Do I Take the Living Water? - Commonweal Magazine

I have been thirsty of late.

I haven’t known what for exactly, but when I read this week’s Lenten Sunday readings, about the Samaritan woman at the well, her desire for living water, I thought: *Yes, that, exactly. *

In many ways, this isn’t surprising. My day job is at an immigration legal-service provider, and I spend a lot of the rest of my time volunteering with an immigration bond fund. As I drafted this reflection, three bond requests I submitted were rejected by ICE “pending appeal.” Three people will remain detained, despite the fact that a judge approved their release, despite the fact that the community has raised money to bring them home, despite the fact that they have loved ones waiting for them. I don’t know the details of these cases, but I can say, fairly confidently, that these people should not be detained. I can actually say, fairly confidently, that nearly everyone currently in immigration detention should not be detained.

Like a lot of people who do this work, I pride myself on being kind of a tough cookie. There’s a level of detachment you can maintain that allows you to celebrate the wins and be saddened but unsurprised by the losses. It’s a ground-down cynicism that makes you feel like maybe you know better than to hope. It’s been getting harder to hold this posture, as the hits keep coming. I cried in the shower after the three rejections landed in my inbox, all within a half-hour, boom-boom-boom. I cry in the shower a lot these days.

Even so, there are upsides. I have seen communities empty out their pockets, make art, make friends, raise thousands of dollars. I have facilitated homecomings, seen videos of children running up the front walks of houses to their waiting, reunited parents, gotten emails so full of awe and joy that they also make me cry. And it’s still not always enough.

I have come to know myself better through this work. There are a lot of good things—the ways that I have risen to challenges, learned new skills, pushed myself into the person I need to be to get things done. There are also bad things that have become amplified: the occasional carelessness and sloppiness that usually only affect me; impatience, anger, and pettiness even when I know better. The tremendous number of games I need to play on my phone just to get my brain to stop chugging around in frantic circles, the feeling that I am lazy whenever I do this.

Up until now, the bargain of Christianity has not always felt worth it to me. As Jesus tells the woman at the well, the deal is the living water, yes, but also Jesus telling you “everything you’ve done.” No, thank you. I avoid looking at myself too long in the mirror these days; why would I want to be seen so deeply and clearly?

In his book, Disciplines of the Spirit, Howard Thurman writes of a woman who had held back from affirming her faith because she was afraid she would need to change herself dramatically. “To her amazement,” he wrote, “the most demanding thing required of her was to clean out her bureau drawers, make them neat and orderly, and keep them that way.” To me, as a person with very messy bureau drawers, this reads as a horror story.

I have spent much of my life stubbornly at the threshold of faith. Raised in the Church, moved away from it, and yet returning, now and again, like a comet pulled in by some greater gravitational force. There are many things I have loved about the Church and its rhythms and rites, and equally many things that have kept me out—a lot of justified critiques, I think, but also just a personal hesitation. I did not want to undergo the mortifying ordeal of being known in order to be loved, did not want to be changed by this love I have so carefully avoided.

But as it turns out, I am already being changed by love—the work I do is rooted in it, catalyzed and energized by it. By the time I am done with this draft, I will have submitted another two bond requests, because we have the money in the accounts and the ability to post them, and the ever-renewing hope of getting someone home. I am already known even as I am changing—I keep watching sermons that make me cry, reading books that speak to whatever sad, tired thing is at the heart of me. I don’t think that’s by accident or my will alone. All that’s left is to not harden my heart, to see what happens if I allow this thirst to be slaked.