Monday, March 12, 2012

John 4

The Woman of Samaria

I've written so much about her (and even a little from her perspective before), but I'm strangely very nervous about this (which is silly considering I can always rewrite). However, I'm fairly pleased with how the Widow of Zarephath turned out the past two days, so I'm just going to go with that.

WOMAN OF SAMARIA

I don't remember when I started going to the well at midday. I slept in one morning, and although the water was hot and unpleasant when I brought it home, the trip had been so much easier. So much easier than enduring the gaggle of women who all came before dawn so they could get their jars of water home while it was still cool. Before the sun rose and baked everything to a crisp.

I had hated the gaggle for so long, for so many reasons, I couldn't even tell you how many burdens it eased from my shoulders to avoid the pre-dawn gathering. When I was young and unmarried and they clucked and clucked speculating on who I would marry. Unsure how to place me in the rankings until then. I was pretty, so I might land a rich man and be entitled to exercise grudges, but I was poor, so there was no need to show any kind of peremptory deference. Then it was all giggles and snickers when I was engaged, pestering and speculation about when I would be pregnant almost before I was married, and unending sympathy, offhand and genuine, when my first husband died.

With the second wedding there was more gossip than bustle about me, but they were approving. A young woman should have the chance to be a mother. Less sympathetic when he died. My third marriage was a divorce, and that's when half the talk became whispers in ears and behind hands. By the fourth, whom I never actually married though I began to claim I did, I was like some attraction, some foreign seller of wonders barking in the streets of Jerusalem. I swear I saw money exchanged on the fifth. By then they were shunning me. The glares and lectures had died away into contempt and silence.

At first I was almost glad - they were seeing me, at last, not defining me on the man I was with. I admit I took a perverse pleasure in how I could silence them, cut through the crowd and take my water quickly because no one wanted me there. But such things lose their charm quickly. Soon all you see is what they intended: the rejection. There was no support when my fifth husband died. I think he was, after all the mess, the love of my life. I certainly needed the gaggle of women clucking and cooing more than I had with my first bittersweet marriage. No support from the women, at least. That was how I ended up in the arms of the man who kept me in his house "joking" that he did not dare make an honest woman of me, lest it unleash a plague of locusts.

So when I saw a figure silhouetted against the well, my heart grew weary and my steps grew heavy. It had been some time that I had had to endure a hostile stare to get a drink of water.

I was more confused than anything else when I drew close enough to see it was a man. Some woman must be sick, sent her son, which would explain why he had waited until noon. Then I saw he was a Jew and my heart rose. A stranger. And I thought, so fleetingly, let him not leer at me. Let him be kind because he does not know he is addressing the fallen woman, the black widow of Samaria. A small dose of human civility - from someone who would never see me naked - would do wonders for my heart, I remember thinking.

I am shocked to realize now what a small measure of grace I would have settle for. What an insignificant blessing I would have cradled like salvation itself - which is what He came to offer me instead.