I am amazed at the plethora of options for drinking water available these days, and I will confess that I have been trying out different brands in an attempt to find the one that will truly satisfy my taste and achieve a healthy hydration. I’ve ventured into the world of flavored, fruit-infused, ultra-filtered, straight-from-the-mountain-spring, sparkling, lightly-sweetened, distilled, purified, alkaline, and more. I’ve tried to balance my desire for flavor with the plain necessity of plain old H20 in order to live. To contextualize this in the current season of Lent, I can fast from food, but I must have water to survive and do a decent job of fasting and “Lenting.” Biologists tell us that our bodies are made up of 60 percent water, and therefore without water, we will die.
In Sunday’s Gospel, Jesus meets the woman at the well. The story can be summed up this way: she seeks water, she meets Jesus of whom she has heard some marvelous things, Jesus offers her “living” water; she is surprised at how much Jesus knows about her less-than-morally-sound life, she is intrigued (not entirely convinced), yet wonders if Jesus is the Christ.
Like so many moments in the Gospel – and in our own stories – Jesus offers us life-giving water (i.e., a life of grace with Him) no matter what we are like when we show up at the well. An encounter with Christ is a moment of mercy with an offer to refresh our parched and weary souls and truly live.
May we find in our Lenten desert the water we need to walk toward Easter. May we find in our prayer, the Christ whose thirst on the Cross was never satisfied, but who offers us a flood of mercy and love so that we may live forever.
Lenten blessings,
Welcome to the Saint Aloysius! Our parish was founded in 1896 to serve the Catholic families that were settling in the greater New Canaan area.