Please, Just a Drop of Water to Cool My Burning Tongue

The Bad Rich Man in Hell (Le mauvais riche dans l'Enfer), James Tissot, 1886–1894. Opaque watercolor over graphite on gray wove paper, 22.4 x 13.2 cm. Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn, New York.

“Just One Drop of Water” from the album While the Ages Roll On by Dr. Ralph Stanley and the Clinch Mountain Boys.

Poetry:

“Scenes of Hell”
by Billy Collins

We did not have the benefit of a guide,
no crone to lead us off the common path,
no ancient to point the way with a staff,

but there were badlands to cross,
rivers of fire and blackened peaks,
and eventually we could look down and see

the jeweler running around a gold ring,
the boss captured in an hourglass,
the baker buried up to his eyes in flour,

the banker plummeting on a coin,
the teacher disappearing into a blackboard,
and the grocer silent under a pyramid of vegetables.

We saw the pilot nose-diving
and the whore impaled on a bedpost,
the pharmacist wandering in a stupor

and the child with toy wheels for legs.
You pointed to the soldier
who was dancing with his empty uniform

and I remarked on the blind tourist.
But what truly caught our attention
was the scene in the long mirror of ice:

you lighting the wick on your head
me blowing on the final spark,
and our children trying to crawl away from their eggshells.

PLEASE, JUST A DROP OF WATER TO COOL MY BURNING TONGUE

In today’s passage, the one overcome with thirst is not for our Lord himself but one who lived a lifetime of lavish indifference to his spiritual thirst. In life, the Rich Man of artist James Tissot’s painting, ignored both Father Abraham and the opportunities for mercy sitting outside his gate. Now, he cries out, acknowledging both and begging for what he had previously ignored.

Many rich people seem so confident, so self-assured, so enviable...prior to death. We can find it all too easy to hurry past the beggar. After all, beggars are dirty, possibly dangerous, and we have small children in the jogging stroller. We send a Christmas check to the rescue mission and assure ourselves that we don’t share his thirst, his lack. But the jarring contrast of Tissot’s work, The Bad Rich Man in Hell (Le mauvais riche dans l'Enfer), depicts how the way of worldly success somehow ends with the shadowy, parched figure, sinking, arms outstretched to the watchful Father Abraham gazing across the gulf.

Our danger is that we turn away too quickly. Poet Billy Collins hauntingly captures the ways in which our pursuits can consume us––leading not to life but to unfilled desire in an endless hell. The afterlife has not, in his poem or in Luke 16, changed the basic postures of the individual seeking satisfaction on their own terms; they persist, and if anything, are now forever stuck in those hopeless pursuits.

Each one of us has been created by God to thirst for Him. Compared with Tissot’s Rich Man, we face far more opportunities to ignore our thirst than he could have ever imagined––indifference does not require wealth as distraction will suffice. Whatever the means, it has never been easier to neglect our true thirst through pursuits that will never bring lasting satisfaction.

In contrast, Tissot depicts Lazarus clothed, protected, and honored at Father Abraham’s side. The Rich Man still assumed that Lazarus was in a servant position and could thus be dispensed to a task and ordered about to carry water or send a message. Instead, the one who lived earnestly hoping for a mere crumb from the Rich Man’s table remains a gulf removed from him, yet this time in an eternity of satiated comfort. Lack in the present moment does not necessarily foretell eternal deprivation. If anything, thirst in this life prepares us well to seek the eternal living water that our souls crave.

For the Rich Man, hell strips away illusions. As musicians Dr. Ralph Stanley and the Clinch Mountain Boys conclude in their haunting refrain, “One drop of water is all that he will ever need.” But this need will persist, unsatiated, forever. The moment for redemption has passed.

Prayer:
Jesus, thank you for enduring unspeakable thirst so that you could bring living water to the thirsty. Help us, who have yet to enter the afterlife, thirst for righteousness so that we may be filled with living water in this life and in the life to come.
Amen.

Jeremy Labosier
University Librarian
Biola University