by Joanne Blum, Ph.D.
Dry seasons come and go in our
lives—times when our spiritual growth seems lifeless and non-productive. We sit
down to our prayers in the usual way but rise from them unrefreshed. We feel like we are going through the
motions, walking dusty familiar paths, waiting for rain.
This inner experience of dryness is what
T.S. Eliot called “the waste land.” It
is a land we have all visited. Who
hasn’t felt dry and depleted? Who hasn’t
felt suddenly like all the usual sources of replenishment have gone dry—that
“the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief, the dry stone no sound
of water”? Yes, T.S. Eliot knew a thing
or two about dryness.
And so do we. The challenge before us in such seasons is to
call upon all we know, all the poets have taught us, and all the truths we’ve
gleaned from our spiritual teachers to find what will replenish. How do we make “branches grow . . . out of
this stony rubbish?” How can we make the rains fall and the streams flow again?
Here is the short answer—we must go to
the well. We must connect with the wellspring of God within and let it saturate
us with its life-giving waters. This is,
in essence, what all our great spiritual teachers have taught us. God is the unfailing source within, and each
of us must tap into that primary source to find the refreshment we need, or, as
Isaiah puts it, to “draw water from the wells of salvation.” (12:3).
H. Emilie Cady,
a New Thought teacher and writer of the late 19th and early 20th
century, explained our role in this process succinctly. One of many spiritual teachers imaging divine
support as a kind of water source, Cady described God as “a great
reservoir.” Each of us is connected to
that source and serves as its fountain, “its sole business being to distribute
what it receives.” The challenge we
face, according to Cady, and our only responsibility in accessing spiritual
replenishment is that “each one must keep his own fountain free for the great
stream to flow through” (Complete Works, p. 274).
Keeping our fountains free, our channels
open, our well pumps primed: all are
excellent ways of describing the challenge we face in the dry times of our
lives. And they are as good a definition
of prayer as any you will find. It is to
prayer that all our theories of
spiritual renewal finally point—there is nowhere else to go but to prayer—and
these watery metaphors help us perceive that prayer is finally not the least
bit theoretical.
Prayer is daily, practical, spiritual
work. It is as though we are spiritual
plumbers, each of us responsible to hook up to the main water line and get it
flowing freely in our lives again. Every
prayer spoken aloud or held in the heart, every hour spent in the silence,
every expression of gratitude for divine grace, is another pipe laid, another
clog removed, or another channel opened.
That opening-up process takes time for
most of us. Emerson observed that “each
of us is the inlet and may become the outlet of all there is in God,”
emphasizing God’s constant availability, its ever-present inward flow. Most people do not naturally experience this
kind of inflow, however; or rather,
most have forgotten how to live in that naturally receptive state. We must make an effort to unlearn the
controlling, plotting ways of ego-mind, and to surrender our need to have our
hands on the divine spigot, controlling its flow.
We do not have to make God flow. We do, however, have to learn how to let It flow through us. Myrtle Fillmore described God as “a great
steady stream of renewing and cleansing and vitalizing life” and she said that
“we can have the use of this life if we will open up the channels of its
flowing and ourselves draw from this source.”
(Healing Letters, p. 24). This is what we are doing, every time we sit
down to pray, consciously turning our awareness to the Presence of God and
inviting it to flow through us. Clearing the channels.
Opening up our fountains. Digging our wells a little
deeper.
We have been talking about intentional
prayer, but what of unintentional prayer?
While our prayer practice is our primary means of connecting with
God-Presence, we do this inner, well-digging work also when we are not praying,
at any moments in our lives when we are in a prayerful state. Certainly this is what St. Paul meant when he
urged early Christians to “pray without ceasing.” He wasn’t talking about maintaining a litany
of words or postures. He meant
maintaining an ongoing prayerfulness of mind and heart.
What constitutes prayerfulness may be
difficult to pin down, but we can at least point to some of its
characteristics: a state of alertness, a
sense of connection with and reverence for life, an awareness of life’s wonder,
an abiding peace, uncontingent upon circumstance, and
a deep sense of gratitude for the sheer gift of creation. Prayerfulness is something like this. And so, a key question for us to reflect upon
in the dry times of our lives is this:
what conditions help us become more prayerful? What activities, disciplines, environments,
or companionships help us inhabit a prayerful state?
One friend, going through a dark, dry
time, remarked that walking out of doors became her central lifeline. Whenever
feelings of meaninglessness or despair arose, she put on her walking shoes and
took to the streets, walking first along city roads, then the paths of an area
park, winding through gardens and trees, then returning home along the same
familiar route. Simply putting one foot
before another, mile after mile, day after day, my friend walked her way back
to a prayerful state and began to feel more inflow from that inner well. It was the flowers, trees, and birds she
observed, as much as the movement and the use of the body, that restored her to
prayerfulness. Nature is a reliable
source of nurture for most of us, helping us return to a natural piety and
delight.
But there are other
avenues to prayerfulness—visual art, dance, music, inspired spiritual
literature, the company of children, or of any individual who lives in a
natural state of prayerfulness.
Anything that lifts our spirits and calms our fears is likely to be a
channel of renewal. It is a personal
call of great importance, then—especially when we are feeling dry and tired—to
determine what nourishes us at the deepest level. What reminds us of life’s beauty and
truth? What calms us and returns to us
our capacity for wonder?
Jesus knew all about the wellspring of
God within us—he called it the Kingdom of heaven—and how to tap into it. And he used well imagery to guide others
toward the same inner source. The
wonderful story of his meeting with a solitary woman at a well in Samaria is
perhaps the most powerful Scriptural explication we have of spiritual dryness
and how to overcome it.
This is a story about a woman whose life
has gone dry. She is no longer
young. She’s had a rocky relationship
history, having been married five times and living now with a man to whom she
is not married. Given what we know of
her culture and time— women’s lack of social or legal rights, their dependence
on men for material support, their isolation in the home—we can guess what her
life has been like. We can imagine her
loneliness, her fear and insecurity. We
can guess that as she walked to the well that morning, she was in need of more
than just water. She had come to a dry
place in her life and needed to tap into that well of salvation. As so often happens for us in this generous
universe, God guided her right to it.
To her great surprise, the woman finds
Jesus at the well on this particular morning, uncharacteristically alone (his
disciples had gone into the village for food) and accessible. Against all the rules of her culture, Jesus
speaks directly to her—not only a woman, but a Samaritan—and asks her for a
drink of water. The startled woman
replies, “How is it that you, a Jew, ask a drink of me, a woman of
Samaria?” It is a spiritual opening,
what we might call a teachable moment, and Jesus seizes it. He begins to speak to her about the “living
water” that lies within.
Pointing to the well, he says, “Everyone who drinks of this water will be
thirsty again, but those who drink of the water that I will give them will
never be thirsty.” It will “become in them a spring of water gushing up to
eternal life.” Sensing Jesus’s genuine power, the woman says, simply and
directly, “Sir, give me this water,
so that I may never be thirsty.” (Jn. 4:5-40)
The Samaritan woman, so ready to receive,
so quick to understand that the “living water” Jesus offered was no common well
water, has much to teach us about getting through the dry times. Too often we expend our energies searching
for outer wells. We think a new
relationship could be the “well of salvation” we’re looking for. Or perhaps a different job, or relocation to
a different city, will bring us renewed satisfaction in our lives. The Samaritan woman had learned, like many of
us, about the failure of outer sources and was ready to start digging within.
She reminds us that our responsibility in receiving from this inner source is going to the well; it is not filling ourselves there. The inflow of new life comes from God and is God’s business. Our business is creating a space within ourselves to receive that infill, to stop telling God what to do and when to do it, and to be truly open to its influence.
E. V. Ingraham, an early New Thought minister and writer, wrote that we must go into meditation “taking a bucket.” Our hearts and minds must be open to the great source within or we will not be able to receive from it. We will be too full of ourselves and our own thoughts and plans, and we will have no empty space in which to hold it.
The Samaritan woman no doubt came to the well many days and went home again with only water in her jar. But in due time, a time determined by God within her, the deeper replenishment came. On that day, she left her water jar behind at the well—she’d gotten the real refreshment she came for—and ran back to her village to tell the good news she’d learned about unfailing wells and where to find them. We may have to wait a while for our buckets to be filled, but we can be certain they will be filled. The Sufi poet Rumi put it this way:
Work. Keep digging your well.
Don’t
think about getting off from work.
Water is there somewhere.
The Samaritan woman’s most profound lesson for us is that we cannot force the activity of grace. However desperately we need that infill, however dry and discouraged we may feel, we cannot force the flow of God in our lives. Ours is the openness and the waiting. Ours is to wait patiently, as the earth waits for rain. Ours is to persist in our prayers, to go into the silence, carrying our empty buckets, again and again, and to wait expectantly for divine process to unfold. The living waters of God will find us, wherever we are, in whatever state of isolation, exhaustion, or aridity we may temporarily be existing. And God will lead us back beside the still waters.
If
we keep going to the well—turning within, centering, listening—God will meet us
there, as Jesus met the Samaritan woman, without judgment or condemnation, full
of love and acceptance, eager to offer us new life. The living water we receive will renew not
only ourselves, but also our families and communities. Like the Samaritan woman’s townspeople, who
heard her testimony and came themselves to believe in the wellspring she
described, we will become open channels for the flow of that divine stream to others.
In the dry seasons of our lives, when our hopes and energies and insights have all evaporated, this is when we most need to remember to go back to the well. To prime the pump. And to keep priming it until the living water starts to flow again. God will not fail us.