Pour Yourself Out for Others

We all know people who “drain us,” as we say. Not only the tedious. Those we’re happy to serve (like children or spouses) also need us to pour ourselves out for them, and in that sense, “drain us.” But there are also those from whom we can drink – those who “fill us up.” These are the people we sometimes refer to as, “life-giving.”

What I find interesting is that life is always both of these things, and that Christ is in both. He asks us, out of love for Him, to endure those who drain us, or, as the Scriptures say, to “suffer the little children” to come to us. But He also invites us to drink from Him by way of relationships that make it possible for us to love others in a self-emptying way.

Take marriage, for example. Spouses need to have some way of drinking from Christ, personally, some way of meeting Him and spending time with Him alone, in order to receive the graces to stay with one another. As I say to you in the confessional, “We have to let Christ be for us what we are trying so hard to be for one another.”

Confession, itself, is really one of the clearest places where this happens. It is the place where God the Father of mercies “pours out the Holy Spirit for the forgiveness of sins.” The person who leaves the confessional has just drunk deeply from Christ.

The encounter between Christ and the woman at the well, which we hear this Sunday, has something of the character of confession. The woman lets herself be seen by Christ as she truly is: “I don’t have a husband,” she confesses. Her sins are named. And then Christ draws up that dingy water so that the Father can pour the life-giving water of the Holy Spirit into her heart.

Now she is able to pour herself out generously for others, something she hadn’t done for years! And with such joy! She returns to the community proclaiming, “Come and meet the Man who told me everything about myself.” She opened her heart to Christ and He filled her with His love.

We hear it said all the time: “God sent His Son not to condemn the world, but that the world might be saved through Him.” In the same way, the Samaritan woman (the woman at the well) moves from confession back into the world, not to condemn it, but so that the world might be saved through the One Who saved her!

We bring the gift that we ourselves receive in the confessional back into the world – we allow it to flow through us. We say to our family and friends (even those who drain us) what Jesus says to the woman at the well, “If you knew the gift of God.” That gift is mercy — forgiveness given freely. Without it, we are empty. But having received it, we’re able to pour ourselves out again.

And this is of course all flowing from the Eucharist. The architecture of our Church reflects this movement. Life-giving water flows outwardly from the sanctuary into the world (look at the “flowing” molding). It says to us what Christ says to us in the confessional: “Freely you have received; freely you are to give.” It says, “Go into the world, pouring yourself out for others, just as Christ has poured Himself out for you here.” +