Which is better, a well or a cistern? When my grandparents and generations before them decided to build a house on their land, the most important factor in choosing a spot for the house was the presence of a spring or a well. Life was better if there was water in the yard. I remember my grandparents’ wells. As a child, I found the adventure of pumping water into a bucket and carrying it into the house as absolutely wonderful!
In Biblical Times
In Biblical times, in the semi-arid land of Palestine it was not so easy to have water. As we know from other stories in Scripture, whole villages were built around a well, and that well was a center of daily life. Nonetheless, in Biblical times people built cisterns. Water was precious and they wanted to insure they had it. Wells could run dry. Springs could dry up. People would carve out rock to make cisterns to insure they would have water.
Yet Biblical scholars tell us there was real difficulty with those cisterns. Water had to be carried to a cistern in jars. Rock is more porous than it looks, and water would leak out. The water wasn’t flowing, so it got putrid from organisms that grew in it unseen. It often stunk—and carried dysentery and other lethal diseases.
Wells were better, much better, because they held moving, living water that was more likely to be safe, pure, and given from the earth by God—even in arid regions.
Today’s first reading from Jeremiah talks about wells and cisterns. God says through the prophet, “Two evils have my people done: they have forsaken me, the source of living waters; they have dug themselves cisterns, broken cisterns that hold no water.”
A Cistern Today?
Those lines have held my attention as I have prayed from today’s Scriptures. This week marks the 50th anniversary of Pope Paul VI’s encyclical Humanae Vitae. As I understand it, in the 1950s when science gave humans the capacity to regulate fertility with a pill, the church was unsure if it was all right to do or not. By the time the Church through Pope Paul VI made sure about the morality and spoke in 1968, people were in the habit of making the decision about use of “the pill” or other means of man-made birth control for themselves.
The image comes: they (we) had built a cistern.
When our pastor spoke about the anniversary of Humanae Vitae on Sunday, he noted that in the US only 1% of all Catholics (about 20% of those who attend mass faithfully) fully support the main concept of Humanae Vitae: that the creation of human life is God’s domain. God seeks to do it in cooperation with us. As humans we have the right to manage our fertility—so long as we do not deliberately leave out God’s ability to over-ride our decisions. Means of birth spacing, generally known as Natural Family Planning, are licit and encouraged, when appropriate. But artificial contra-conception is not—because it seeks to leave God out.
Admittedly, in 1968 Natural Family Planning did not have solid science within it. Today it does—and is 97% successful at managing fertility—if people use it conscientiously.
That is the rub. Using it conscientiously takes effort to mark symptoms of fertility and to self-regulate sexual desire when the symptoms of fertility are present. That requires a lot of couple communication and self-giving to each other. Yet that process, over time, often results in many patterns of saying “I love you” in ways besides words or intercourse. This builds stronger marriages…and stronger families.
Why Did Jesus Speak in Parables?
It is interesting to me that today’s reading about cisterns and wells in Jeremiah is paired with a Gospel that can be confusing. The disciples ask Jesus, “Why do you speak to the crowd in parables?” Jesus’ answer is, “Because knowledge of the mysteries of the Kingdom of Heaven has been granted to you, but to them it has not been granted.”
For years that has puzzled me. First, it seems to me that parables are easier to understand than explanations of doctrine. Generally I get it that the Good Samaritan tells me I should help those in need. I’m not always so sure what to do when I read the Compendium of Social Doctrine.
Second, the story of Jesus’ parables is open to application from multiple angles. In the Good Samaritan I can be the wounded man at this reading, the one who helped at the next reading, and the one who passed by at a third. I do not have the flexibility of thinking to do that if I am reading straight theology.
So it seems to me parables are better than the direct knowledge of the mysteries of the the Kingdom of heaven.
New Parables Today?
But, today, as one who has used Natural Family Planning to achieve pregnancy to no avail because God did not give me the capacity to carry a pregnancy to term, as one who worked for years as a volunteer counselor in a pregnancy crisis center and saw how belief in a woman’s right to manage fertility leads naturally to belief in a woman’s right to terminate a pregnancy, as one who has worked with couples on the brink of divorce because they no longer want to create family together, and as one who now volunteers with Carebound elderly who have more needs for care than children to care for them, it seems to me we need parables of the Gospel of Life. We need parables that will be living water to us.
Pope Paul VI gave us Humanae Vitae. Saint Pope John Paul II gave us a series of Wednesday audiences in the 1970s generally collected as Theology of the Body. It is beautiful when you understand it—a description of a way to live as co-creators with God in our fertility, in our loving each other as couples in so many ways, in our joining in openness to life in a radical, beautiful way.
But perhaps we need someone to be Jesus and give us simple stories that will be wells for us, living waters that speak to our hearts wherever they are, that will help find wells and reconsider our cisterns.
Prayer:
Lord, thank you for the gift of life you gave me and ALL the springs of water that have helped me walk with you throughout my life. This morning, while I write, I remember those days some forty years ago when I struggled with the difference in my plans for my fertility and your plans. I realize this morning the attitude of “I know best” that marked that time in my life has carried over in other, subtle ways, even until now. Lord, forgive me again for that rebellion, keep me now close to you. Let me live a Gospel of Life. Amen.
