THOUGHTS OF A MONK

Samaritan Woman

CHRIST IS RISEN!

1 Pt 2:18-25; Ac 9:1-14; Jn 4:3-30; 39-42

Many years ago when I was in College there was a popular speed-reading program called Evelyn Woods Reading Dynamics. I was a sophomore when I took the course and I will always remember the instructor’s question to us as we neared the end of the class: “Are you reading more and enjoying it less?” I’m not sure how long he remained as an instructor. But the popularity of the course was based in part on the information explosion that had already begun back in the 1960s. Reading Dynamics was the current fad to try and “solve” the problem of keeping up with everything. Now the problem has grown exponentially. And the solutions are even more sophisticated: Smaller and faster computers that access and handle more and more information. But how do we process that information? What prevents us from being buried in facts but bereft of wisdom? With all these facts do we make any better decisions? Do we really live better or do we get so involved in all the events and activities motivated by our desire to keep up our image that we drift away from and lose contact with our inner compass?

Today we are constantly being enticed into thinking that we need more and more information about more and more subjects. The ultimate goal of all this acquisitiveness is that the more we know about all these matters the smarter we’ll be. And what do we associate with being smart? Power, control and influence! And in that world we have created where we have power, control and influence we will feel secure. It’s the modern world’s view of wisdom. Facts and information = knowledge and knowledge = control and the one who is in control and has all knowledge is the “font and source” of wisdom. And to the extent we are striving for that wisdom of the world we place ourselves at the center of that universe. In that universe we have created we can dispense little bits of our knowledge as we see fit, leaving out the parts that are inconvenient, coloring the facts to make our image shine, or at least not be too tarnished.

But Jesus Christ calls us to go somewhere else. He calls us to go deeper into ourselves to try and find the wisdom that was planted there by God, our creator. It is ironic that going deeper inside only works if we throw open our hearts and cast off all the armor we have built up around ourselves. And yet that deeper place connects with the infinite God who created us and it is the place Jesus touched in the Samaritan Woman. When Christ asks the Samaritan Woman for water, it is a request for her to reveal her truth to him. But she, and we, are often not prepared or skilled in being truly open even when confronted with the truth.

With the Samaritan Woman Jesus insisted on breaking through her defenses to get to the heart of the matter. This gospel story falls in the paschal season because it is a resurrection theme. The resurrection is not an effort to erect a whole new set of defenses but to genuinely resurrect that fallen image that is buried deep within us. It is not an effort to find a new persona, a new identity as if we are in some witness protection program. It’s about getting to the core of our human reality to find the person God originally created. Our sins are no secret to Jesus. Jesus knew all about the Samaritan woman and ultimately, that is what drew her to him. He knew all of it, he knew about the masks and he knew about the truth at the core of her being. And what did she tell the townspeople: “here is a man who has told me everything I have done, could this be the Christ?” The one who already knew everything, the one who could not be kept at bay, the one who would not let go until the truth was out, that’s the one she recognized as the Christ. He was inviting her to stop camouflaging her real self with actions that were self-destructive. After all, he asked her for water first because he knew that in the heart of her being deep within her, as the Psalmist says, was that source of true wisdom the source that makes her and each one of us one with God, that source that knows its source.

But we let the distractions of life, the deluge of news, events and information take us away from it. We delve into the world’s ways and then we get caught in its web. The wisdom of the world is noise; God calls us to a deeper wisdom that can be reached only down the path of stillness and silence. As the Psalmist says: “Be still and know that I am God.”

Bishop Nikolai Velimirovich in his book of meditations, Prayers by the Lake, from another angle ponders this same idea.

“White doves fly over my blue lake, like white angels over the blue heaven. The doves would not be white nor would the lake be blue, if the great sun did not open its eye above them.

O my heavenly Mother, open your eye in my soul, so that I may see what is what—so that I may see who is dwelling in my soul and what sort of fruits are growing in her.

Without your eye I wander hopelessly through my soul like a wayfarer in the night, in the night’s indistinguishable gloom. And the wayfarer in the night falls and picks himself up, and what he encounters along the way he calls “events.”

You are the only event of my life, O lamp of my soul. When a child scurries to the arms of his mother, events do not exist for him. When a bride races to meet her bridegroom, she does not see the flowers in the meadow, nor does she hear the rumbling of the storm, nor does she smell the fragrance of the cypresses or sense the mood of the wild animals—she sees only the face of her bridegroom; she hears only the music from his lips; she smells only his soul. When love goes to meet love, no events befall it. Time and space make way for love.

Aimless wanderers and loveless people have events and have history. Love has no history, and history has no love.

When someone makes their way down a mountain or climbs up a mountain without knowing where they are going, events are imposed upon them as though they were the aim of the journey. Truly, events are the aim of the aimless and the history of the pathless.

Therefore the aimless and the pathless are blocked by events and squabble with events. But I tranquilly hasten to you, both up the mountain and down the mountain, and despicable events angrily move out of the way of my footsteps.

If I were a stone and were rolling down a mountain, I would not think about the stones against which I was banging, but about the abyss at the bottom of the steep slope.

If I were a mountain stream, I would not be thinking about my uneven course, but about the lake that awaited me.

Truly terrifying is the abyss of those who are in love with the events that are dragging them downward.

O heavenly Mother, my only love, set me free from the slavery of events and make me your slave.

O most radiant Day, dawn in my soul, so that I may see the aim of my tangled path.

O Sun of suns, the only event in the universe that attracts my heart, illuminate my inner self, so that I may see who has dared to dwell there besides you—so that I may eradicate from it all the fruits that seem sweet from the outside, but smell rotten in their core.”

Maybe we can each say: Jesus, when you come to me and ask for water from that source you planted deep within me, may I be open to freely make that water available to you in whatever guise you present yourself to me. Christ is Risen!