Water, Water Everywhere

On the afternoon of February 5th, I looked out my window and saw a crowd of construction workers out on Arden Way by the tower entrance to our church. Intrigued, I went to check things out and saw a small geyser erupting where the sidewalk had been only a few days before. A miraculous spring? Lourdes in Arden Arcade? Moses striking the rock in the desert? 

Alas, something much more prosaic. A jackhammer happened on an undiscovered pipe, and pretty soon a small lake formed. The county called the water department, valves were opened and closed to no avail except that several boxes in our sprinkler system around the school blew open, and there was a belching flow from our irrigation well housed at the back of parish property. A few hours later, the broken main was capped, air was flushed from the pipes, and things more or less got back to normal. Alas, no miracles, just hydraulics. 

This occurrence made me think of one of my favorite shrines in Rome, the chapel of the Madonna del Pozzo, Our Lady of the Well, in a little church next to the main post office. In 1256, the well on that site in the stables of a cardinal named Pietro Capocci overflowed, and floating atop the waters was an image of the Virgin Mary painted on a stone panel. The stable boys tried to remove it, but it darted away from them “like a fish.” Finally, the cardinal was called, he said a prayer, waded in and retrieved the image and the waters ebbed. To this day you can go into the chapel, venerate the image, and having made an appropriate offering, take a shot glass of water from that same well off a zinc-topped communion rail. The waters are said to have curative powers, and I’ll admit that my trick shoulder felt better, at least for a while, after downing a couple of sips. 

All of which is some distance from today’s gospel story of a thirsty Jesus at Jacob’s well that was tended by an oft-married and heretical Samaritan woman. Jesus rested there in enemy territory, and he didn’t shun her. He engaged that unlikely interlocutor in a discourse about springs of living water, the promise of eternal life, and the need to hear God’s word and act upon it. Something like living water welled up inside her heart. She went to her townsfolk and convinced them to listen to Jesus, who stayed a while with them and shared his good news. 

Let’s pray that in this dry and dangerous season of war and violence that the waters of hope and peace might flow again in our world and in our hearts that so thirst for them.

Blessings,