|
In the Name of the Father, the Son and
the Holy Ghost.
When the Samaritan woman came back in haste
to her town and called all those who lived around her to see
Christ, she said: 'Come! Here is a Man who has told me
everything I have done!’ And the people flocked around, and
listened to what Christ had to say.
At times we think, how easy it was for this
woman to believe and how easy it was for her, from within this
shattering experience to turn to others and say: Come! Listen to
one who has spoken as no-one else has ever spoken, One Who,
without a word of mine has seen into the depth of my heart, into
the darkness of my life, has seen and known everything.
But is it not something that can happen to
each of us? Christ did not tell her anything very singular, He
told her who she was, what her life had been, how God saw her.
But this He can tell us every day of our life, and not in a
mystical experience, not as it happened to some saints, but in
the simplest possible way.
If we turn to the Gospel and read it every
day, or if we simply read it once in a while with an openness
that we do not always possess, we may think that Christ holds
before our eyes a mirror in which we see ourselves as we are:
either by rejoicing at what we see, or by contrast, being shaken
by the fact that we are so different from what we seem to be, or
what we imagine we are.
Christ said to the Samaritan woman: Call your
husband! And she said: I have no husband. Christ replied: You
have spoken the truth. You have had five husbands, and the one
who is your husband now indeed, is not your husband more than
anyone else.
Certain spiritual writers have commented on
this passage by suggesting that Christ was saying to her: Yes -
you have been wedded to all that your five senses could give
you, and you have seen that you find fulfilment, satisfaction in
none. And now, what is left to you is your own self, your body,
your mind, and this, no more than your five senses can fulfil
you, give you that fullness without which you cannot live.
Is this not what Christ says to us when we
read the Gospel, when He presents us with what we could be, when
He calls us to that greatness which is ours by vocation? - the
greatness that Paul describes by calling us to reach the
fullness of the stature of Christ, to be human as He was, in the
same way as Christ is true man, fulfilled by total final, full
communion with God.
So let us learn from this woman that we have
turned, all of us, to so may ways in which we could receive the
message of this world and be filled, and we have all discovered
that nothing can fill us, because man is too deep for things
material, too deep for things psychological, too vast - only God
can fill this vastness and this depth. If we only could realise
this, we would be exactly in the position of the woman of
Samaria. We need not meet Christ at the well. The well, indeed,
is the Gospel, the place from which the water of life may gush -
but not a material well, that well is a symbol. The water which
we are to drink is different.
And so, let us emulate this woman, let us
come to our senses, let us realise that all we have been wedded
to was not our fulfilment; and let us then ask ourselves "Who am
I, with regard to myself in the dimension of God's vision?" And
then we can go to others and say: I have met someone who has
held a mirror before my eyes, and I have seen myself as I am, He
has told me about myself: come and see! Come - and listen to Him!..
And others will come, others will listen, and then they will
turn to us and say: It is no longer your testimony that makes us
believe - we have seen for ourselves, we have heard for
ourselves, we know for ourselves: we believe! Amen.
|
