Looking for Love at a Well

Twentieth Sunday in Ordinary Time–First Scrutiny

    While our elect are not old enough to have seen this movie, or maybe even heard of it (and, to be honest, I wasn’t even born when it came out), one of the top movies in 1980 was “Urban Cowboy,” starring John Travolta and Debra Winger.  IMDB gives the following synopsis: “Bud Davis is a country boy who moves to the city to visit his uncle and his family. He starts hanging out at Gilley's, the popular nightclub owned by Mickey Gilley himself. He takes a job at the oil refinery where his uncle works, hoping to save enough money to buy some land. He also meets a cowgirl named Sissy, they dance together and fall in love. When a bull-riding contest at Gilley's is announced, Bud decides to sign up. Can he win the contest?”  And one of the hit songs from that hit movie, which has continued its popularity through the past 45 years is “Looking For Love,” most famously sung by Johnny Lee.
    The first verse and refrain say, “Well, I spent a lifetime lookin’ for you, / Single bars and good time lovers were never true. / Playin’ a fool’s game, hopin’ to win, / And tellin’ those sweet lies and losin’ again. // I was lookin’ for love in all the wrong places / Lookin’ for love in too many faces / Searchin’ their eyes / Lookin’ for traces of what I’m dreaming of. / Hoping to find a friend and a lover / I’ll bless the day I discover another heart / Lookin’ for love.”  
    The Gospel passage of the Samaritan woman at the well is precisely the story of a woman looking for love in all the wrong places.  She has had five husbands, and the man she’s with now is not her husband.  But in her encounter with Jesus, she finally finds true love, a love that doesn’t give her a lesson in leavin’, to quote another country song.
    Raegan, you, and Skyler, who will be baptized with you, have been searching not for an earthly love, though you both have also found that, but for a love that is not of this world.  God created you in love and has sustained you in love since your conception.  He has wanted to be in a deep and loving relationship with you which you began as you were welcomed into the Order of Catechumens some months ago.  And now God prepares you for the culmination of your preparation, and the beginning of a new life as His adopted child through Holy Baptism, which you will receive in a few short weeks.  

    Like with the Samaritan woman, this has been a dialogue between you and Jesus.  Over these next two weeks as we celebrate the scrutinies, the Lord will invite you to put behind you all the false lovers of your past who have not given you true happiness, or the distractions which have kept you from the deep trust that the Lord desires for all His children.  I will ask, after the homily, the Holy Spirit to put away from you all that is fallen, so that you can be truly prepared for the indwelling of God and His grace that will happen at your baptism.
    And once you are baptized, you will have a spring of living water welling up inside you, a source of continuing grace that is meant to refresh and strengthen you, just as water refreshes and strengthens us, especially in the heat of the day, when the rays of temptation oppress us the most.  But unlike a well, to which we have to return again and again, this water will truly be inside you (though the waters of baptism will be poured on your head on the outside) so that all you will need to do is go to you inner room, where Christ is, to deepen you communion with Him.  
    While the day of your baptism is a big day, and certainly a cause of celebration, baptism continues day after day, so you are not just pledging yourself to God for a day, but for a lifetime.  Jesus changed the Samaritan woman’s entire life, and Jesus wants to change your entire life, taking away from you all that is fallen, and increasing your joys and walking with you in the midst of sorrows so that you do not carry those burdens alone.  
    And like the Samaritan woman, your responsibility given to you with this great gift of new life in Christ through baptism, will be to tell and show others just what God has done for you so that they, too, can believe.  Your new life, lived for Christ each day, will speak to others about the importance of the spring of water welling up inside you, and the importance of doing your best to abandon those distractions and false lovers who promise you true joy but can only deliver momentary pleasure.  
    And we, your parish, are happy to walk with you, not only through these scrutinies and in your baptism, but also in the weeks, months, and years ahead where we will also help each other to abandon our false lovers, the sins that we turn to when we turn away from God.  Just as your witness rejuvenates us, so we hope that our witness will help strengthen you as we all walk towards the springs of eternal life in heaven.  May God strengthen you through your holy resolve, and help you to find love in all the right places.  

Filling Up What is Lacking

Tenth Week in Ordinary Time-First Scrutiny Readings
    Mia, your preparation for baptism, which will happen at the end of this month, is so important that the Church has us take a break from the usual progression of readings and has us focus on thirsting for God, thirsting for Christ, especially as we heard about in the first reading and the Gospel.

    In the first reading, the people thirst for water because they have not yet arrived at the Promised Land.  And even though they complain and say that slavery seemed better, God gives the people water after Moses strikes a rock.  In the Gospel, the Samaritan woman thirsts for water because the town ostracizes her, and she has to draw water at the hottest time of the day, when no one else in their right mind would have drawn water.  But Jesus shows her that she truly wants something more than physical water.  She desires God.
    In both the first reading and the Gospel, the Chosen People and the Samaritan woman want someone to take care of them.  They want someone to provide them with water, but they don’t see how that can happen.  They don’t trust that God will care for them.
    In your life, you have come to acknowledge that your life lacks something.  Like so many times in life, it is an encounter with another who helps us to recognize what we are missing in our life.  And through your continued friendship with the Pietras family, you explored what might be lacking in your life.  You attended Mass with them, and eventually worked up the courage to acknowledge that you needed God, just like the Israelites did in the first reading; just like the Samaritan woman did in the Gospel.  
    But while you were thirsting for God like a deer that longs for streams of water, as Psalm 42 says, another thirst also existed.  When we have these readings we often focus on the person who will undergo the scrutiny, the time of prayer and acknowledgment of sin, and the thirst of that person.  But God also has been thirsting for you.  He has desired that you come to Him and discover the soul-saving relationship that He wants with you.  He wants you to become His child, not just because you are human and are made in His image and likeness, but by Holy Baptism, which configures you to Christ and makes you a child of God by grace, so that Christ can truly become your brother by adoption, and you can become a joint-heir to heaven and eternal life with Christ.
    That thirst of God comes from Jesus’ very lips as He was dying on the cross when He said, “‘I thirst.’”  St. Theresa of Calcutta, whom we often refer to as Mother Theresa, connected deeply with those words and wanted to satiate the thirst of Christ for souls by serving the poorest of the poor.  But it was also present in the first reading.  God wanted the Chosen People to trust in Him, to trust that He would provide for their every need.  God didn’t want the Israelites to doubt His love, or to think that their foreign masters cared for them more than He, their God and husband, did.  All they had to do was ask, and God would satisfy their every necessity.  
    It was also present in the Gospel, as Jesus drew out from the woman her desire for a savior, her desire for the Messiah.  The Samaritan woman had tried to plaster over that desire with physical desires, with liturgical arguments, and even with multiple marriages.  But none of them satisfied.  And Christ could cut through all of that to name her true desire, for God, and let her know that He could provide for what she needed.  
    Today, the Lord invites you to trust in Him, and allow Him to satisfy your every necessity.  Trusting is not always easy.  And the ancient enemy wants you to think that you have to take care of yourself.  He tempted our first parents, Adam and Eve, in the same way, and got them to doubt God’s care for them when He told them they could not eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.  Adam and Eve doubted that God would give them what they needed, so they disobeyed Him, and they lost everything: they lost the innocence that was theirs so that they had to cover up their nakedness; they lost the ease of the garden providing for their every need so they had to toil for the food they would eat; they lost the painlessness of giving birth so that new children could only come through suffering; and they lost paradise, as God cast them out from the Garden of Eden.  That all happened because they did not trust God to provide for them.
    Today, over these next three weeks in particular, and for your entire life as a Catholic, God will invite you to trust Him.  Yes, we can cry out to God in our need, but He invites us to trust that He will provide for us.  Satan will try to get us to doubt God, but do not give in to those temptations.  Whatever ways you have doubted God before, trust in all the more now.  Thirst for His love; satiate His thirst for your love by trusting Him.  You are being led to the waters of new life, which when you drink from them you will never thirst again.  May your preparation for Holy Baptism strengthen your trust in God and in His will for the rest of your life!