears – and admit our own. Some of the earliest Christian writers understood that there were two Bibles – and the one read less often, composed several billion years before the other, was the Bible of Nature. As our world gets hotter and extreme weather become more common, we’re bound to ask more urgently, what today’s lesson is… from the Bible of Nature.