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Good morning. In the last few years lots of my friends have taken up some form of exercise for their well-being. I can’t get my head around most of the options. I ran regularly for months and still hated it. If I swim laps in a pool I get bored very quickly. I only did lockdown yoga a couple of times before I rolled up my mat. But there’s one thing that has stuck. Whenever I get the chance, I’ll go for a dip in the sea. It turns out that a good brining in the cold salt calms me down like little else. I think it might run in families. My mum would move into a beach hut if we’d let her. My granddad was a child of the Welsh coast, and even when he could no longer remember family names he would walk by the sea and give thanks to God. Maybe it’s also our shared island identity. Britain is a country of waterways, shaped by tides, lakes, and rivers. Many of our saints’ lives take place in and by water. The stories go that St Cuthbert of Lindisfarne would wade into the sea at night to pray. When he returned to the shore, otters came to warm his feet. St Ia of Cornwall travelled across the Irish sea on a miraculously enlarged leaf and lived a life of prayer in what is now St Ives. Our seas and rivers are a shared source of food, shelter, spiritual nourishment, and recreation. It’s no surprise that so many of us have flocked to water over this hot summer. It’s also no surprise that many of us feel frustrated and helpless by the latest reports of sewage being released along our coast. After this week’s rain, sewage has flowed into dozens of beaches, followed by swift pollution warnings across England and Wales. These are the latest in almost 400,000 such events in the last three years, and a government level plan to reduce storm overflows is due to be released next month. The health, economic, and environmental impacts of polluting our waterways are obvious. But some communities also point to its spiritual significance. A few days ago, a 4ft statue of Mary began travelling along the River Wye to raise awareness about the health of the river. Dubbed ‘Our Lady of the Waters and the Wye’, the statue is making a daily stop for a church service or prayer of blessing. These campaigners are capturing our shared belonging to this watery land. The waters around us come as an unearned, unbuyable gift. Some theologians call this common grace: offered to all, regardless of merit or status. Given this country’s history of commons – land and water that belongs to everyone – perhaps we ought to think of our rivers and seas as commons grace. If we began from such a principle, our waters might start to recover.