This week’s Gospel story is many-sided, as you will see. The woman at the well. But what catches me is the part about water soothing our thirst.

Jesus asks the woman to draw some delicious well-water for him to drink. She hesitates. She is Samaritan—a people at odds with the Israelites. But apparently she sees his need, and gives water to him.

He says he will put right inside her a flowing fountain of such water. It will slake her thirst forever!

I remember bicycling with a friend, Gerry Stockhausen, SJ, out in the countryside on a very hot day. We had not counted on one particular hill that would continue to rise up before us, a very long, unremitting one. We worked and worked and worked and at last achieved the top.

Hurray!

But the heat and humidity had parched us, remarkably so. Off to the left stood a farmhouse or residence of some kind. Hey, why not go ask for a drink of water?

… But the house was at the top of its own hill, and we saw four hundred steps leading up to it. Ok not four hundred, but very many. How could we put ourselves through another Olympic ordeal and mount steep stairs in order to subject some innocent citizen to our begging?

Well, we clambered up, knocked at the door and received greetings from a most gracious lady who could think of nothing more delightful than to bring us each a big glass of cool, wet water. Aaaaahhhhhh. Savor it. Be refreshed. Then, thanks, and off and away. Nothing else in this world could have tasted so delicious and so satisfying. We were craving what our bodies ached for, and got such a kindly answer.

Nevertheless, it seems that human beings have a thirst for something even more profound than such a welcome drenching. As St. Paul puts it, this week in the Second Reading, we thirst for “the love poured forth from God in Jesus through the Holy Spirit.” Love. This is our primordial need, very like the need for water. It is “a God-sized hole” within us, a yearning for the greatest love there is.

Often you and I use other lesser things to try and satisfy this great need—food, work, looks, accomplishment, other persons, sex, drink, and so on. Each of these is good in itself. Yet taken to excess all of them lose their importance. They hum that famous line, “Is that all there is?” even at their very best.

We are each built in such a way that we die without real love. Our small selves have been fitted with a soul that opens wide to love and especially to the greatest love of all, God’s.

We can open up to this depth-center within us. Careful, patient steps will get us there—Lenten quiet, self-denial, re-fitting of our lives, peace within our losses—these we can have. We can cycle our way to the top of our life’s hill, can clamber up our own endless steps, and can get ourselves to knock on Christ’s door and wait.

Wait.

Will someone answer?

       Will someone give us “a spring of water welling up to eternal life”?

Wait.

Wait.