Circling the water of life

I don’t know when I got the blank postcard or who gave it to me, but for years I’ve used it as a bookmark. The sculpture on the front is striking. Two figures, one seated, one standing, are joined at the feet and lean towards each other. Together, they hold an overflowing basin of water, their hands touching. Their faces are close and their expressions tender, each needing something while offering something, too. Around the base of the fountain, there are words from the Gospel of John: “Jesus said, ‘The water that I shall give will be an inner spring always welling up for eternal life’” (Jn 4:14).

This summer, I saw the sculpture face to face.

I was visiting the English city of Chester and found it in the cathedral’s cloister garden. In the early 1990s, Stephen Broadbent was commissioned to create a fountain as part of the 900th anniversary celebrations that commemorated the presence of a church on the site. The original church was a Benedictine Abbey founded by the nephew of William the Conqueror in 1092, and the well that supplied the monks with water is the source for the modern fountain. Which makes it a beautifully fitting location for a modern retelling of Jesus’ encounter with the Samaritan woman.

Mirrored thirst

Often we use this story to talk about how Jesus breaks down boundaries. By asking the Samaritan woman for water, Jesus shows how God’s love reaches beyond social stereotypes. Walking around this sculpture, I saw something more.

Jesus looks tired and thirsty. The woman is strong but vulnerable, too. Both come to the well needing something. They need each other. Jesus’s humanity is here in his thirst, and the woman whose past is a burden, needs both to be seen and to give. This is a moment of grace.

The two figures hold the fountain’s bowl between them, a bowl which is always full and always overflowing. Water runs down his arms. Her fingers, too, are wet.

I saw how the water that surrounds them reflects and mirrors their forms just as Jesus’ thirst and the woman’s need mirror each other. I saw the connecting space between their faces filled with the intensity of love between them. Both look back to Jacob as an ancestor, and in their encounter – this family meeting across the divide – you can see the sacred source of love healing humanity’s longing with mystery, tenderness and interconnection.

Penny prayers

Something else surprised me: there were coins in the fountain. But then that’s what we do and have done for millennia. All over the world, there are coins in holy wells and sacred ponds, shopping mall fountains and civic pools. Superstition or ancient practice? Or both? Maybe it’s natural to want to leave something of value in a place of beauty and what is more beautiful than water? So I wonder about Jacob’s well. I wonder what wish or prayer the Samaritan woman dropped there, its answer rippling out in wider and wider circles as we repeat her story and remember her meeting with Jesus.