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Reflection for July 23, 2006

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The Wells of Abraham

"The man sitting in the iron seat did not look like a man; gloved, goggled . . . he was a part of the monster, a robot in a seat." The monster driven by this goggled fellow (in The Grapes of Wrath) was a tractor owned by a corporation that had taken over the small farms of Oklahoma families forced out by the 1930's dust storms. "The thunder of the cylinders sounded through the country, became one with the air and earth, so that the earth muttered in sympathetic vibration. The driver could not control it - straight across country it went, cutting through a dozen farms and straight back." This was observed by Tom Joad who complained, "You filled in the well this morning," "I know," said the driver. "Had to keep the line straight."

I guess you might call the driver a Philistine, a biblical term which has evolved to mean "an ignorant person who is indifferent to cultural values". Anyway, the term Philistine seems especially applicable to people who fill in wells, because way back in the days of the patriarch Isaac Genesis says: "The Philistines stopped up and filled with dirt all the wells that his father's servants had dug back in the days of his father Abraham."

Therein lies a metaphor that was used by Erasmus of Rotterdam (1469-1536), a priest, humanist, and prolific writer who lived to witness the early years of the Protestant Reformation and who - well in advance of that event - was a loyal critic of the Church and Christian monarchs. Because of the Church's uncontested monopoly over Europe, pieties and practices had accumulated over the centuries that had little to do with the Sermon on the Mount. No need to go into detail but a too, too commercial attitude toward indulgences, the cult of saints whose existence was questionable, the imposition of an abstract theology that diverged down paths of little sanctifying value - these were among the abuses Erasmus foresaw would lead to a blow up in Europe. And sure enough in 1518 Martin Luther nailed his 95 complaints to the door of the Wittenberg Cathedral.

Erasmus, though he understood Luther's action, could never himself break with Rome. He still saw the Church as the keeper of a wellspring of truth and spiritual refreshment that reached right down to the authentic Gospel of Jesus and Paul but that had become filled in with dust and debris, superfluous pieties, rituals and sanctions. To him it was as though the Philistines had come back again to fill up the Wells of Abraham.

Jesus of course had come centuries earlier to clear out the debris, the dirt that clogs up the arteries of our souls. He made that clear when at Jacob's well he challenged us along with the Samaritan woman to give him a drink and we couldn't. Then he said, "If you knew the gift of God and who is saying, 'Give me a drink' you would have asked him and he would have given you living water." He would have released that wellspring of goodness and mercy that lies deep within us - to allow it to inundate this Dust Bowl we have made of the world and make it blossom like Eden.

Allowing that each of us is such a well whence refreshment might be drawn and real community cultivated, I have to ask myself every day whether I've allowed my own well to become clogged up with resentment, self-righteousness, aggravation. Do I allow it to be buried beneath the rubble depicted by headlines that preoccupy me all day long? Then maybe it's time for me to approach Christ by way of a prayer life and sacramental practice that digs, that probes more deeply into the dynamics of Christ's profound Sermon on the Mount. Only then may juices begin to flow that can irrigate the parched landscape all around me.

-- Geoff Wood