Living Water: The Season of Creation

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COZ162: Every year from 1 September to 4 October, Christians across the ecumenical family keep the Season of Creation, and the 2026 theme is Living Water, drawn from Ezekiel 47. Lindsay Sant starts with the passage itself: a trickle from under the temple threshold that swells into a river too deep to cross, greens land that was barren, and then does the one thing water cannot do — turns the Dead Sea fresh.

That impossibility is the point. Ezekiel wrote from exile, with Jerusalem levelled and the temple gone, and the river he saw does not route around the deadest place in the region. It goes in. Lindsay traces the reversal underneath it — blood flowing toward the altar becomes water flowing outward from it — and what that asks of anyone who takes it seriously. Worship that stops at ritual is unfinished worship. Care for creation is a consequence of a restored relationship with God, not a political position parked next to one.

Lino Saubolle keeps pulling it back to the tap: the duty of care we owe the next generations, the ozone layer, mining, waste, and his argument that if we ever do settle somewhere else, the responsibility travels with us. Both of them are blunt that they are not doing this for political reasons. As Lindsay puts it, we are Christians before we go to the ballot box.

Then the numbers, and they are not comfortable: 1.7 billion people without basic hygiene services at home, 2.1 billion without safely managed drinking water — one person in four — with data centres and AI now drawing on the same supply. Against that, the episode reads Pope Leo’s homily for the World Day of Prayer for the Care of Creation, his September prayer intention for water, and Laudato Si’ on refusing a tyrannical anthropocentrism. And it ends where hope gets practical: wells dug, rivers restored, and Caritas Australia’s Project Compassion paying for water at Samoan schools so children stop walking home in the middle of the day to drink.

The science segment goes somewhere completely different. A new study in Nature Communications, built on the Itiner-e map of roughly 300,000 kilometres of Roman road, takes three assumptions apart at once. Not all roads led to Rome — the network clustered around provincial capitals, and Constantinople sat more centrally than Rome ever did. The roads were straight only where the terrain allowed it. And the ones we are still driving on are far fewer than the legend suggests. Lead researcher Tom Brughmans calls even that enormous dataset the tip of the iceberg.

Plus listener feedback on citizen science from the SQPN Discord — SETI@home on an old Mac, eclipse temperature logging, and one listener whose name ended up on a paper about Haumea’s moon.

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Catholics of Oz