The story of the woman at the well is one that haunts my imagination. Do you remember it? She's only in John's telling of the Gospel. She comes to the community well in the middle of the day, apart from the other women of the community. Jesus asks her for a drink of water and she is shocked. After all, she is a Samaritan and he is a Jew. They talk and he knows all about her. It reasonable to think most people do, given that she's been married five times and the man she lives with now is not her husband.
She's not the likely character for a theological conversation. She and Jesus have one any way, talking about living water. When she leaves the well, she understands better than the disciples do. She tells everyone in the city about Jesus.
In recent years, commentary has moved away from worrying about her sexual sins to talking about her being exploited. Ancient customs aside, women who have been married several times tend to have been exploited by their partners. Her story is far too common in the world we live in. Our concern about the number of baby daddies a woman has makes that all too clear.
I don't know what the story of her five husbands was, but I know the stories of others.
She had a baby at fifteen with her high school boyfriend. Their high school taught abstinence only; they didn't know there was contraception. Well, that assumes they had much information at all about what they were doing. She got kicked out of her parents' house, but he said he'd get a job and they'd figure it out. Before she was seventeen, he was gone.
Within a couple of months, she was living with their next door neighbor. He was much older and creeped her out, but he would take her in. There was money left over at the end of the month sometimes to buy extra things. There was always food in the house. She couldn't make it on her own, any way. One night, when there wasn't money left over or food in the house, he hit her. It happened a few more times before she landed in the emergency room. The social worker helped her get to a shelter. The shelter helped her find a job.
All of that wasn't enough, so she moved in with a man she thought she loved a few months later. They wanted a baby together, so they had one. He told her all the time how lucky she was to have him, how good it was that she could find anyone willing to take her in. She knew he was right, so she didn't push back very often at all. When he hit her the first time, she knew she deserved it. He told her he'd get both her kids if she ever tried to leave. He had to be right. He was always right. When bruises showed up on her oldest, a teacher reported it. The social worker removed her kids and offered to get her help as well.
The housing projects she ended up in were better than she imagined, at least for a while. She had her kids back with her now. And here, her story would repeat. Abusive cycles tend to repeat themselves, after all. That's just the rule. The next partner could start selling drugs or using drugs or something else that comes often with people living in poverty. One of the most horrifying stories I've ever heard was about a woman who was told to marry her rapist. She wanted an abortion, but ended up at a Christian pro-life clinic thanks to a bait and switch. They told her it was her fault and she needed to marry him if he'd have her. That would fix everything. That story has been told in a million different ways throughout history.
I let the story of the woman at the well haunt me because I've met too many women like her. Maybe they'd only had one or two terribly failed relationships, but they were used to the guilt and shame. They were used to the whispers and the looks. The story of the woman at the well reminds me that women's issues are the church's issues.
The day following the election, I signed up to be in a local production of The Vagina Monologues. It was one of the most tangible, immediately available ways that I could imagine to talk about violence against women and other women's issues. Actually, there are all sorts of things it brings up that aren't often part of polite conversation. If the President-elect gets away with joking about sexual assault, though, you better believe I'm going to talk about the horrors of sexual assault and all the other terrible things done to women.
If I wanted to, I could talk so many things related to this choice, including plenty of secular feminism that we don't talk about enough in church. At the end of the day, though, I'm doing this on behalf of the woman at the well. May the unwritten parts of her story haunt us all.
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