John 4:9
The Samaritan woman said to [Jesus], ‘How is it that you, a Jew, ask a
drink of me, a woman of Samaria?’ (Jews do not share things in common with
Samaritans.)
I’ve been reading and
reflecting in the Lenten devotions and for the Adult Confirmation Class about
what signs (sacraments) mark us or what encounters help us see how we are
connected to a community or congregation. What provides us with a sense of
belonging, of responsibility towards our community and who decides or gets to
decide? In John’s Gospel, Jesus encounters the Samaritan woman at Jacob’s well,
we are told, in part because of the route he was obliged to take to get back to
Galilee from Judea. “But he had to go through Samaria.” Their encounter is cast
as improbable, but the conversation Jesus startles her into effectively
converts her. I think all of us have at some point in our lives been surprised
by someone speaking to us or even inviting us to do something or attend some
event (social or professional) that we maybe don’t feel we should be invited to.
When that has happened we might have wondered why we were selected. You got the
wrong guy, we want to say. We might even accept whatever the invitation is even
as deep down we suspect that whoever invited us must not really know who we
are. It can be unsettling to rethink our understanding of who we “share things
in common with.”
The Samaritan woman at
the well was open to such rethinking, in part because she was thirsty, but
sometimes we don’t make such openings because we feel so certain in our ways. Once
when I was about 12 my four younger siblings and I were all packed in the
family station wagon on a routine shopping errand with my mom that took us past
a public elementary school (not our school). This particular time as we drove
past the school my youngest sister wondered aloud (to all of us) why it was
that none of us attended that school to which another sister who was probably
about 8 then promptly and knowingly (smugly?) replied as if it were the most
obvious thing under the sun, “Because we’re CATHOLIC … not public.” I was old enough to think that my
sister’s logic was funny, cute even, but I didn’t think much more of it and I
don’t recall if my mother even heard the original question or if any of us
tried to provide an alternative explanation. I think I knew Catholic wasn’t the
opposite of public …really… but given that our neighborhood church and school,
Our Lady Star of the Sea (OLSOS), was so close to home (3 blocks away) and the
only church and school in my neighborhood, it sometimes felt like my family and
friends, we all belonged to OLSOS/the
Catholic church and we did not share things in common with people outside that
group (read: the “public” people), even if matters weren’t nearly as proscribed
as they were for Jews and Samaritans.
I hadn’t thought about
that story and my sister’s early confusion about Catholic versus public in a
long time, but recently was prompted to reflect on the faith tradition that
shaped me as a child and this moment in the family car came to mind. It seemed
emblematic of our inability to conceive of the possibility that these worlds
might meet and even blur. We were confident that they did not. Where did that
sureness, this absolute certainty come from? And more urgently for me now and
in this season of Lent, what does understanding yourself and your community as
a distinct faith tradition or
denomination mean? I have been using the term “post-denominational” for a while
to describe myself, for better, for worse, but then I wonder, if that is
(still) accurate, especially as I think of how I want to teach my own children
and why we bring them to St. Francis to learn and be raised in a faith
community. How have we been invited in? How do we invite others to be part of
our community? In conversation during
the Confirmation Class this past Sunday, Rich said something about how the
Episcopal Church must be “radically hospitable” (if I’m remembering this
correctly) and that phrase struck me and has stuck with me. I shy away from
evangelizing or proselytizing, but I welcome the opportunity, the challenge of
being radically hospitable.
-
Kathleen Suchenski
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