Patiently Impatient? Lyn G. Brakeman, Spiritual Lemons, 2023.03.12

Some years back my priest-spouse, Dick Simeone, and I performed a dialogue homily using a script I’d written about a midrashic (interpretative) conversation between Jesus and a Woman from Samaria (John 4). In our drama, these two protagonists meet at the well to which she is coming to draw water, and Jesus, an inimical intruder on her territory, shows up and rudely demands that she give him a drink from her well. She refuses, thinking him arrogant. He confronts her with a few rude questions about her sexual behavior, her bad rep. What business is that of his? Hmph. 

The gospel writer, John, goes on to proclaim that Jesus forgives her, gives her “magic” water, and preaches about eternal life. In our dramatization, however, the woman stands her ground; Jesus sasses back but he listens; and we all wonder who converts whom in the story? Is this a story about her bad rep (sin) or her bad rap (sexism)?  Is it about the cultural/religious enmity between Samaritans and Jews? Is it about the humanity of Jesus? Or is it about ancient feminism emergent?  

Familiar, right? What’s a woman to do? What’s a Jew to do? What’s an immigrant to do? What’s a man on a sacred mission to do? How do we heal our tug-of-war politics in church and state? How do we reconcile one with another? Perhaps we have to let go of “winning” or being “right.” “Shaming” or being “wrong.” What?

*  *  *  *

Talk. Get honest. Allow what we think with our minds, what we feel in our hearts, and what we do with our bodies to align—yes align. 

Such honesty is reached through the doorway of grief and loss. We get vulnerable about our fears and our own dishonesties, failures, dreams, truths we do not want to hear, unhealed wounds and memories. “We” means all of us in this drama called Life, with whatever biases we hold, according to whatever religion, culture, or nation we hallow, and through whatever prayers we pray.  

*  *  *  *

I remember a very anxious young client to whom, after much back-and-forth/dead-end counseling, I said: “In your vulnerability is your power.” She hopped up, ran out and slammed the door. I never saw her again. Later I heard she got a job. 

What about my own frustrated passion to liberate gender from the gender harness?  I keep talking about it. I read wise books. I “zoom” with women friends. I blog. I make friends. I talk with my spouse. I tell God to soften hearts hardened by fear. I know it’s not all my fault or my responsibility. I also know it matters. I feel impatient. I keep on writing. Then I remember biblical heroes like Jesus and the Samaritan woman who kept on being patiently impatient.  

2020.03.22 The Good Samaritan and the Good Jew—In Conversation

People on planet earth in 2020 are arrested, quarantined because of a viral pandemic that is spread by human contact. We are to avoid each other when we need each other most. The virus, COVID-19, is particularly life-threatening to people over sixty, people with compromised immune systems, heart or lung disease, the homeless, and the poor.

How long, Lord? We are prescribed certain protective behaviors, yet there is no guarantee. We are told to avoid human contact and physically isolate. If we are obedient to all this, will we stay healthy? For how long?  We fear and we hope.

My own feeling is one of unsettledness, almost like being suspended between nothing and nothing, trapped like a spider in an intricate web of fear and hope, and I don’t know which thread to grab onto and trust. Which to choose, given that there is no definitive timeline?

Fear and hope interlock.

Is there a biblical story like this, a story in which fear and hope interlock? What popped into my mind was a story in John’s gospel in which two people, a Samaritan and a Jew, meet at an ancient sacred site, Jacob’s well. Centuries of cultural/religious prejudice about the enmity between Samaritans and Jews prescribed what each should do. Instead these two have a conversation.

You might expect me to say that the Samaritan was the one with fear, she being a woman of dubious reputation, having had several husbands and who knows what else, and Jesus was the righteous one who brought hope and all thing good. I would suggest however that if we freeze the scenario and look into it with open hearts we see two human beings, strangers, each with a need and a decision to make, each with fear and hope battling in their hearts.

Jesus was a traveling evangelist with a mission who had met with hostility because he had baptized more people than his cousin John the Baptizer. Enter sibling rivalry, even if it wasn’t true. Jesus decided to return to his home territory of Galilee. To do so he had to pass through Samaria— enemy territory. It was a long journey on foot, it was midday, and he was tired, sweaty, and most of all thirsty. There was the well of Jacob and his sons. Jesus knew the tradition of the ancients who came to worship at this well and of the hostilities that had evolved about land in Israel. Still, he was thirsty, and he had no bucket.

The woman knew all about history and her own situation. She was alone. She came to draw water. Jesus presented a challenge when he asked her to draw water and give him a drink. It could be risky. The wise thing to do would be to flee, but then she needed to fetch water, and she had something he needed. So she boldly engaged him in a conversation, a challenge really. “How can you a Jew ask a drink of me, a Samaritan? “ 

Why does she say yes, and why does he pursue the conversation? Leaving aside the temptation to project our own religious or gender biases, or to give Jesus the Christian edge, because John inserted a small and lovely homily about living waters, an obvious add-on. I want to stay with the two people. Jesus and the Samaritan woman stood on equal ground, each with something to say, each with a need and a choice to make, each with some fear and each with some hope.

Why does she say yes to an enemy, and why risk a whole conversation? I don’t think it was just because he magically knew all about her reputation and history; nor was it because she spotted her next potential husband; nor was it because he offered a new spirituality of living water for her soul. I think she gave him what he needed, because she had a bucket, because he did not condemn her, and because she had a warm heart.

Why did Jesus ask something of her, an enemy?  I do not think it was because he spotted an opportunity to convert her or make her into the latest greatest evangelist for his proclamation, nor because there was any sexual attraction. I think he asked because he was thirsty, she had a bucket, and because he saw her warm heart.

Together they made something new. In them we see hope and fear interlock. Can we do likewise in this time of hope and fear?

2017.03.19 The Loveliness of the Sow

"To me, poetry is somebody standing up, so to speak, and saying, with as little concealment as possible, what it is for him or her to be on earth at this moment."

Contemporary American poet Galway Kinnell, born in 1927 in Providence, R.I., said this. Kinnell, I first surmised, was Irish—I suppose because of the name Galway, which makes me think of the virtuoso flutist James Galway who is Irish, from Belfast, and sometimes know as “the man with the golden flute.”  Although our Kinnell was a New Englander, ending up in Vermont, where he died in Sheffield in 2015, and in which he was Poet Laureate from 1989-1993.

Kinnell also said: “Never mind. The self is the least of it. Let our scars fall in love.”


The quote about poetry being someone standing up and saying what it is for him or her to be on earth at this moment brought to mind the biblical story (John 4:5-42) about Jesus and the Samaritan woman at the town pump, so to speak. Jews and Samaritans were arch rivals, having very distinct religious practices. Nevertheless, the Jew and the Samaritan in this biblical story, made a kind of poetry with their theological conversation—debate really.

Jesus stood up with little concealment before a woman from whom he wanted a drink of well water. To her, a foreigner, a divorcée many times over, or perhaps a widow, and a woman whose religion and ethnicity the Jews did not countenance, Jesus revealed who he was on earth at that moment: the Christ of God with access to Eternal Life aka, “living waters,” and the slaking of all thirst forever.

The woman, for her part, likewise stood up with no concealment before Jesus in total honesty about her situation—not precisely sinful by today’s standards, but not exactly stable either, being on her sixth intimate relationship, this time with a man not her husband. Yet she was truthful, open, and theologically astute in her perceptions of this Jew. Jesus took due note.

And the poet takes due note of the loveliness of one of the most maligned creatures in God’s array of critters: the sow. St Francis blessed and beheld ever living thing as sacred. So must we.


Saint Francis And The Sow

The bud
stands for all things,
even for those things that don't flower,
for everything flowers, from within, of self-blessing;
though sometimes it is necessary
to reteach a thing its loveliness,
to put a hand on its brow
of the flower
and retell it in words and in touch
it is lovely
until it flowers again from within, of self-blessing;
as Saint Francis
put his hand on the creased forehead
of the sow, and told her in words and in touch
blessings of earth on the sow, and the sow
began remembering all down her thick length,
from the earthen snout all the way
through the fodder and slops to the spiritual curl of the tail,
from the hard spininess spiked out from the spine
down through the great broken heart
to the blue milken dreaminess spurting and shuddering
from the fourteen teats into the fourteen mouths sucking and blowing beneath
them:
the long, perfect loveliness of sow.

© 1980 by Galway Kinnell