I have always been intrigued by this boy meets girl story. Generally in the Bible, when a boy meets a girl at a well, it’s not only an old conversation but it is a totally predictable one. By the next chapter, they are married with a bunch of kids. Before the Saturday night dance at the community hall, the personal ads or the host of internet dating sites, the well was where you went not only to get water but usually to get a wife. But in this boy meets girl story, romance doesn’t have a snow ball’s chance in hell. It’s not the same old conversation … it’s a brand new conversation.
We meet them at the edge of the well because Jesus has not chosen to take the nine day detour along the Jordan River in order to avoid crossing through this hostile terrain of his people’s enemy. Instead he places himself as an unwelcome intruder with a Galilean accent in the heartland of Samaria.
In the world of this story, he is a first century Jewish man sitting beside a well named after one of his most famous ancestors. She is a Samaritan woman standing beside this well sacred to her people in the hottest part of the day. Although thirst has brought each of them there, the story never has either of them drink a drop of water.
Instead, it places them under the hot desert sun engaging in a scandalous act. They are talking to each other. At best, we would expect stony silence. At worst, we might expect an exchange of slurs. What we get is an intriguing conversation about thirst between two people whose socialization would have taught them that they should have nothing civil to say to each other.
Where there has generally been either a heated argument or a stony silence between their ancestors, they take up a deeper conversation … generations earlier when their peoples parted company it was over the two great “R’s” of race and religion … it was a separation over right lineage and right ritual … the Samaritans were a people who shared the Jewish heritage but had intermarried with gentiles and with neighboring peoples in the ancient near east who were often the enemies of Israel … and they were a people whose holy place was on a mountain not the temple in Jerusalem. They each had different ideas about which books constituted the holy books and who could serve as priests.
Somehow as they reach across all the prejudice and dogma they had learned in their lives, risking a genuine human encounter, the conversation deepens from the number of angels who can dance on the head of a pin to a new conversation about the real thirst that drives every spiritual quest.
Whatever the differences in their feasts and festivals, their priests and prayers, their stories and myths, they are both thirsty. He is an unwelcome stranger in her land. And this is the well she to comes every day. And he asks her for help in quenching his thirst. She is clearly surprised that a Jewish man would make such a request of her.
But she is at a loss to help him because he has no bucket … nothing with which to draw water from the well. He has no container for the water of Jacob’s well. As the conversation continues, he invites her to think of thirst in a new way … to think about drinking from a spring which she would find within herself not only to find water in the familiar well of her ancestors … to think about a source of water that moves freely and without any bounds or limits … that cannot be captured by any particular well or contained in anyone’s bucket … a spring you can drink from directly … a source that requires neither cup or bucket.
She is skeptical enough to test the limits of this new source … checking for boundaries and barriers by focusing on the elephant in the living room. She brings the core conflict between their two religious traditions right out in the open … she puts it directly to him … “where do you say that we ought to find the sacred … on our mountain or in your temple??” … he didn’t engage the old conversation … he says something startlingly new … he offers her a new and mystical understanding about the sacred being spirit that can be found anywhere and everywhere by those who seek honestly and with a true spirit.
Essentially what I hear him saying is that it’s the water that makes the well not the well that makes the water. Water is beyond containment … it is invisible in the atmosphere … it runs in underground streams … it springs from deep within the core of the earth … it is this pure, unbounded living water for which we thirst … not the cup, not the container … irrespective of whether one has a bucket or a jar with which to draw water.
Somehow this insight causes her to leave her water jar there at the well and return to her community alive in new ways and reaching beyond the boundaries of her tradition, exploring possibilities her tradition had excluded. Their conversation has transcended interfaith dialogue and has moved into a new and deep conversation between religion and spirituality.
We are spiritual beings … which is to say, we are thirsty. Religion, as a social construct, makes containers but containers no matter how long, how deep, how wide are not the water … and ultimately cannot define or confine the water. They may be useful in helping us draw water. They may also be deadly in blurring the distinction between the cup and the contents. They may cause the water they try to capture to become still and stagnant.
They each came to this conversation rooted in the old conversations, the old arguments and debates of their particular religious traditions … their conversation touched the essence of their humanity … of what it is to be spiritual beings in a human experience … they left this conversation respecting the roots that shaped them and their ancestors before them … he left without a bucket or a cup … she set her jars down and left without her containers … perhaps a sign that the thirst within them was determined to reaching beyond the roots of their traditions branching out to drink wherever living water was to be found.
This is the first century version of a long conversation that is still with us today … it is the conversation we know as the spiritual verses the religious … You know the one I mean … how many times do we hear someone say: “Well, you know … I’m spiritual but not religious.”
That’s an old conversation … Imagine a new conversation …
What might it mean to refuse to parse our thirst into the dichotomy of being spiritual or religious choosing instead to be spiritual and religious? It might require us to revisit our roots … to re-examine the soil of our assumptions … to re-imagine the limits of our reach … it might ask us to re-tradition our tradition … leaving some of our jars beside the well … accepting that they are obsolete, redundant or irrelevant … it might mean that we re-learn our tradition as a living tree … roots sinking deep and wide in many directions … intertwined with all the other trees in the forest of spiritual traditions … to remember that every religious tradition has forced the root of a spiritual experience to emerge into the narrow trunk of orthodoxy only to be forced out of that orthodoxy shooting new branches in every direction as life keeps reaching for water and light … to re-imagine our tradition beyond its buckets and jars and containers … to be re-acquainted and re-enchanted with the life giving water that nourishes our spirits.
It’s a new conversation … it’s as risky a forbidden first century conversation … and like that conversation has the potential to change to transform spirituality from a individualistic smorgasbord into a community of seekers acting together for a more fair and just planet … and it has the potential to transform religion from its preoccupation with creeds and other obsolete containers into communities of practice where we learn from one another where living water is to be found.
Every 500 years or so … our tradition goes through a major shake up and renovation … Phyllis Trickle describes it as the church having a major rummage sale … its been 5 centuries now since our last major reformation … it is a time for a new conversation … as we hear more and more of the church alumni and adult children who have left the church and a new generation seeking their own spiritual paths … isn’t it time for a new conversation between the religious and the spiritual … time for us to know where we come from … our of what spiritual experience our movement separated out of Judaism and became a new religious tradition … isn’t it time to branch out into a new reach learning not only from all our neighbors in the forest of enduring religions … but also from the SBNR … fellow seekers with whom we could shape the church into a new community of care and concern … together seeking and sharing living water and from that refreshment finding what we need together to act justly and walk humbly as spiritual beings in a human experience on this good earth, our home for the human journey.
-Nancy Steeves
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