3/28/2023 0 Comments Seven jeans![]() The woman has had five husbands she is presently living with a sixth man Jesus shows up in her life as Man Number Seven … and seven is a mystical number, the perfect number. In Sacred Scripture, wells lead to weddings. Wells are where marriage proposals take place. In the Bible, wells are places of engagement and espousal. Keep in mind the Scriptural significance of wells. Without your receptivity I can do nothing, I am powerless in my love for you.Īnd then Jesus adds this: If you knew the gift of God. What is the “gift of God”? I go with François Mauriac’s answer: “It is precisely the opposite of anguish.” If you only knew that I cannot do so without your being receptive to me, then you would ask me to give you a drink of divine compassion and I would give you that living water. If you only knew that I am burning with desire to fill you with the living water of grace and love, that my asking you anything is but a loving occasion for me to touch you, to make you into a new person. ![]() If you only knew that my longing for you surpasses infinitely your longing for me. In his beautiful book The Woman at the Well, Fr. Jesus says: “Give me a drink.” Jesus is thirsty for us to give him what we thirst for. The word for “tired” here is the same used in Mt 11:28: Come to me all you who are weary. And he comes tired so as to model for us in his flesh the fatigue and exhaustion that sin imposes on us. ![]() Jesus gets to the well before us and arrives tired. It is Jesus who takes the initiative in rescuing us from our patterns of bondage and self-destruction. I was created by Love for love, and when by sin I act contrary to Love, my heart must necessarily feel his absence (Fr. My sins will not let me feel that inward presence that is the sole real source of peace here below. The parched and thirsty soul feels the need of the dew of God, and rushes madly as the beasts wander in the jungle looking for the water they cannot find. After an offense against God, human nature feels itself to shrivel up and become cut off from the rest of the world. Sin makes a person realize as nothing else does the terrible loneliness of life. She opts for solitariness and alienation, even if it makes her life more oppressive and unbearable. She does not want to subject herself to others’ derision, to suffer their contempt. Here she is coming to collect water at the very hottest time of the day-at noon-precisely to avoid running into anyone else at the well. The woman at the well shares in sin’s madness. … Julia’s so good to her little, mad sin.” She’s got to take care of her little sin. … “Poor Julia,” they say, “she can’t go out. Waking up with sin in the morning, seeing the curtains drawn on sin, bathing it, dressing it, clipping diamonds to it, feeding it, showing it round, giving it a good time, putting it to sleep at night. Living in sin, with sin, by sin, for sin, every hour, every day, year in, year out. A character caught up in an adulterous relationship, suddenly struck with qualms of conscience, obsesses about that “one little, flat, deadly word that covers a lifetime” - sin … and then experiences a kind of meltdown: This dilemma is dramatized by Evelyn Waugh in his novel Brideshead Revisited.
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