There she goes ...
the Woman of Samaria.
I can see her in my mind's eye.
She is wearing a loose dress,
the colour of burlap,
somewhat like a long potato sack,
cinched with a twisted cord of rope.
It reaches down to a few inches above her sandalled feet.
She is wearing a headpiece of the same colour.
It falls in folds halfway down her back.
On her right shoulder
she is balancing a water jug,
rather large in my eyes.
Surely it's heavy when it's full.
There she goes ...
the Woman of Samaria ...
walking to the well.
She travels down the well-worn path from town
as it twists and turns,
intimately acquainted, in her solitariness,
with every curve,
every boulder and every lonely blade of grass.
Tunelessly she hums into the stillness
of the noontime air.
Scuffing her feet,
she raises little wisps of dust.
The perspiration beads on her upper lip
and runs in rivulets down her back
and between her breasts.
It is hot and sticky this time of the day
but its the only time she feels safe
to go for the water she needs.
Safe from the taunts and innuendos,
the glares and the hisses,
the damning laughter of the other women.
The heat of the cloudless sky is more merciful than they.
Walking along - alone - lost in her thoughts
she is startled to hear voices
coming towards her
just around the bend.
She casts down her eyes and moves over ...
to avoid the men she sees approaching.
Glancing up briefly
she catches one hostile glare.
Glares are nothing new to her
but this is different.
These men are Jews - not Samaritans - not her neighbours.
They abruptly move further away from her
as if she had the plague....
Samaritans and Jews do not associate.
As she gets further along she no longer hears them.
Instead, the clicking and buzzing of countless insects grows louder.
She relaxes and begins to sing a snatch of song,
something she heard at a campfire one night.
As the deer longs for flowing streams,
so my soul longs for you, O God.
My soul thirsts for the living God.
When shall I come and behold the face of God?
My tears have been my food day and night,
While people say to me continually,
"Where is your God?"
Despite her dreary hard life - she still hopes,
still clings to the stories
she heard as a child about Yahweh.
At last the well is in sight.
But, what is this?
A man - alone - sits by the well.
A Jew. Another Jew.
She feels tense, wary
all her senses are heightened.
Danger screams through every second that passes.
She is alone...
a woman alone with a strange man.
She thinks: "Who IS this guy?
What does He want?"
He is just sitting there
looking dusty and worn and tired
but strangely peaceful and calm
and - despite the dust - radiant.
He smiles.
He speaks.
Breaks the silence and,
in an instant,
tears down the walls that distance ...
that distance Jews and Samaritans
that distance Women and Men.
He speaks.
"Give me a drink."
It is so astonishing that
she blurts back the question,
"How is it, that YOU, a JEW - a MAN,
ask a drink of ME, a WOMAN of SAMARIA?"
This man wastes no time debating
but challenges her:
"If you knew the gift of God, and who it is
that is saying to you, 'Give me a drink,'
you would have asked him,
and he would have given you living water."
The woman is so startled, so overwhelmed,
so on fire with excitement, she babbles:
"You have no bucket!"
"The well is deep."
"Where do you get this water?"
"Are you better than our ancestor Jacob?"
"Do you know what you're saying?"
To herself, she says,
"I must be dreaming. It must be the heat.
I feel so dizzy."
This man goes on, in the midst of her confusion,
"Everyone who drinks this water will thirst again
but those who drink of the water I will give them
will never again thirst.
My water will become in them a spring
of water, gushing up to eternal life.
"Sir," she pleads, "give me this water so I'll never be thirsty
and I'll never have to come back here to draw water again."
She doesn't know what she is saying.
She is standing on strange ground.
Everything is upside down and different today in this place.
Then, the man totally blows her away.
He knows everything about her, the whole sorry tale,
and tells her,
about her mixed-up life,
the five husbands
and the live-in lover she has now.
Everything.
Back and forth this preposterous conversation goes.
Finally she tells him,
"I know that Messiah is coming
and when he comes
he will tell us all things."
"I am he! The one who is speaking to you."
The words of the song from the campfire come back to her:
When shall I come and behold the face of God?
*****************
Sister of Samaria,
I reach out to you
across the years,
To ask you about what happened that day.
Can you tell me?
Did he touch your heart?
Did he really reach in and renew you?
What happened to you after he left
and the days and months went by?
What happened when you heard
he'd gone up to Jerusalem
to hang on a Cross and die?
Or, were you there?
With the other women,
at the foot of the cross?
With his mother,
in an agonizing wait,
when darkness fell on the land?
O, Sister of mine,
without a name,
You are not anonymous!
Your story's been told.
We're telling it new.
You are not anonymous!
Sister of Samaria,
I reach out to you across the years.
If you were here
I'd give you a hug and a smile and
I'd hold on tight.
But you are not here - so - the gift I'll give
in your memory
is
to love those who are here with me tonight.
I'll give them a hug and a smile
and I'll hold on tight.
Goodnight, Sister, Goodnight.
© Charlene Elizabeth Fairchild - 1994, 2002, 2005
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