The Kitchen Sink
An occasional piece of paper
July 3, 2011
Vol. 14 no. 27
If there is a standard locale for a Biblical story (‘a guy walks into a bar’), a good candidate would be down at the well. Isaac’s and Jacob’s wives are found getting water at the well, Jesus asks for water from the Samaritan woman at the well. The town well was the gathering place for all sorts of people, kind of an early small town coffee shop before there was coffee. In order to survive you had to go to the well to fetch the water of life; in order to live you had to be at the well to hear the news, meet and make friends, solve the world’s problems, and perhaps get a drink of water yourself and give water to your animals.
This “oh well” story – ‘finding Rebekah’ - has become the model for many a romantic first encounter ever since, but it is sometimes puzzling how this fits into the Biblical narrative. Does this rendez-vous at the well have anything to do with faith, or is it just a plain old love story told very nicely? Personally, I don’t have a camel anymore to have an excuse to meet someone at the well. For that matter, is there a public well in Regina?
Get back to me about the well, but there is something faith-full about more than a few Old Testament tales in which God has no speaking lines and the action seems a tad bit too worldly. The genius of the Old Testament lies in the fact that God is not obviously present – as in our 21st century lives – and yet is immanently here, but it takes our faith’s eyes and ears and minds to notice God’s subtle and incredible involvement. Our minds are not as quick as God’s, so usually it is afterward that we think it over and see that we couldn’t have done it by ourselves.
Knox-Metropolitan United Church
Regina, Saskatchewan