There are moments when reality refuses to fit the story we have about it.
Someone we thought we understood turns out to be more. We experience something that unsettles our convictions. A moment of beauty catches us unexpectedly and takes our breath away. A loss changes the landscape of our life. A question we thought we had answered returns with new force.
I have come to think of these moments as encounters.
An encounter is more than an experience. It is a meeting with a reality beyond what we already know — a moment when the world, another person, or G-d exceeds the story we have constructed around it.
These moments are essential for our forming and becoming — necessary disruptions that reveal there is more to be understood. These disruptions cause a disorientation that disturbs our sense of control and alters our experience of what is true. They expose our theories of control, the ways we defend against uncertainty, as inadequate maps of reality and poor guides for living.
This sense of disruption is what draws me to the story of Jesus and the Samaritan woman in John 4. It is an encounter of disruption and reorientation.
A woman comes to the well for water, a daily necessity and, no doubt, a central rhythm of her life. She is not expecting to meet a tired and thirsty Jewish man in this space, seeking her assistance. He is sitting beside the well, where he is hard to avoid, though as a Jew he is someone she would ordinarily avoid.
Nearly everything here is unexpected and risky.
And then he asks her for a drink.
This is remarkable.
He is crossing social, religious, cultural, and relational boundaries. Jews and Samaritans did not share things in common. Yet rather than beginning with an argument, a lecture or correction, he begins with a request.
He holds the more powerful position, but he begins by acknowledging that he is the one who is thirsty. He creates a reciprocity in their encounter. She has something to offer him, even as he has something to offer her. Yet his request also places her in a difficult position. She would prefer to avoid him and the social implications their interaction might carry if observed.
This is the beginning of their encounter — and the disruption of her safety in relation to both his people and hers. Perhaps she had chosen this time of day to control her encounters. Now her sense of control and safety is disrupted. I imagine she resents the vulnerability, but Jesus establishes a different way of relating — a knowing without threat.
Her first response is revealing: “How is it that you, a Jew, ask a drink of me, a woman of Samaria?”
He has changed the rules.
Hers is a question about boundaries, identity, and custom. He does not retreat from her discomfort. He does not shame her. He does not reduce her to her history. However, she also does not back down, as she pushes back and holds him to the literal. “Sir, you have no bucket.” He responds in a way to reveal he is speaking of the infinite within the finite necessity they both share. She responds that she wants this living water — that which satisfies the thirsts of now and forever.
And then he tells her story.
She comes to the well with a history we do not fully know, carrying experiences that Jesus somehow sees more clearly than she expected. She is known by this stranger. Remarkably, she does not appear overcome by shame in this encounter. Moreover, she understands that her deeper thirst is being quenched in this encounter. She leaves her jar and goes into town.
That is what an encounter can do. Encounter moves through our defenses, offering a truth that soothes our thirst to be known and dissolves our shame. It interrupts the stories we have constructed about ourselves and other people. It creates the possibility that we might become accessible again — that there might be more to this person, this moment, this life than we imagined.
Encounter is central to transformation. We cannot be transformed by what we refuse to encounter – what we are unwilling to face.
We often talk about transformation. But transformation is not simply the acquisition of new information. It is not becoming more sophisticated, more analytical, or more knowledgeable while remaining untouched at the level of our story.
We need the accessibility of both heart and mind. We need safe-enough spaces where we can think deeply and feel deeply, where we can ask difficult questions and remain open to wonder, where we can encounter another person’s story without immediately trying to fix, categorize, or explain it.
We develop useful ways of protecting ourselves from the uncertainties of life. And then, somewhere along the way, we discover that we are not connected with the parts of us that feel most alive. Our faith can become ritual without meaning, our relationships transaction without intimacy, our work a task rather than a calling.
But encounter interrupts all of that.
It reopens possibility in the ordinary places of our lives.
That is what happens at the well. The woman comes for water, as she has on so many other occasions. But this time she has an encounter with Jesus. And she returns to town carrying something different than the jar she brought. Not because Jesus gave her a five-step method for transformation, but because she was seen and engaged. She was invited into a deeper understanding of herself, of G-d, and of what was possible.
This is one of my hopes for The Seattle School: that we become a community increasingly capable of encounter.
People who can hold a story without confusing our story with the fullness of reality.
People who can remain accessible when something unexpected meets us.
People willing to attend long enough for curiosity to overcome premature certainty.
And people willing to be changed by what and whom we encounter.
Perhaps transformation begins there: in a knowing without threat, and in the trust that there is always more to encounter.