Living water

I don’t know if any of you are reading the daily Lenten devotions from Episcopal Relief and Development – we’ve got a link for them in our weekly email – but one from this week caught my attention. The writer is an Episcopal nun, Sr Monica Clare, who is superior of an order in New Jersey where I used to take parish retreats. She wrote about her prayer life upon entering the order at the age of 46, feeling like she was already very close to God and proficient at prayer. She tells her novice director that she doesn’t need to learn any new ways to pray. Her novice director tells her to think again. So she is required to take further classes in prayer, and learns that there are infinite ways of praying. She writes,

…the closeness I [had] felt with God was fairly superficial. The years I have spent in prayer at the Convent have deepened that closeness and taught me that there is no limit to the depths of a relationship with God. I could pray for a lifetime and still grow closer every day… God’s love is infinite, and we can journey into that love, closer and closer, for eternity.

That gives us a great place to start for today’s exploration of Centering Prayer, a kind of contemplative prayer that lets us dwell in that infinite love of God. It’s a way of drinking deeply from the well of living water. Sr Monica Clare’s words reminded me of the gospel story for today, where Jesus encounters a woman at a well, a woman who already seems to think she knows all there is to know about water and thirst. But Jesus leads her into so much more.

Jesus is sitting at the well, resting, when the Samaritan woman comes along. She’s coming like she comes every day, because that’s the place you get water, and you need water to cook and clean and drink and live by. I once saw a animated short film called ‘Water Path for a Fish,’ where a boy tries to save a goldfish he finds swimming in a puddle. It is night and the whole town is in bed, but a sudden noise – water flowing – wakes them all up. Everyone on the street grabs their bucket or jar or pitcher and races to the village well, whose water spigots have just turned on, and in the dark, they cluster around to fill up their vessels before the water turns off again. (Meanwhile, the goldfish does manage to save itself by jumping from jar to pitcher to bucket to escape a cat, so don’t worry about that.) The need for water is the backdrop to the whole story – no matter the hour of the night, the whole thirsty town will turn out to get the water they need.

That’s the need the Samaritan woman has, there in the heat of the day in a desert climate. She needs water, and has trekked out to get it – as women in parts of the world today still must trek for miles to get clean water. It may be that she’s there at the well at a time when other women wouldn’t have been, but it may not be that complicated – maybe she just needs water for some reason, and so she’s there to get it. And then a strange man begins to chat her up, a taboo act, particularly because he is a Jew and she is a Samaritan and their people have long been at odds. But she needs the water too much to flee, and besides, she’s not the fleeing type. And it’s only after a fair bit of back-and-forth that she begins to realize that the water he’s offering her is not the water in the well she comes for every day, the water of daily existence. He’s offering her water for her real thirst, the thirst in her heart and soul for God. And when she realizes that, she loses her cool, abandons her water jar, and runs off to tell the village of this deeper, truer nourishment on offer right here in their town. And they listen to her and come running too, and they come to believe and to drink the water Jesus has for them.

That water is what satisfies us when nothing else can. It is what sustains us in the desert journey. It is what we need to really live. Yet we will go so long without it even so. It is easy to come to church regularly, be part of a Christian community, even be part of the ordained clergy, without really drinking the water. Easy until it isn’t at all anymore, and suddenly there you are, gasping like a fish out of water.

I can tell you I’ve had those times – long stretches in my life and ministry when I didn’t really seem to have time for prayer every day. When my day could be filled with getting things done and being productive and useful, but without really connecting to God as the reason why I was doing it. It started to change several years back when my previous bishop, talking to a group of us clergy, made it clear that she expected us to be saying the Daily Office in our personal prayer time. I still remember her double take as she looked at us all, staring back at her with a mixture of guilt and confusion on our faces, gasping like fish, and she said again, more firmly, You NEED to be saying the Daily Office. It is the prayer of the church. Understand? We nodded. I went home and restarted the next day the practice I had abandoned years before. It was the best episcopal reprimand I’ve ever received.

And I will pass that reprimand on to you. You NEED to be praying and reading the Bible. It is what sustains you through the dark times and the stressful times and the confusing times. When our parents or spouses or loved ones are sick and dying; when we are upset and angry at the state of our nation and government; when we are so stressed and busy and crazed in our daily schedule that we scarcely have time even to breathe – we need to be praying even more.

Many of the ways we learn to pray involve us talking – sharing with God our needs, our thanksgivings, our hopes and fears, with words that come from a book or just spontaneously from our hearts. But we also need prayer that allows us to listen in silence. Imagine a friendship where we talked all the time, and never listened to our friend – it would get exhausting for both of us. Centering Prayer is a way to sit in silence and receive what our friend wants to give us.

But that can be hard to do. When we sit in silence we may not hear anything very clearly. Our mind can start to wander, we can think of things we should be doing, we can feel like we’re wasting our time. So it helps to have some structure for how to listen, and ways to stay focused. ‘Contemplative prayer’ is a term that includes lots of methods for prayer that help focus us so we can be quiet and listen. It might include walking, or looking at art, or using prayer beads, or listening to music, ways to focus our attention and be still. Centering Prayer is one method of that contemplative prayer. It uses a ‘sacred word’ – like what in Eastern meditation is called a mantra – to focus the restless part of our brain, our ‘monkey mind.’ That allows the deeper parts of our soul to be quiet, and rest, and listen. It’s structured, so that we start and end in a particular way and keep the time we’ve set to pray. So it begins to open our hearts in a new way.

Sometimes people hear or feel something right away when they begin to pray this way. Sometimes nothing seems to happen. But our spiritual ancestors teach that whether we do or don’t ‘feel’ anything in a prayer session is no sure sign of its ‘working.’ One monk talks about centering prayer as anesthesia that allows the surgeon to do the healing work – we’re not aware at the time of what God is doing, but later we become aware of what has healed and changed in us. It may feel awkward at first. But it’s a way worth trying, and returning to from time to time to try again. One way or another it’s always good to give God a chance to get a word in edgewise.

Because going along in life without that living water – going along sustained only by friendly chat and getting work done – even with stepping into church a few times a month and listening to a sermon – it’s enough to keep you existing, perhaps, like the little bit of water required to keep the goldfish alive, like the bucket of water the Samaritan woman draws every day. But it’s not enough to give you life – which is why Jesus calls it living water, water we need to be truly living. And it’s not enough to get you through the long dry desert times of life. You need to be drinking from the true well to be ready for those times. We need that true well that is God; we drink from it by being in relationship with God, showing up and praying and listening to hear God’s word of love for you. It requires that we follow the discipline of being present. There’s no quick way around it.

We follow this pilgrim way of Lent every year to remind ourselves of our thirst – to recognize that we have been surviving on meager rations, a barely adequate diet for our souls, and we are starving. Life will teach us this from time to time anyway; Lent is the annual regular reminder, the spiritual checkup. The letter to the Romans says, God's love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us. Jesus says, the water that I will give will become in them a spring of water gushing up to eternal life. Water that is gushing and pouring and plenty and abundant and never fails, water for living. It is time for us to remember to drink from that well, and drink deeply. We need it for ourselves; the world needs it of us. This water will never run out. Thanks be to God.