Unitarian Universalist Meeting of South Berkshire
April 6, 2008
“Meeting at the Well”
Rev. Kathy Duhon
When I think of wells, I picture a nursery rhyme – “Jack and Jill”. The children seem perfect to me, from the illustration I remember from my childhood, as they go “up the hill to fetch a pail of water”. The well is cute and sweet and has a tidy little bucket, painted with flowers I believe, that small children can easily draw up to bring water to their family. Of course, there’s that unfortunate matter of breaking one’s crown and tumbling down, but I never associated that with the sweet little well at the top of the hill.
Six years ago, on one of our congregational Global Village trips, to Guatemala to build houses with Habitat for Humanity there, I came across my first real, open, working well. At home in Louisiana we had a closed well, as many around here do, but it simply pumped water into our pipes – you couldn’t get water directly from it. This open Guatemalan well was big. It was not tidy, not cute, and no small child could have drawn up a bucket of water from this well. Sometimes I would haul up the water, which we needed for mixing the cement, and it required a great deal of strength, at least for me. Women and girls were, and are, the ones who have most often hauled the water – from wells, rivers, and springs. Not a sweet, quaint, or dainty job at all, which makes me appreciate the strength and capacity of women.
There are two different religious stories about transformation and wells that I have come across. One, which we listened to part of today, and you may have heard before, is from the Christian tradition. Jesus is at a well with a Samaritan woman, a woman of a despised group, which Jews at the time would normally not share water with, or conversation. Jesus does both, and amazes the woman with his understanding of her colorful past, with her many husbands and lovers, and his acceptance of her, nonetheless. He offers her the living waters of transformation, and she is so moved that she must go and tell everyone about this amazing prophet whom she thinks might be the Messiah. She went forward with the good news of her new wisdom gained at the well of transformation.
The other story is from the Buddhist tradition, in which one of Buddha's favorite young monks, a man of the highest social caste, comes upon a woman of the lowest social order, at a well. This set-up is similar to the Christian story – a man and a woman meeting at a well, who would normally not be able to even speak with each other, according to the rules of their societies. In the Buddhist story, she offers the monk water, and he takes it, and he is transformed, but the change is a hard one. By his contact with this untouchable woman, the monk has lost his own caste and is now in low social standing, which concerns him. (Although the Bible does not make it clear, this is also similar to what happens to Jesus over and over again – he associates with those for whom contact with them means that he is made unclean, an outcast to his own religion and society.) The young monk confesses to the Buddha of his interaction with the woman at the well, and the Buddha approves wholeheartedly, and suggests that they ordain the woman a nun and welcome her into their community.
The monk is gradually transformed by being lost to the world in his encounter at the well; the Samaritan woman was immediately transformed by being found to herself in her encounter at the well. The other ones in both stories, for whom transformation is not the emphasis, Jesus and the woman turned Buddhist nun, are also given something by the interaction – Jesus the outcast is called Messiah, which means “the anointed one”, while the woman of lowest caste becomes a nun of the highest order.
In the Buddhist story, the transforming monk retreated from the world, as did the woman he met who became a nun, while the transformed Samaritan woman ran out to tell the story everywhere, and Jesus continued his public ministry. Transformation has many channels, many ways of becoming made manifest. Yet these diverse ways of transformation are symbolized by the giving of water at the well.
What’s happening here? Like the Samaritan woman, we don’t understand these living waters, though we might want them. The transformations happen at a well, and we have forgotten the importance of wells. The particular well in the Biblical story, Jacob’s well, appears earlier in the Hebrew scriptures as a significant and important discovery, and so would water be in a desert area. As a Hindu prayer begins, “Waters, you are the ones who bring us the life force.” The ancients understood this. We are beginning to know it again, worldwide, as the availability of clean water for the sustenance of life on our planet becomes an issue of crisis.
Hauling water from something like a well must be done for everyone, even if it is essentially piped and from a reservoir – still, we must bring the water forth to use for our daily living. In the old days, and in poverty today, drawing water forth was often a quiet job, what you did by yourself, whether in meditation, resentment, exhaustion, or resignation. Sometimes, the water source was more public, and then you might come upon a neighbor, a relative, a loved one. And rarely, just as happens in all public spaces, and happened in these two stories, you might come upon a stranger, someone who was very different from you, to whom you did not belong, according to the ways of both of your peoples.
We don’t have castes or laws about cleanliness, or even Jim Crow laws of racial division, anymore, but we do have plenty of unwritten rules about who we belong to and who is different, seemingly dangerous, and someone with whom one should not interact, let alone be seen near, according to what we’ve learned. The divide can be along racial or class lines. We can be separated by age or abilities, by sex or sexuality. For many in America, for example, a young person of a minority race who looks poor is someone most white people would not share even a glass of water with, because of fear, of propriety, of the great divisions that exist in our world – not so different from olden times. And I can think of several other profiles of people that would cause most folks to turn aside.
The transformations happen at a well because everyone is connected by water, by the need for water, and it is when our most basic needs are recognized as being common to all that we can begin to reach across the deep divides that keep us away from each other and apart from the Beloved Belonging that wants to move our hearts, to free our spirits.
The transformations happen at a well because when we connect most easily over the simple things: when we drink together, eat together, cook together, talk with each other, we are made whole. Even with those to whom we think we already belong – the sharing of simple, basic life happenings is what keeps us connected.
Lately some of us have been reading together Barbara Kingsolver’s book, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, and I am mindful of her frequent reference to a similar kind of meeting to that of meeting at the well. She is always meeting in the kitchen with others to can vegetables or fruits, or to cook great garden-fresh meals, or to learn a new skill like cheese-making, or she is meeting with friends in the yard to harvest animals, or in the fields to learn techniques. People used to meet over chores, not just members of the same family, but in a social way. Drawing water from a well was a chore, and a necessity, and you did it often, just like growing food, or harvesting or preparing it, and of course you met people in the process, in the flow of the necessary undercurrent of life. And sometimes those meetings through the simple tasks brought one the sense of the living waters, the sense that we are all part of the same flow of life, and that really such oneness is filled with exultation, joy, aliveness.
Where do we meet to taste the living waters? What is the well where transformation might take place? It might be on the streets of your town, when you greet someone with whom you felt you had no belonging. Or at the People’s Pantry, or at a nursing home, or a jail. Every time we cross over the divisions between us with anything as simple as shared drinks of water, acceptance, kindness, we are transformed by the living waters.
We are here to be transformed by our religion, to drink deeply from the well, but how that happens for each of us is different. As Unitarian Universalists, we have a multitude of traditions, a variety of backgrounds and experiences, and a variety of ways that we feel divisions with others. But we all meet here at this well. And we go forward from here to find the other wells where we meet with others. May the living waters be known by you and transform your lives. Blessed Be.