When the Samaritan woman encountered Jesus at the well, asking her for a drink from the waters of the well, the Lord’s words to her were transformative: “If you knew the gift of God, and who it is that is saying to you ‘Give me a drink,’ you would have asked him, and he would have given you living water.” She was a broken woman, longing for healing waters, which Jesus offered: “The water that I will give will become a spring of water gushing up to eternal life” (John 4:7-15). This theme of living waters runs deeply in the biblical tradition. The Israelites thirsted in the desert and grumbled about it to Moses, who struck a rock, from which water flowed to slake their thirst (Exodus 17). The Prophet Jeremiah speaks of God as “the fountain of living water” (Jeremiah 2:13). The metaphor of living waters sustaining the People of God on their journey through a desert, harsh and unforgiving, has long been one of the great Lenten themes of our tradition.

In our Lenten day of reflection, we shall reflect upon these ancient themes in relation to our own faith journey. Using both Scripture and selected poetry from David Whyte’s collection, Where Many Rivers Meet, we shall examine our own thirst in relation to the thirst of others. We shall look at how, in our faith journey, we seek and find those living waters in our desert which alone can slake our deepest thirst and we will open our hearts to see how we ourselves can be living waters for the healing of others.

Join us on Ash Wednesday (10 am-4 pm) March 5 at St. Columba’s, where through presentations, solitude, group sharing, and the celebration of the Eucharist with the distribution of ashes, we will slake our thirst in the wilderness by drinking of Christ’s living waters.