Yesterday morning I gave the second of two meditations at the Unitarian Universalist Church in Spartanburg, which closes out the series I began last week with The First Home Is a Watershed. Last week’s question was where the water goes. This week’s is narrower and considerably more expensive: what do we ask of it while it’s here? And yes, I realize now that I wore the same jacket (it’s been hot here!) both Sundays.
Which meant talking about South Pine Street. The NorthMark/Valara build at the old Kohler factory, the 459,000 gallons a day that Spartanburg Water’s own people put on the record at this month’s fact-finding meeting, and the third reading of the data center moratorium that County Council voted to push to September 21, six days before I stood up to say this. Amos and the county calendar collided on their own this week. I didn’t arrange it.
I’ve started the video at the beginning of the meditation, but I’d encourage you to watch the whole service. The music from TJ (Joni Mitchell’s Big Yellow Taxi and Marvin Gaye’s Mercy Mercy Me (the Ecology)!) and the readings from Clemson do most of the work, and the congregation’s part is why any of this landed.
Enormous thanks again to Scott and Anne, Erin and Kimberly, TJ and Clemson, Janice, and the staff, tech team, and musician who made two Sunday mornings feel like a conversation rather than a performance. The conversations afterward, both weeks, have been the best part... several of them have already changed how I’m thinking about the ordinance question, and I suspect they’ll show up in this newsletter before long.
One practical note, since the meditation ends on it. Spartanburg County Council meets September 21 at 5:15. Council has said there will be another committee meeting before then, and as of this writing, that date still hasn’t been set. I’ll post it here when it is.
Here’s the meditation text:
What We Ask of the Water
Unitarian Universalist Church of Spartanburg · August 23, 2026 Home Ground: Watershed, Attention, and the Life We Hold in Common, part two of two
Thank you for having me back. Last Sunday you were generous with a man who spent twenty minutes talking about a slope in his backyard, and I’ve been warned that generosity like that only encourages me.
Here’s where we ended. Every house in this county sits on a slope, and the slope decides where the water goes. You are downstream of somebody and upstream of somebody, and that was your address before you had a name for it. The map shows ownership. The slope shows relation. They describe the same acre, and they don’t agree.
That was the easy week.
The easy week is the one where you notice you’re inside a common world. This week is the one where somebody asks what you intend to do about it, and the answer costs something.
So this morning the question is narrower and harder. Not where does the water go. What do we ask of it while it’s here?
Start with the ordinary version, because the ordinary version is where most of us live.
A house asks the water for a few hundred gallons a day. Showers, dishes, the washing machine that never stops in a house with children, the hose my daughter uses to make what she calls a river and what I call a bill. Multiply that by every roof between here and Chesnee, and you have Spartanburg Water, Lake Bowen, the intake and the treatment plant and the pipe under your street. That’s a request. It’s a modest one, and we make it so continuously that it stopped sounding like a request a long time ago. It sounds like a faucet.
To the household, it is a modest request. In the watershed, it is a withdrawal. The moral weight of the thing sits in the gap between what we take out and what we give back, and in what condition.
That’s what a watershed is, ethically speaking. It’s an Excel Sheet that no one keeps.
Now the specific version, and I’m going to be plain about it because Scott told me I could be and because you already know.
Out on South Pine Street, on the ground where the Kohler plant used to be, a data center is going up. NorthMark Strategies is the parent company, Valara Holdings is the subsidiary doing the building, and the numbers are the kind you have to say slowly. Two point eight billion dollars. Over five hundred thousand square feet. A four hundred and fifty megawatt gas-fired power plant on site to run it.
And the water. At the county’s fact-finding meeting this month, Spartanburg Water’s own people put the figure at about 459,000 gallons a day. They compared it to somewhere between 2,200 and 2,500 single-family homes. They also said, and I want to be fair to them here, that the system has the capacity to serve it without hurting current customers.
I believe them. That’s a real answer to a real question, given by people who know the infrastructure better than I ever will.
It’s the question I’d like to hold up to the light.
Do we have the capacity? It’s a question about the present tense and the current customer list. It asks whether the pipe is big enough. It’s an engineering question, and engineers should answer it, and they did.
But there’s another question standing right behind it, and it doesn’t have a department. Should we. And underneath that one: who is the we, and who’s in the room when the we gets decided, and how far downstream does the we extend?
Nobody’s job is to answer that. Which is roughly why we have prophets, and why the lectionary and the county calendar have collided this week in a way I didn’t plan.
Amos was a herdsman from Tekoa, and he showed up in the northern kingdom during a boom. That’s the part people forget. He isn’t preaching to a nation in ruins. He’s preaching to a nation doing extremely well, with full sanctuaries, good music, and a strong economy, and he tells them God can’t stand any of it.
שָׂנֵאתִי מָאַסְתִּי חַגֵּיכֶם. Sane’ti, ma’asti chaggeikhem. I hate; I reject your festivals. Two verbs stacked with no conjunction between them, which in Hebrew is the sound of somebody too angry to be tidy.
And then verse twenty-three, which I’d advise any guest speaker to think twice about reading aloud in a room this musical: הָסֵר מֵעָלַי הֲמוֹן שִׁרֶיךָ. Take away from me the noise of your songs. הָמוֹן, hamon, is a crowd-noise word. A racket. A mob of sound.
Marvin Gaye and Rhiannon Giddens are safe. I checked.
And then verse twenty-four, which is the one everybody knows, and which is almost always quoted in a translation that makes it prettier than it is:
וְיִגַּל כַּמַּיִם מִשְׁפָּט וּצְדָקָה כְּנַחַל אֵיתָן
V’yigal kammayim mishpat, u’tsdaqah k’nachal eitan.
The verb is יִגַּל, from גָּלַל, galal, which is what you do to a stone. Roll it. It isn’t a gentle verb, and it isn’t a liquid one. Amos has water doing something heavy.
מִשְׁפָּט, mishpat, is the ruling. The decision handed down, the judgment rendered, the vote taken. צְדָקָה, tsedaqah, is rightness of relation, whether the thing between us is actually straight. You can have the first without the second. We do it all the time. A properly filed application, correctly classified, approved by the appropriate staff, is mishpat without tsedaqah, and Amos would recognize it instantly.
And then the image, and this is where last Sunday pays off.
נַחַל אֵיתָן. Last week we spent time with נַחַל, nachal, the wadi, the watercourse that runs when the rain comes and lies dry when it doesn’t. Lawson’s Fork in March and Lawson’s Fork in September. Amos puts אֵיתָן beside it, eitan, meaning perennial, permanent, the one that doesn’t quit. He’s built a small contradiction on purpose. The seasonal creek that runs anyway. The one you can’t wait out.
Because that’s the strategy, isn’t it? Not opposition. Waiting. Every one of us has waited out somebody else’s righteousness, hoping the news cycle would move, the meetings would thin, and the creek would go dry the way creeks do in August.
The Greek translators heard exactly what he was doing. In the Septuagint the phrase comes over as χειμάρρους ἄβατος, from the same χείμαρρος we looked at last week, the winter-flow, joined to ἄβατος. ἄβατος is ἀ- with βατός, the verbal adjective of βαίνω, to walk or to go. Un-walkable. A torrent you cannot ford. You can’t step over it, can’t get around it, can’t cross it and keep your shoes dry.
That’s the vision. Justice as the creek that runs in the dry season and can’t be crossed on foot.
Now, Amos has a reputation as the prophet who’s against worship, and he isn’t. He’s against worship that leaves the water unchanged.
That distinction matters especially in a room like this one, where people arrive from four traditions and none, and where the shared thing isn’t a creed. It’s the willingness to show up and pay attention together. Amos would take that seriously. He’d just want to know what happens on Monday.
And on the Monday of this particular week, something did happen.
County Council was set to take the third and final reading on a one-year moratorium on new data centers. They’d passed the first two. The third is the one that counts. Instead, they voted unanimously to push it to September twenty-first so another committee can hear from more experts. The room was full. People had signs. Officers escorted two residents out.
I don’t stand here with a clean verdict on any of that. Serving on a county council is a hard, thankless, underpaid job, and I’ve watched enough church committees to know that the person calling for more information is sometimes right, sometimes stalling, and often can’t tell which. I’ve also sat in enough rooms where the meeting kept getting continued until the thing was already built.
What I do notice is what the lawsuit is actually about. The Southern Environmental Law Center filed in July, on behalf of a group of residents, and the claim isn’t that the data center is evil. The claim is that the project was classified as two minor land developments rather than one major one, and that classification determined whether the public had a hearing.
Hold that up to the light for a second. A definitional question, handled at a desk, determined whether anyone downstream got to speak.
That’s the whole thing. That’s the sermon, really, and I could sit down now.
But I’d be a coward if I stopped there without saying the obvious.
I use the cloud. I’m a doctoral student who runs models on machines that live in buildings exactly like the one on South Pine Street. My newsletter sits on somebody’s server. The sermon in my hand went through three drafts on a laptop syncing to a data center I couldn’t find on a map. When we ask what we ask of the water, the we includes me, and it isn’t a rhetorical we, and I’m not going to perform innocence I don’t have.
Which is why I don’t think the useful question is whether data centers should exist. They exist. They’re how we’ve built the thing we’re all using.
The useful question is the one Amos actually asks. When the ask gets made, who gets to be in the room? When the cost lands, does it land on the people who chose it? And is the arrangement between us straight, or have we just processed it correctly?
Four hundred and fifty-nine thousand gallons a day is not a scandal by itself. It’s a number. It becomes something else depending entirely on how it was decided and who was standing there when it was.
Edith Stein gives me the language for why that’s a spiritual complaint and not only a procedural one.
Last week I put her Nullpunkt der Orientierung in front of you, the zero point of orientation, the here I can’t get outside of. Everything is a there in relation to my here. Left alone, that stops feeling like a viewpoint and starts feeling like the world.
The move she makes next is the one I want this morning. In Einfühlung, feeling-into, I do not climb inside your experience or make your here mine. Your orientation center is given to me as yours. And because it remains yours, I discover that my here was a here all along, one among others, and that the world contains more than showed up from where I was standing.
That’s more than sympathy. It’s correction, with difference preserved. It is intimacy with remainder: the discovery that my account of the world was partial, and that the only way to find out was to receive somebody else’s without taking it over.
A public hearing, at its best, is that. Applied to a county.
It’s a technology for the shifting of the zero point. It’s how a room full of people who each know one thing find out that there was a whole world of theres they hadn’t accounted for. The man in the Oaks subdivision who wakes up at three in the morning knows something the permit does not contain. So does the woman who’s been drinking from that system for fifty years. So does the person whose electric bill went up and can’t get a straight answer about why.
There’s a here down in Lawson’s Fork, if you’ll let me stretch Stein past where she’d follow me. There’s a here in the Pacolet and the Broad. Nobody in that lawsuit represents those places, and no ordinance currently speaks for them, and the whole tradition I come from says that this does not make their claim smaller.
We heard Langston Hughes earlier. Rivers older than the flow of human blood in human veins. He names the Euphrates and the Congo and the Nile and the Mississippi, and the effect of the poem is to make a very old soul out of a very young country’s youngest people.
I keep thinking about that in this two hundred and fiftieth year.
The Pee Dee, where I grew up, was carrying water before there was a Carolina to argue over it. Lawson’s Fork was running before there was a Spartanburg. The republic is younger than a good many trees and infinitely younger than the drainage. That isn’t a knock on the republic. I love it enough to be embarrassed by it, which I take to be the standard arrangement.
It’s a matter of scale. Two hundred and fifty years is a long time for a nation and about a minute for a creek. The decisions we make about that water in the next eighteen months will be legible in it long after every name in this argument, mine included, has stopped meaning anything to anybody.
So when someone tells you a moratorium can wait until September, the true answer is that yes, it can. Almost everything can wait a month. That’s exactly what makes the month worth watching.
Here’s what I’d leave you with.
Last week I said the ground has been keeping us all along. שָׁמַר. That’s still true, and it’s still, I think, the deepest thing I know about home.
But being kept isn’t the same as being excused.
The water has been keeping this county since before any of us. It has asked us for nothing. We have asked it for everything, and lately we’ve been asking on behalf of machines that will never drink, in rooms where the people downstream weren’t invited, using a classification decided at a desk.
V’yigal kammayim mishpat. Let the ruling roll down like water. And righteousness like the creek that doesn’t go dry.
Not a trickle. Not a gesture. The unfordable kind. The kind you can’t step over on your way to somewhere else.
The next council meeting is September twenty-first at 5:15. Council says there will be another committee meeting before it; as of this morning, that date has not been set. Watch for it. These are ordinary evenings in an ordinary county building with bad chairs, and they are, as far as I can tell, what tsedaqah looks like on a calendar.
Go be somebody’s shifted zero point.
Benediction
Go now into the ordinary week.
Drink the water. Notice that you did.
Remember that somebody upstream decided what would be in it, and that somebody downstream is waiting on what you decide.
May justice roll down like water, and righteousness like a creek that runs in the dry season.
And may the Lord bless you and keep you, as this ground has been keeping you all along.
Go in peace.