The story of the woman at the well 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 for her household after the other women in the village had been to the well and had gone home. She did not want to be mocked and ridiculed. She is lucky to have this encounter with Jesus.
We know that Jesus always seeks out the lost and the lonely. He does not wait for the outcasts to come to him, but rather, he actively seeks them out. Even though Jews and Samaritans were not supposed to even talk to one another, Jesus engages the Samaritan woman in conversation. He meets her in her reality.
Jesus talks to her about life giving water that will quench her thirst. We cannot even begin to imagine the thirst she has in her life. 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 hide and avoid the other villagers. The woman at the well believed in Jesus so strongly and so passionately that she brought the other members of the village back to come and see for themselves, the very people who had 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. A few years ago, right before the pandemic started, I attended a conference at the University of Notre Dame that explored the topic of evangelization, of how the laity and the ordained should be co-responsible in that task of evangelizing others and building up the kingdom of God. As I thought of the Samaritan woman at the well in today’s Gospel, I thought of two women I heard speak at that conference.
Sister Therese Marie is a Sister of Life, a member of an order of religious sisters founded by Carinal O’Connor of New York in 1991. Cardinal O’Connor thought about his visit to 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 religious sisters who would give themselves fully to the enhancement of the sacredness of human life, beginning with the most vulnerable; the unborn. Sister Therese Marie of the Sisters of Life spoke at the conference of how her religious community helps 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 this 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 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 at that Catholic Worker home, how the social justice work of this movement’s founder, Dorothy Day, gives them inspiration in their ministry and their service of feeding and sheltering the homeless.
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 have felt the call from God to serve him and to serve their brothers and sisters in a very particular way. Both of them responded 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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