Endless Love


Dear Eugene,

My all-time favorite story is Jesus speaking to the Samaritan woman at the well.

It is dangerous to have a favorite story: one can get very ungenerous with any other interpretation.   Almost every sermon on this story induced nausea in me.  Yes, I am a Pharisee.

Good stories invite multiple readings and continual interpretation.  Any misinterpretation can only be to reduce what is living and generative to a few dogmatic of-courses and set-you-rights.

I was thinking this morning: love is suffocating, especially that we claim to be true and deep.  No sincere lover sets out to make it so; all are genuinely surprised by the strangleholds that eventually (and often very soon) must be given and taken to resurrect what was once vouchsafed with ease and grace and assumed to be undying.

Jesus loved the woman at the well.  It was no teddy-bear love.  There was firework right from the get-go, secrets and lies were revealed, in the unspeakably intimate chamber-piece setting.  “I am he,” said Jesus. “You don’t have to wait any longer or look any further.”  Jesus, the One True Love we are seeking, loves us too and offers himself to be drunk up.  There is no suffocation involved, but "gushing fountains of endless life."

It is a human story that is humanly impossible.

Yours, Alex

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