We know the story of the woman at the well. It is a reading we commonly hear during Lent. The woman at the well was marginalized, set apart from the rest of the village. Jesus meets her when she is alone, collecting water from her household after the time the other women at the village had been to the well. She did not want to be stared at, mocked, and ridiculed. But, the woman at the well is lucky in her encounter with Jesus. Jesus seeks out the lost and the lonely. He does not wait for the outcasts to come to him - he actively seeks them out. Even though Jews and Samaritans were not supposed to even talk to one another, Jesus engages this Samaritan woman in conversation. He meets her in her reality. Jesus talks to her about life giving water, water that will quench her thirst. We cannot even begin to imagine the thirst she has in her life. The thirst to be included into her community. The thirst to be accepted and loved. The thirst to be whole and healed. The thirst to be an active member of the community again, so she does not have to around hiding and avoiding people. She believed in Jesus. She believed in Jesus so strongly and passionately that she brought the other members of the village back to come and see for themselves. The very people who had shunned her and marginalized her. All of us have thirst in our lives. All of us can have that thirst satisfied by Jesus.
As I thought about the Samaritan woman, how she not only was converted and radically transformed by Jesus, she took her faith and became an evangelizer of the Gospel to others. Recently, I got back from a conference at the University of Notre Dame that explored the topic of evangelization of how the laity and the ordained are all co-responsible in that task of evangelizing others and building up the kingdom of God here on earth. As I thought of the Samaritan woman, I thought of two women I heard speak at the conference.
Sister Therese Marie was a Sister of Life, an order of religious sisters founded by Carinal O’Connor of New York in 1991. He thought about his witness of the Dachau concentration camp in Germany during World War II and the culture of death present in the West during the later part of the 20th century. This weighed on his heart and on his prayers, which prompted him to found a community of women who would give them themselves fully to the protection and enhancement of the sacredness of every human life, beginning with the most vulnerable - the unborn. Sister Therese Marie spoke about how they help women who are thinking about an abortion, how they bring healing into the lives of women who have had an abortion, of how this ministry is rooted in the Eucharist and in prayer, and how they collaborate with many lay men and women in their ministry. The joy with which she spoke about her ministry truly touched my heart.
Another woman who spoke at the conference was Margaret Pfeil, a professor of moral theology and Christian ethics at the University of Notre Dame. She is also the founder of the Peter Claver Catholic Worker House in South Bend, Indiana, which was founded 18 years ago. She talked about the outreach programs that they have at the Catholic Worker and how the peace work and social justice work of Dorothy Day, the founder of the Catholic Worker movement, gives them inspiration in their ministry and service of feeding and sheltering the homeless and performing other works of mercy.
Like the Samaritan woman who out of the lived reality of her faith and her conversion to Christ, Sister Therese Marie and Professor Margaret Pfeil use their faith experiences and their relationship with Christ to reach out to others. Both of these remarkable ladies feel the call from God to serve him and to serve their brothers and sisters in a very particular way. Both of them respond to that call out of their faith, just like the Samaritan woman. Like these women, we too are to bring the Gospel message to others out of the reality of our lives.
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