"Give Me This Water"
-
March 5, 2026
The woman at the well came for water. She came at noon, alone, to do something ordinary — fill a jar and go home. She was not looking for God. But God was sitting on the edge of the well, waiting for her.
What follows is one of the longest personal conversations Jesus has in all of Scripture. And at its heart is a single question that runs beneath everything: What are you really thirsting for? The woman speaks about water, about husbands, about which mountain to worship on. Jesus keeps gently pulling her past every surface answer until she arrives at the thing beneath the thing — the deep, unquenched ache that no jar of water and no human arrangement has been able to satisfy.
Lent does the same work in us, if we let it. The disciplines the Church gives us during these forty days — fasting, prayer, abstinence, almsgiving — are not rituals of deprivation. They are the Church's way of asking us the same question Jesus asked at that well: What are you really thirsting for?
When we fast, we let ourselves feel the ache. We sit with hunger instead of immediately filling it, and in that unfilled space, something true can surface. We discover that beneath our hunger for food is a hunger for comfort, and beneath that a hunger for peace, and beneath that — if we are honest and patient — a hunger for God that nothing else has ever fully answered.
The Church's Lenten obligations are simple and concrete. Ash Wednesday and Good Friday are days of fasting and abstinence. Every Friday of Lent is a day of abstinence from meat. Fasting means one full meal and two smaller meals that together do not equal the full meal, and it applies to those between eighteen and fifty-nine. Abstinence binds all the faithful from age fourteen onward. These are not burdens. They are invitations — starting points the Church offers because she knows we need something concrete to begin with, just as Jesus began with a concrete request: Give me a drink.
But notice — the conversation at the well did not end with the water jar. It ended with the woman leaving the jar behind entirely and running to tell her village what she had found. The obligations of Lent are the jar. They are real, and they matter, and we should take them seriously. But they exist to lead us past themselves, toward the living water that springs up to eternal life.
As we cross the midpoint of this holy season, I invite you to sit with Jesus at the well of your own life. What are you really thirsting for? What surface answers have you been settling for? The fast strips away our easy satisfactions not to leave us empty but to show us what fullness actually looks like. God is not waiting for you to perform Lent correctly. He is waiting — as he waited at that well in Samaria — simply to be with you, and to give you what you did not know you came for.
A blessed Lent to you all.
-- Fr. Matthew