Our Lady and the way of the Bride
How Mary, the woman at the well, and the pursuit of a life of purity in Christ reveal the feminine genius
I have espoused you to one husband, that I may present you as a chaste virgin to Christ.
—2 Cor 11:2
As the ark that is Milwaukee is blanketed with the beautiful stillness of a light (?) snowfall, we turn to Our Lady for a reflection on the power of the feminine genius. What of Our Lady can we possibly emulate amidst our sinfulness and a world mired in darkness? Purity. And not just in ordering our lives towards chastity, as the Angelic Doctor St. Thomas Aquinas would discuss in his Summa Theologia, but also in what he describes as the essence of chastity which consists primarily in charity and which unites the human mind to God. What does that actually look like? Perhaps not what we may expect. While it may very well entail religious or consecrated life in the world, there is so much more here for us all, and the Lord desires to meet us exactly where we are right now. Our Lord’s encounter with the woman at the well helps illuminate this paradigm.
It is the priesthood, an office for ordained men acting in the person of Christ, that is sent into the world to baptize others in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, and who is also commissioned by Christ to obtain for His people the Bread from Heaven, such that they may reap what their fathers before them had sown – the souls for which our Lord thirsts. For this reason, Christ said the harvest is plentiful but the laborers are few (Matthew 9:37).
But what of woman’s proper role in the divine economy? Woman, in all her grace and receptivity, is not concerned with harvesting the wheat of the field but with embodying in the person of Our Lady the purity gifted to her by the living water of Baptism and the Holy Spirit. We need look no further than the Lord’s encounter with the woman of Samaria at the well to understand this, for just as man is commissioned to go forth to obtain his daily bread, so does woman encounter our Lord most unexpectedly amidst the seemingly mundane places in her life: carrying her proverbial water jar in the sixth hour of the day when no one else is present but the Lord Himself.
Our Lady herself received as a result of her purity the Word Incarnate in her fiat in Nazareth, thus becoming the human vessel and well bearing the living water that is Christ. So too at the seemingly mundane well of woman’s daily activity does the very Word Incarnate sit and await woman’s arrival (John 4:6) such that she too may receive in purity the living water that is Christ.
“Give me your desires and I will give you myself”
Wearied as our Lord is from His journey (John 4:6), He awaits woman to encounter Him and asks of her that which alone satisfies His weariness: Give me water to drink (John 4:7), that is, “give me your desires, and I will give you myself”. For just as everyone who drinks of this water will thirst again (John 4:13), so will she who drinks from the wellspring of eternal life never thirst, for our Lord indeed says, I would feed you with the finest of the wheat, and with honey from the rock I would satisfy you (Psalm 81:16).
Indeed, the woman of Samaria comes to the well prepared to draw water (John 4:7) as an empty vessel who returns with thirst to the deep well in the sixth hour of the day (John 4:11). It was in encountering our Lord in this place of great thirst the woman is invited to receive her salvation: she bares the empty vessel of her impure soul to meet Christ the living water, who, having made of Himself an empty vessel who had nothing to draw with (John 4:11) except His desire to satisfy His burning love for her soul, might in return bear with even greater thirst His desire for her love on His Cross. For this reason did he say, I thirst (John 19:28).
In this encounter, woman must simply receive the Lord’s living water, that is, to accept her past and all its shame and impurity, for our Lord personally invites her thus: Go, call your husband and come here (John 4:16). The woman, in humility and obedience, speaks truly in her reply that she has no husband, for no man can satisfy her except He who can show her all things (John 4:25) and speak to her heart of all the things she had ever done (John 4:29).
Indeed, it is here in accepting the Lord’s call to purity that woman leaves behind the labors of her empty water jar and returns to the city from which she came, giving testimony and converting many on account of her word (John 4:39). Thus also does the woman’s labor, transformed through love and purity in the Lord, water the eternal seed which is sown in the hearts of those she encounters – the field that is white for harvest (John 4:35) by the Lord’s laborers.
In her witness of purity woman thus mirrors Our Lady, she who at Cana invites us to imbibe in the water which is transformed through purity into the eternal wine of joy that is Christ. Furthermore, Our Lord foreshadows woman’s role in time to come as He says, woman, believe me, the hour is coming when neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem will you worship the Father (John 4:21), taken to mean, “you will worship in Spirit and truth”, that is, a life of purity in the white field of wheat awaiting the final harvest.
Thus it is written:
Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.
—Matthew 5:8
Aeterna flamma caritatis incendit in silentio.