Spiritual Quote of the Day (Helen Garner, on the Bible’s Repeated Water Imagery)

“Even now there are days, as I go about my business along certain streets, when my past cruelties, my foolishnesses, my harsh egotisms hang around me like a fog — or, rather, when they haunt me like a pack of cards which offer themselves to my consciousness one by one and with a clever appropriateness, as if a tormentor’s mind were actively choosing and shuffling them, so that their juxtapositions are forever fresh, always bright and with a honest, unbearable edge.  Because of this, I understand and treasure the Bible’s repeated imagery of water, of washing; and of the laying down or the handing over of burdens.  I like the story of the woman at the well.  First, she was a woman.  She belonged to the wrong race.  She had had five husbands and was living with a man she was not married to, but she was the one Jesus asked to draw water for him.  She bandied words with him, but he told her about the other kind of water — the sort that never runs out — the water that he was offering.”— Australian novelist, short-story writer, screenwriter and journalist Helen Garner, “Sighs Too Deep for Words: On Being Bad at Reading the Bible,” originally published in Portland Magazine, Winter 2004, reprinted in The Best American Spiritual Writing 2005, edited by Philip Zaleski (2005)

The image accompanying this post, Christ and the Samaritan Woman, depicting the “woman at the well” with Jesus, was created between 1520 and 1530 by the Italian painter Vincenzo Catena (1470-1531).